Blade: Red Band #4
☆ Be the first to review + Add to your collection — Join freeBlade: Red Band #4 serves as the dramatic fulcrum of Bryan Hill's five-issue miniseries — the issue where the antagonist Pontious van Helsing's ancient origin is finally laid bare and the fractured partnership between Blade and his new ally Elena is forged into something purposeful. It is historically significant as one of the earliest entries in Marvel's Red Band imprint to push vampire mythology into genuinely adult, theologically layered territory, linking the birth of vampirism to figures from biblical and Roman antiquity (Cain, the crucifixion) within the mainline Earth-616 continuity. The issue also crystallizes the post-Blood Hunt characterization of Blade as a guilt-ridden, morally exhausted hunter rather than a triumphant hero — a tonal shift that distinguishes this run from all previous Blade solo series. As the penultimate chapter of the miniseries, it functions as the payload that makes the finale's confrontation narratively inevitable.
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We Buy Collections ▸History
The Blade: Red Band miniseries was announced in June 2024 as part of Marvel's expanding Red Band line — a mature-readers initiative that grew directly out of the polybagged Red Band editions of the Blood Hunt crossover event, which itself marked the first time Marvel produced an alternate, more graphic edition of the same comic for adult readers. Writer Bryan Hill and artist C.F. Villa launched the series in October 2024, with Federica Mancin joining as co-artist from issue #2 onward. Editor Devin Lewis oversaw the run under Editor-in-Chief C.B. Cebulski. The Red Band label name is borrowed from the U.S. film industry's term for restricted, adult-audience movie trailers, and every issue of the miniseries was polybagged with a Parental Advisory rating.
Trivia · 8 facts
- Released January 22, 2025 (Philip Tan variant) and January 29, 2025 (main edition); cover-dated March 2025; issue #4 of a 5-issue miniseries.
- Written by Bryan Hill; interior art by Federica Mancin and C.F. Villa; colors by Javier Tartaglia and Matt Milla; letters by VC's Cory Petit; edited by Devin Lewis.
- Cover art on the main edition by Carlos Fabian Villa with color by Federico Blee; a Philip Tan variant cover was also released simultaneously.
- This issue reveals the full origin of Pontious van Helsing — an ancient Roman legionnaire turned vampire on the night of the crucifixion, later a Spellguard operative who defected to become a vampiric cult leader — the first time his backstory is shown in flashback.
- The Cain of biblical tradition appears in flashback, depicted here as the agent responsible for vampirizing Pontious, expanding Marvel's vampire-origin mythology within Earth-616 continuity.
- The issue resolves the distrust subplot between Blade and Elena (introduced in issue #2) and establishes their functional alliance ahead of the series finale, while also revealing that Pontious has offered to make Blade fully human again.
- Published as part of Marvel's Red Band imprint — polybagged with an explicit-content Parental Advisory on every issue — a mature-readers line whose naming derives from restricted (adult-audience) movie trailers in the United States.
- The entire five-issue miniseries was subsequently collected in a trade paperback titled Blade: Red Band — Prodigal Son, which was published without the polybagging of the individual issues.
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Reprints
Reprinted in Blade: Red Band - Prodigal Son #[nn] (2025)
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