Our Vampires Are Different/Comic Books

• In the Marvel Universe, it is clearly established that a believing Jew can use the Star of David to ward off a vampire just as well as a Christian using a cross can. Conversely, a cross won't work for an atheist or a Jew. If you're an atheist, it might be a good idea to keep some garlic or one of those little Darwin fishes handy.
  • This, of course, gave Nightcrawler a moment when the X-Men fought Dracula. Drac laughed when Wolverine tried to use a cross to drive him away, saying You do not believe, little man! Night crawler picked up the fallen cross, and held it out, saying, But I DO!
  • The Marvel Universe has a large variety of vampire types, from Dracula himself to those based on the patterns of insects to "pseudo-vampires" created by science here. Dracula and other traditional, magical vampires beginning with the Atlantean Varnae, originate from a Black Magic spell cast from the Darkhold, a magical tome written by the demonic Elder God Chthon.
    • Great Strength, speed and healing as long as they get blood are kind of universal. Dracula's line has most of the powers he had in the novel. They can control wolves, rats and bats as well as transform into mist, more powerful ones can manipulate the weather. In addition to religion, sunlight weakens almost all types, destroying most on contact. Wood can disrupt their healing and they also are very weak to silver and garlic.
    • A sample of some others: Nosferatu's ilk are like Dracula but look ugly when using the full extent of their power. Adze, found primarily in Guyana, ignore pain to the point they keep going even as they burn away. Charniputra mostly fly above the Himalayas with their great wings, spending almost all non feeding time in the sky. Charniputra also have a tough hide that's hard to damage without the weaknesses. Yiki Onna, the snow vampires of Nippon, spend their time as clouds of razor sharp ice, turning into a humanoid form to feed. Tryks drink other vampires and have none of the weaknesses, they also have retractable claws and spikes. The spikes inject venom that stops vampires from fading away after dying and the drained corpse becomes Tryk larva, which find human hosts to leech off of until adulthood. Queen Tryks have wings and can fly. Aqueos are more like fish people, spending most of their time in the ocean depths where the sun can't get them.
    • Some variations are limited to individual characters. Blade's Dhampire birth made him immune to being turned by every type in the sample but he was eventually bitten by Michael Morbius, a science-created vampire instead of a supernatural one, and his powers have changed some. Spitfire's vampire turn was mostly rejected and the few traits she has are suppressed, they come out when she's angry.
  • Runaways provides us with vampires that specifically don't work like vampires in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The only weakness they carry is sunlight... and aliens that taste like rainbows.
• Cassidy from Preacher (Comic Book) is a vulgar, foul-mouthed, grungy character who looks and acts human for almost all intents and purposes. His hair and nails grow, he breathes, he has apparently fathered children (although we never meet any), he has human-temperature skin and bleeds if he's cut. Holy symbols have no effect on him, he casts a reflection and can be photographed, he eats and drinks (and drinks, and drinks...) like a mortal, but needs blood for healing wounds and prolonging his life. He can drink nonhuman blood just fine and prefers getting it from rare steak, and only bites humans if they're trying to kill him. He can't change shape. He doesn't age. Sunlight causes his body to burst into flames but nothing else can kill him, up to and including being shot by the Saint of Killers. Stakes don't kill him, but they hurt, and he has also survived decapitation. He doesn't even have fangs! Despite this, the word "vampire" is never used. The closest the book comes is Cassidy referring to himself as "the V word".
  • A Spin-Off book contrasts Cassidy with a Gothic poseur vampire in the Lestat mold, to the detriment of the poseur, who gets killed by Cassidy after Cassidy discovers that he is feeding off a group of human Lestat wannabes using the false promise of turning them into vampires, and for being "too much of a wanker to live".
  • Even though Cassidy averts almost all the traditional vampire tropes (he's left with needing blood, although rare meat is good enough, and bursting into flame in the sun), it's revealed near the middle-to-end of the series that Cassidy is very much a metaphorical vampire, based on how he handles relationships.
• In an issue of Badger, Norbert "The Badger" Sykes sets out to fight a vampire. Being politically correct (he lives in Madison, Wisconsin), he realizes that one cannot assume that everybody has the same culture as oneself, so he carries a variety of Christian, Jewish and Muslim relics to cover different eventualities. Badger is helped by a pig who can snuffle out vampires, although she confuses their scent with that of IRS employees.
