(Blue Ribbon Comics 011, 1941)
We open not on the King of the Vampires but on a different vampire, one with a monocle. This is Carlos Hubbello, a diplomatic envoy from South America who has been sent to discuss a trade deal with the US that would leave the Nazis in the cold. The two gentlemen with him are no gentlemen at all but rather Nazi spies who are controlling Hubbello by the simple expedient of having turned him into a vampire, which is certainly harder to get out of than say kidnapping his loved ones but comes with a whole lot of extra risk for his handlers.
This story is rife with lore. To whit:
LORE: Vampires are easily cowed with a cross, even when wielded by evil men.
Hubbello comes very close to vampiring Mr Justice’s love interest Pat Clark while they watch a performance of the very weird and cool “Waltz of the Vampire”. A ghost/ vampire brawl ensues.
LORE: A vampire can lose control when exposed to great art.
LORE: vampires can transform into wolves and bats and retain their special vampire haircut in both forms (you can just make out a teeny tiny widow’s peak on the bat if you squint).
Hubbello, defeated, spills the beans. The Nazis imported the King of the Vampires from Transylvania as part of their scheme to control the trade negotiations. Is the King of the Vampires a Nazi or merely using them to his own ends? This is not explored. Is the King of the Vampires supposed to be Dracula or is Transylvania just a good place for a vampire to come from? We can never know.
LORE: Kill the head vampire in time and its under-vampires can be saved. What is “in time”? Not sure but it isn’t “before the under-vampire takes a life/ drinks human blood” as in a lot of vampire media, because Hubbello has already done both.
Enter the King of the Vampires, freshly gorged on the blood of the innocent and battle commences. And I sure hope that Mr Justice knew the LORE that vampire cannot fight vampire because it means that he is on his own.
LORE: this is the kind of vampire that seemingly isn’t harmed by light so much as by not physically being in his coffin at dawn. And he isn’t, so he dies.
Hubbello is saved! The trade deal can go forward! And back in the US we are reacquainted with the Nazi vampire-handlers, who come with one last piece of LORE: that knives fashioned of pure gold taken from the tomb of the Egyptian King Ankhaman II are capable – possibly the only things capable – of killing a ghost. A potent weapon against Mr Justice, if only they were any good at knifing. But they aren’t so they get captured immediately and the knives are presumably never seen again.
