Written by Marv Wolfman, Chris Claremont, James Felder, and Christopher GoldenArt by Tony DeZuniga, Rico Rival, Gene Colan, Ladronn, Juan Vlasco, and Mark Pennington
Okay, this is a weird one. It's like Marvel was looking to cash in on the movies or TV show or something, and decided to take some uncollected Blade stories from their black and white 70s magazines, and then to make it a thicker book, a couple more random books from the late 90s, and print them together. There are some thematic similarities (aside from vampires, wooden knives and an ugly costume) across the stories, except for the Ladronn one, which contradicts what happens in the others.
The 70s stories are exactly what you'd expect. They make more liberal use of the word 'blackie' than my modern sensibilities are used to, and are incredibly heavy on the melodrama. The art is problematic - it's only lightly inked, if at all, and the reproduction looks like it's a photocopy of a photocopy on some pages.
The Felder/Ladronn story is downright strange. It doesn't fit with the rest of the book, and seems to end with Blade's death - a fact not explained in the subsequent story where he's fine.
The final story is the best of the bunch, and that's largely due to Gene Colan's beautiful (and fully inked) artwork. This is a conscious attempt to clean up dangling plotlines from twenty years previous, and it kind of reads like that.
This book came as a freebie from the guys at Labyrinth, and while I enjoyed reading it, I can see why most of these stories had not been collected before.
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