• In the first storyline of the Jack Staff comics, tabloid reporter Becky Burdock (known in her paper as "Becky Burdock, Girl Reporter", much to her distaste) is killed and transformed by an evil vampire. However, it turns out that she doesn't have to drink blood to survive, and even has no trouble standing in sunlight. She's more concerned by the vampire hunter who's now fallen in love with her and the demonic hounds who want her to join their evil army. Worse, her newspaper has given her the even tackier title of "Becky Burdock, Vampire Reporter"...
• The Star Wars Expanded Universe has the Anzati, essentially a race of psychic vampires, featured prominently in the comics about Anti-Hero Quinlan Vos, whose parents they killed. Anzati live for millennia, have no pulse, can regenerate from a lot of grievous injuries. They feed by mesmerizing they preys, before inserting the proboscises extending from their cheeks into the nostrils of the victims, and drinking their "soup". That is, their brains, and their imprint in The Force. Weirdly enough, they're also the resident ninjas.
• In Grendel, Tujiro is an Asian vampire who has a largely different set of rules from the traditional European type. For one thing, he seems to change only into a cat, being hit with water is highly painful and fire are a concern. However, sunlight is no impediment for him, which he uses to maximum effect to give the Christine Spar Grendel the scare of her life when she wakes up in the middle of the morning and finds the vampire waiting right at her bed just to taunt her.
  • Later in the series, the vampiric plague started by Pellon Cross clarifies several details about vampires in the world of Grendel: each one csn assume a single animal form, called a 'totem', that reflects his or her personality; they don't bleed unless they'd previously been hemophiliacs, in which case it makes them ravenously hungry; they can subsist on blood from animals or dispensed by machines; they share Tojiro's vulnerability to water, which can kill them in sufficient amounts; and, while sunlight couldn't kill Tojiro (probably due to his age), younger vampires dislike it so much that they prefer to live far from the equator.
• Aside from being several hundred years old the vampire in Theo's Occult Curiosities displays none of the traits usually associated with vampires: He is unaffected by sunlight (he spent 150 years living in the jungles of South America) doesn't seem to be able to transform himself into a Bat, etc. He does drink blood, but that is more because of a warped sense of duty, he is a devout Christian who believes that God has chosen him to purify the souls of sinners by drinking their blood, than out of necessity.
• The Vampires in Jack Chick's First Bite are not only capable of getting pregnant (and impregnating others), but also lose their fangs once converted to Christianity. This one does make sense, from point of view of mainstream theology and conventional mythology. Vampirism is either a curse from God, a punishment for sin, or it's a dark blessing from Satan. Sincerely accepting Christ into one's heart would indeed be more than enough to gain absolution of one's sins, and obviously Satan would have to withdraw his blessing from someone who truly and sincerely loved God. This might be the first and only time Chick did his homework.
• The DC/Vertigo comic, Bite Club, has vampires as an ethnic group. While they drink blood they can use laboratory made substitutes, They are only little sensitive to the sun but they can be killed relatively easily, also some are color-blind. There are many ways to become a vampire, If you are bitten by vampire bats, then you become an Alpha, Betas are the sons of alphas or other Betas, and you can also make more vampires by biting humans.
• Swamp Thing provides another DC/Vertigo example with the vampires of Rosewood. Formed from a vampire colony which had been mostly destroyed when the town was flooded, the survivors (sleeping in sealed freezer units) adapted and became aquatic vampires. John Constantine explains that the vampire virus is anaerobic; running water is aerated and damages vampires, but they can tolerate stagnant water -- and being underwater shields them from direct sunlight. They were even becoming fish-like.
• In a Thor story in Marvel Comics Presents, the Thunder God answers the distressed prayers of a colony of Vikings settled on an island off the coast of what will be the New World. He is too late, and they are all vampires. Some attack him on sight, and instantly turn to dust. Their master, Dracula's Atlantean predecessor as Vampire Lord, Varnae, however, is almost invulnerable to him, since the gods of Atlantis that he worshipped are long gone. In a Marvel Conan story set millennia earlier, a sorcerer manages to turn Varnae away with incantations spoken in the names of gods of his time.
• Vampires in Nikolai Dante are members of the Selene family, and most commonly beautiful women. They have impressive claws and are capable of extending black wings from their shoulders, and cannot be detected by any form of surveillance equipment.
• In the cult comic series Trencher, the title character fights a vampire named Dr. Tushman who lives on farts instead of blood, frequents a strip club where they only serve baked beans for his victims, and, when he's finished draining a victim, puts a fake butt over their real butt in order to cover up the bite marks. Trencher beats him by lighting a match. Yes, it is as ridiculous and immature as one would expect from Keith Giffen.
