Like a Goddamn Vampire

Dracula Dobbs enjoyed a stint of just over four years in Buster, launching in May 1987 as part of a major revamp of the comic which retired several long-serving characters and introduced some new ones. It is notable as making a permanent change to its status quo at one point, and it is an alteration which really tickles me for some reason.

The setup of the strip seems pretty self-explanatory: every night at sundown, Dennis Dobbs turns into a vampire and roams the streets looking for not blood, but food (the term 'food vampire' was later created), usually from his local takeaways and street vendors. No explanation was ever given for this transformation beyond a mention in the first strip that he was 'born at midnight' (implying this has been happening since the day he was born, which if anything seems like an even more interesting idea for a comic strip); in that introductory instalment Dracula Dobbs is already an established terror of his neighbourhood. In the very first strip (which can be seen here) Dennis appears to be fully cognisant of his double life, and it's implied it doesn't happen every single night, but both of these were retconned pretty sharpish; by late '87, only Dennis' parents know his secret, and he transforms every night.

A question which I don't in any way have the answer to: is it possible the strip was originally conceived as a boy who turns into a werewolf, and got changed to a vampire without anything else about the setup being altered? People don't generally only turn into vampires at night, and there does seem to be some insinuation in the first strip that the change only happens at the full moon which might be a hangover from an earlier incarnation.

In any event, DD was drawn by Nigel Edwards; I like Edwards' work, but it seems to be particularly suited to the fantasy-horror setup of this story, and it's a shame he didn't get to do more strips on similar themes. As mentioned earlier, in the issue of Buster dated 22nd September 1990 the strip got a bit of continuity -- unusual in a British humour comic, but maybe not that unusual -- when something changed about the setup. Before reading on, see if you can guess what.

Earlier strips had often focused on the efforts of Dennis' parents to stop him from terrorising his neighbourhood, but later on the human side of things had slowly lost focus and often didn't appear at all, which might be why things got shaken up. Just two strips later they go for the double (it seems more likely this was always the intention rather than deciding they might as well):

(The strip never really explores whether or not the parents know about their alter egos after this happens, possibly because it was a bit too disturbing a concept to think about.)

Dracula Dobbs ended a year after this change was made, and seems to have been Nigel Edwards' final work for the comic (although it was reprinted near the end of Buster's run); after an initial flurry of strips featuring them post-vampirisation, his parents more or less disappeared from the strip by early 1991 (as did Dennis himself in the final months), so maybe it didn't lead to the new storytelling opportunities that had been hoped for?