Something Spooky: ‘Uncanny X-Men’ #159 Introduces The X-Men To The World of Vampires For Better & Worse

By 1982, Marvel’s 1970s horror boom was mostly played out.

Tomb of Dracula, arguably the centerpiece of the boom, bowed in 1979. Werewolf By Night (the series which gave us Moon Knight) had ended in 1977. The final issue of Ghost Rider (a character with stronger superhero ties than many of the other monsters) would be published in 1983. Yet while Dracula no longer had a series to call his own, he remained a character within the Marvel Universe.

And so X-Men writer Chris Claremont (who had written some Dracula stories back in the 70s) tapped the character to serve as the villain in a done-in-one horror story in Uncanny X-Men #159. In doing so, he introduced the X-Men to the world of Marvel’s vampires, kicking off a sparse but long running pairing between the two groups of characters that continues to this day — with wildly mixed results.

Written by Claremont and drawn by Bill Sienkiewicz (a few years before he wildly upended the visual aesthetic of Marvel’s Merry Mutants in the pages of New Mutants) with inks by Bob Wiacek, Uncanny X-Men #159 is a fairly straightforward, “someone is acting strangely; turns out they’re being fed on by Dracula” story, with Storm essentially in the role of the original novel’s Lucy Westerna. Of course, it’s hardly a spoiler to say that Storm meets a better fate than Lucy, ultimately rejecting the lure of the Lord of the Vampires with a little help from Kitty Pryde and the rest of the X-Men.

Along the way, Dracula joins the ranks of X-Men antagonists who find themselves attracted to Storm, I learn there’s a castle in Central Park, and Claremont does his fun “think of powers and lore in new ways” thing by establishing that one has to believe in the religious iconography in order for it to affect Dracula. (Jewish Kitty wielding a cross does nothing, but her Star of David necklace repels him.)

It also marked the X-Men’s arrival into the world of vampires. They would return to it — again, thanks to Dracula — later that year in X-Men Annual #6, though that story largely is concerned with wrapping up some loose ends from Tomb of Dracula. It is reprinted in 1993 as X-Men vs. Dracula #1, part of small reprint line of the time representing Dracula’s earlier encounters with assorted superheroes — the early 1990s saw a resurgence of 1970s characters & trends, including horror books, as Marvel pushed as many comics as they could onto shelves every month.

While the X-Men didn’t bump into a lot of vampires in the intervening years, they were no strangers to the occasional horror story, and the legacy of Uncanny X-Men #159 played a role in the late 90s via Bloodstorm, Storm from a reality in which she succumbed to Dracula’s advances and became a vampire, who was a regular cast member of Mutant X (and would return in the late 2010s as part of the cast of X-Men Blue).

But the X-Men’s next most significant encounter with vampires came in 2010’s “Curse of the Mutants” storyline. Intended to launch a new volume of adjectiveless X-Men (the third), “Curse of the Mutants” sets the X-Men (now operating on the West Coast) against an attack on humanity launched by Xarus, the son of Dracula and the new Lord of the Vampires. It is, rightly, not a terribly well-regarded story, with its biggest legacy being the transformation of Jubilee into a vampire, a bizarre and head-scratching creative decision that nevertheless would last for a long time.

Jubilee would not be cured of her vampirism until 2018, a stretch of time that lasted longer than her tenure as part of Generation X. More recently, the X-Men were dragged back into a vampire-centric crossover in 2024’s “Blood Hunt,” while a once-again vampiric Storm plays a key role in the “set in a world overrun by vampires” of Midnight X-Men.

 

While it remains to be seen whether or not the world of Midnight X-Men was, like Bloodstorm, born of a twist to the events of Uncanny X-Men #159, the issue itself still stands as a key turning point in the X-Men narrative, the opening of a door into a new subsection of X-Men stories, like “X-Men in space” or “Savage Land stories.” But more than that, it’s a fun little issue, one which puts a superhero spin on a story beat of the classic Dracula story, with lush, atmospheric art that ably sets the mood. Even if “X-Men and Vampire” stories aren’t your thing, it’s well worth a read or, if they are, a re-read this Halloween season.