Blade was (and, to some extent, continues to be) an underutilized character. For the first 20 years of his existence, he only made 30-odd appearances; by the time of his 1998 film, he hadn’t even cracked 100. For most of those appearances, the character was barely recognizable as the cool, tough character as he appears today (and not just because of his orange and green visual motif) – that interpretation was largely a product of casting Wesley Snipes, who was perhaps contractually obliged to be cool as hell.
The comics collected in Blade Epic Collection: Nightstalkers collect issues around that 20-year mark and show a transition from the Blade of the 1970s to the Blade of the 90s. One of the most striking differences between the Blade who played a key role in Avengers and Blood Hunt is that he’s downright insane.
Singularly driven to madness, Blade’s ‘vampire hunter’ career path limited the character; for decades, vampires weren’t exactly top-billed villains outside of the various Dracula titles (there was the whole Comics Code malarkey, to start). There wasn’t a lot for the character to do until he broadened his horizons. Like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Blade would have to dedicate his time to killing other monsters. This was doubly true because, not long before Blade’s modern break, Stephen Strange obliterated all vampires.
The highlight of the book is Ghost Rider.
Marvel Comics
During the Rise of the Midnight Sons event, Marvel set out to establish a world of horror that lived just underneath the four-color world of their superheroes. They did so by reconsidering some older characters and concepts, from the Darkhold to Morbius the Living Vampire.
Luckily, Dracula had acquired an entire cast during his 1970s heyday; Nightstalkers featured a trio of vampire hunters expanding their resume. As with Buffy’s first season, once the inciting incident villain (the Midnight Sons baddie Lilith) is set aside, Blade and his friends jump into a sort of monster-a-week marathon, and Blade’s insanity opens wide to include a burning hatred for anything and everyone supernatural (including, exhaustingly, his teammate Hannibal King, a sort of not-quite-vampire in a world without any undead).
Marvel
For its first six issues (collected here), Nightstalkers displays the low point of the Midnight Sons line of books. Writer DG Chichester, just a year from his most notorious Daredevil story (Fall From Grace), sets a pace and tone that can best be described as “ambivalent”. Penciller Ron Garney provides some standard ’90s artwork. The Punisher shows up because of course he did; it was 1992.
The Blade featured in the series can be considered prototypical to the Snipes version of the character in only one major way: he ditches the green shades and puts on a leather jacket, then straps some katanas on his back.
Marvel
What makes Blade Epic Collection: Nightstalkers worth the price of admission is its opening story, the pre-Midnight Sons return to Tomb of Dracula. The four issues, from the original series most famous collaborators Marv Wolfman and Gene Colan, picked up 12 years after the conclusion of the first volume.
Though the book features Blade, the focus is more firmly turned on his Nightstalker cohort (and eventual frilly blouse-fanatic) Frank Drake, a distant descendent of the Dracula line. Dracula himself had been “killed” in those earlier stories; here he returns, briefly, raised by a Satanist professor who happens to be Frank’s wife’s therapist.
His revival doesn’t last.
Marvel Comics
The mini feels a little watery in plot and features Colan at his most free and abstract. These aspects paired make the book feel like a horrific fever dream, as equally haunted by unreality as it is the lord of vampires.
Blade’s role in the story is brief, and tragic, and leaves him in the insane asylum we find him in at the beginning of Nightstalkers. It’s a stronger story, but it little serves the character for whom the volume is named. This Epic Collection is a chronology, not a highlight – at no point in these issues do we feel delighted with our time with the character; this is no Snipes, this is no Blood Hunt. This is a character still indefinite and malleable 20 years into his existence.
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