Tomb of Dracula #40

The cover of this January 1976 issue announces "Dracula Is Truly Dead!" while a panicked group of vampire hunters — a young woman clutching a crossbow, a curly-haired teen gripping a wooden stake, a man in a purple coat armed with a gun, and an older man in a wheelchair — scramble in desperate disarray, all while a screaming Dracula looms behind them with arrows piercing his body. Cover pencils by Gene Colan and inks by Frank Giacoia make the tension feel genuinely dire, with the bold tagline "The Triumph of Dr. Sun!" promising that the hunters' greatest foe is very much still in play. Marv Wolfman and Gene Colan were at the top of their game on this series, and this issue captures exactly the kind of horror-charged suspense that made Tomb of Dracula one of Marvel's most compelling titles of the mid-1970s.