Of course, it’s a Blade who’s rather different from the one familiar to most audiences today. The Blade we’ve met in Tomb of Dracula #10 — an apparently “normal” Black guy who kills vampires with wooden knives — is one cool dude, no doubt about it; but he’s not yet the “Daywalker” — the human-vampire hybrid known to the millions of people who’ve seen one or more of the Blade trilogy of films starring Wesley Snipes, or have encountered the character in other ancillary media since the release of the first of those movies in 1998 — or, for that matter, have read any of his Marvel Comics appearances from the last quarter-century or so.
We’ll note here that certain aspects of the Blade character not seen in his debut appearance — the most significant for his later development being the fact of his mother having been fatally bitten by a vampire before giving birth to him — would be forthcoming as early as Tomb of Dracula #13, and were very likely part of Marv Wolfman’s concept from the very beginning. That said, there’s enough daylight (if you’ll pardon the expression) between the Blade introduced by Marvel in 1973 and the Blade whom New Line Cinema would bring to the big screen 25 years later that it appears to have factored into the decision of the judge in the subsequent lawsuit brought by Wolfman against Marvel over the rights to the character. As reported in November, 2000 by The Comics Journal:
The court ruled… that Marvel’s later use of the characters [i.e., Blade and Deacon Frost, the vampire who killed his mom] was sufficiently different from Wolfman’s initial creations to protect it from Wolfman’s claim of copyright ownership.
Wolfman’s attorney Michael Diliberto told the Journal, “We don’t think the judge understood the nuances of character development in comics, the way characters change their powers and relationships over time.”
From what little else I’ve read on this topic, Wolfman accepted the judge’s decision in relatively good grace back in ’00, figuring he’d taken his best shot, had his day in court, and that was that; as far as I know, he still feels that way. On the other hand, the heirs of the late Gene Colan have been embroiled in legal proceedings with Marvel since 2021 or thereabout regarding the rights to several characters they claim the artist co-created — Blade among them. And while there doesn’t seem to have been much progress on this case in the last year or so (or at least not much written about it, outside of court filings), I suspect that, mindful of the potential profits of the new Blade movie Marvel Studios plans to release in 2024 — just a little more than a half-century following the character’s first comics appearance, and a quarter-century since his motion picture debut — the IP attorneys on both sides are keeping their metaphorical wooden knives sharp, at the very least.
Et le 2, l un des mieux réalisés.
