The leading lady, Anita Blake, lives and works in St. Hamilton's Anita Blake Vampire Hunter book series was adapted by Marvel in 2006. She appears in a number of comic series and a direct to video movie. Vampirella, the vampire superheroine from the planet Drakulon, fights evil vampires on our world in an effort to save her own. Men aren't the only ones to play large roles in vampire stories. Adam Heller, a man slowly dying of AIDS finds out his friends are actually vampires when they turn him into one to cure him and save his life.

Two such 'vegetarian' vampires are main characters in Vertigo's series Blood + Water. In modern vampire culture, many vampires choose to live among us and forgo the drinking of human blood for that of animals. This image from a book of Russian folk tales shows the warlock from the tale 'The Soldier and The Vampire' who comes back from the dead each night to terrorize a town by cursing a newlywed couple and drawing their blood until he is outwitted and killed by a clever soldier. Folk stories teemed with different versions of the vampire. Stoker wasn't the only one to write about vampires, though. In addition to its large spread in comics, the story of Dracula has also been taken to the stage over the years, as seen in these scenes from a 1978 production of Dracula starring Frank Langella as the titular feind and famous illustrator Edward Gorey designing the scenery and costumes. Not to be outdone, Warp Graphics (which later turned over most of its titles to Apple Comics) pitted Dracula against Jack the Ripper in its 1986 mini-series Blood of the Innocent. This issue even comes with a record of songs composed to supplement the stories! This 2004 adaption of Stoker's Dracula presents the comic in a dramatic black and white contrast that plays up the drama of the story.Īnother series featuring the Count is Apple Comics's Blood of Dracula, where each issue contains an installment of three different stories featuring Dracula in his own time, in the future, and anywhere in between. In more modern times, vampires' popularity has spiked again with television series such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer and bestselling book series like Anne Rice's The Vampire Chronicles, Stephanie Meyer's Twilight series, and the Sookie Stackhouse Novels by Charlene Harris. While vampires have been around for ages, it was Bram Stoker's 1897 novel Dracula that made them much more prevalent in literature and popular culture. Reflecting this, Dracula and his brethren abound on the shelves of Special Collections – particularly our comics collection where the dramatic nature of the vampire lends itself perfectly to a graphic medium. (Your blood, that is.) How does one even begin to write about vampires with any sort of completeness? Every culture's got one – some version of a creature that rises from the dead and preys on the life force of the living (either the blood or something more abstract, such as energy or the soul) to sustain itself. If the weather isn't cold enough for you yet, or you just want to help celebrate the first day of winter, come see us at Special Collections, where we've got all these ice creatures and more waiting to be discovered in the warmth of our reading room. In the last two, comic book hero Conan battles two such Frost Giants as he pursues their sister across the ice. in the first, the X-Men prepare to go up against the recently resurrected Ymir, progenitor of the Frost Giants. The final three images depict the Frost Giants of Norse mythology. In other legends, she breaks down the doors of houses with a fierce wind and then kills its sleeping residents (like she is in this picture). The image to the right is of a creature from Japanese folklore called the Yuki-Onna (or, Snow Woman) that kills travelers with her icy breath, leaving them frozen. The first two images below show different depictions of Jack Frost, who, in these folk tales from Russia, saves a young girl whose step-mother threw her out in the cold to die. In honor of the official first day of winter and the recently fallen snow here on MU's campus, this week's installment of the Fantastic Beasts series highlights creatures that live and breath the ice and snow of the Arctic.

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