Blade (1998) #1-3

Blade #1-3

Originally released in 1998

Written by Don McGregor

Art by Brian Hagan

While I was tempted to cover Blade's first appearance, I decided to read something that came out closer to the release of his movie. In this series, Blade travels to New Orleans to hunt vampires, only to get caught up in a plot to discredit him.

The plot here is straightforward for the most part - Blade hunts vampires, vampires try to make a name for themselves by killing Blade, and ordinary people get caught in the middle. (It's why the news surrounding the MCU movie for Blade is so baffling, as it seems like nobody who's involved has any idea how to make a movie out of a fairly simple concept)

Blade is tracked down by a woman named Dominique who needs his help - a relative of hers is being stalked by a vampire, and she's concerned that her relative might have already been turned into a bloodsucker.  She can't go to the police, so she turned to Blade.  There are hints of a romantic development between the two, though it's unclear if she's working for the vampires and this is a honey trap or if she's unaware of certain details and helping them by accident.

I thought the apparent vampire looked familiar, but I brushed it off as a coincidence.  However, it later confirmed that it is, in fact, Morbin' time.

Dr. Michael Morbius is also in New Orleans, and if the writing is any indication, this is the first time that he's crossed paths with Blade in over twenty-five years (our time, not in-universe time) by that point.  That feels inaccurate, but the two of them don't seem to recognize each other; it could have been a mistake on the writer's part.  You'd think that Marvel's most prominent vampire hunter and a guy called "the Living Vampire" would have met at some point between the early seventies and the late nineties.

A group of vampires plan to have Blade kill Morbius, since as Morbius isn't technically a vampire, it would mean that Blade will have killed a living person.  They have agents in the New Orleans Police Department who are keeping a close eye on Blade, meaning that he'd be caught in the act pretty quickly.

The weird thing is that this series ends in issue 3.  I thought Marvel was cutthroat nowadays, with series like Avengers Inc. being forced to wrap up in five issues, but this series doesn't get that wrap-up even though the conclusion would be pretty obvious (Blade and Morbius team up to fight the vampire cabal) - the following panel is how this series ends:

It's good while it lasts, though; the connections between vampire attacks and sexual assault or drug addiction are explicit (Dominique's relative isn't turning into a vampire; rather, she's addicted to heroin), and we get a bit of development for Blade and what he does when he's not hunting vampires.  As it turns out, he likes watching police procedurals, and while he does read some vampire novels, he can be pretty picky about them:

Without doing any further research, I can only speculate on why the series ended so abruptly.  It came out about three months after the Wesley Snipes movie, so the timing seemed close to ideal given that Blade would have been in the public eye by then.  Maybe the creative team just didn't want to work at Marvel any more and they couldn't find anyone else to take over - going by Marvel's website, this was the last new work that writer Don McGregor and artist Brian Hagan put out for Marvel. (though then again, maybe the sudden cancellation caused the two of them to leave, or maybe the two events were unrelated)  The whole thing seems so weird; I've seen comics forcefully ended before, but not like this.