• In the horror series, 30 Days of Night Vampires, instead of just two neat, little fangs for canines, have entire mouthfuls of pointed teeth, like sharks. Their bite transforms a victim into one of them unless the victim is immediately killed. They have superhuman strength sufficient to rip humans apart like phone books. They are also some of the most hostile vampires ever put to any medium, while still retaining a measure of individuality. Turning into a vampire in this series generally seems to entail degenerating into a dick.
  • As for their weaknesses, vampires in this series seem to vary based on the author. They seem superhumanly tough, capable of taking such serious injuries as being impaled, shot in the face or even having grenades going off on their person. As one vampire character puts it, 'It'll all grow back, except the head'. The only thing that seems to consistently hurt the vampires in this series is sunlight, though this is balanced by the fact that it seems to take very, very little sunlight to reduce a vamp to ashes.
• In DC's Final Crisis, the secondary Big Bad (after Darkseid) was Mandrakk, a rogue, twisted Monitor who fed on the Bleed (aka ultramenstruum) - which is, technically speaking, the life blood of the Multiverse itself. Mandrakk had once been the good and wise Dax Novu until he had been corrupted and overwhelmed by vampiric hunger. It was further revealed that all the Monitors - meta-beings from a sort of sentient super-universe in which the entire Multiverse was a mere lesion - were vampiric in this way - either by feeding on Bleed, or, in a more metaphorical way, by 'leeching' on the stories of the universes they watched. One female Monitor, Zilla Valla, was seen physically feeding on Overman, a Superman from a universe where the Nazis had won World War II. In spite of the insane scale of the Monitors, Mandrakk was, in the end, killed very basically, by having a stake driven through (what presumably was) his heart. Admittedly it was a stake composed of the joint energy of most of the Green Lantern Corps, but the principle remains.
  • Mandrakk also had trouble coming near Superman because of the stored sunlight in his body, so he's weak to sunlight too.
• Atomic Robo and Jenkins sometimes fight off invasions from the "Vampire Dimension." Robo explains:

"They're not literally vampires. Sunlight, garlic, crosses, none of that applies. But we call them vampires because they're ageless super strong monsters that feed on the blood of the living."

• This trope is a plot point in DC/Vertigo's American Vampire. The main group of vampires are old European nobility with the traditional weaknesses (sunlight, wood, running water). However, when Skinner Sweet, a Wild West outlaw and the titular American Vampire, gets turned inadvertently he turns out to be the first in a new breed. Notably, he and his progeny can walk around in daylight just fine, has a Game Face with massive claws and fangs, and the elder vampires are at a complete loss on how to kill him. It doesn't help that he was an Axe Crazy Complete Monster even before he died, and was buried for several decades before being freed. It turns out that the new breed are powerless and vulnerable during the new moon. Gold may also work.
  • In the second arc we also meet vampires who transform into large bat like creatures.
• Roman Dirge's comic Lenore the Cute Little Dead Girl has a 420 year old vampire named Ragamuffin, who instead of sucking blood, kills and eats people to survive. That is, until, he happens to kill the wrong person at the wrong time, and is turned into a doll for the majority of the comic.
• Astro City has The Confessor, a vampire super-hero.
• DC Comics again; their 'regular' vampires are the classic kind, hiding from the sun, eating the innocent, etc. They have 'remote' control over their victims. However, these guys have learned. Running water is very scary, yes, but smelling like a hobo is scarier.
• Vampires in Requiem Vampire Knight are the ruling class of the world of Resurrection. As per usual they're aristocratic, pale (mostly), beautiful (sometimes), proud, vulnerable to silver and just plain evil. As per unusual, they're often addicted to a drug called the Black Opium to help them forget their past sins, and they're not immortal but are as susceptible to regression as anyone else in Resurrection; only receiving Dracula's Dark Kiss makes you immune to rejuvenation, and that's pretty hard to come by. Rebirth as a vampire in Resurrection is reserved for the very worst of the worst among humans.
• In Batgirl #14, Batgirl (Stephanie Brown) teams up with Supergirl to take on 24 hard-light hologram Draculas.
• In Victorian Undead II: Sherlock Holmes vs Dracula, vampires are much more bat-oriented. Forming bat wings on parts of their body (from the back, under their arms, from their hands, etc) and also have a weird swirling mist about them. Their skin can be damaged but feeding will fix it instantly. It also takes fate on both sides for religious symbols to work since when confronting Lucy and Dracula's brides. Only Lucy wasn't affected since she states the brides were from a more religious time. Also when heavily damaged rather then blood, a green mist flows from their body and why burst into green flames when fully killed.