A LOOK AT MONSTER FUN STRIPS: DRACULASS

Draculass was a daughter of Dracula who came to England from Transylvania to stay with her relatives (Aunt, Uncle and cousin Maisie – all of them perfectly normal people). Draculass was a no-joke vampire – green-faced and sharp-fanged, she fed on human blood and was always on the lookout for unsuspecting victims to prang. Luckily for the victims, Draculass’ bite wasn't lethal and didn’t turn them into vampires, all they needed was a patch of sticking plaster. Nonetheless, the little vampire’s urges didn’t make her very popular amongst the townsfolk of Monsterville, and Maisie was her only friend (possibly because they had an arrangement that Draculass won’t try to prang her cousin). Her fangs always at the ready, every week Draculass schemed to take a bite at a nice neck or two; needless to say, her plots usually backfired. 

Draculass was illustrated by Terry Bave who devoted a couple of passages to the strip in his interview for the Summer 1986 edition of GOLDEN FUN. Mr. Bave recalls he created the character together with his wife Sheila when they had been invited to contribute to the new comic by way of creating a suitable ‘monster’ feature. Initially they thought of Draculadd but then Shiela suggested that a little vampire lass might prove more fun, and by replacing the two D’s with a couple of S’s they arrived at Draculass. Mr. Bave recalled that Draculass proved very popular with MFC readers and even attracted her very own brand of fain mail, “with many a reader (especially girls) exclaiming their sheer delight over the little vampire’s fangs”. In the interview Mr. Bave says: “Obviously, the emphasis was on ‘fun’ and not ‘fear’ so I had to play down the blood-letting aspect of the vampire characteristic. When the script called for an encounter between Draculass and one of her unsuspecting victims, I would first show the little vampire sizeing-up her victim, then with fangs at the ready, then the following frame would show Draculass flying away with a satisfied grin on her face while her perplexed victim would be shown to have acquired a cross-patch of sticking plaster on his or her neck! During my many ‘talks on comics’ with children of varying ages I have always found tremendous enthusiasm for this character.”

Draculass started in MFC No. 1 and continued to the very end without missing a week. The little vampire got her own poster in issue 22 (8th November, 1975) and a cut-out mask in issue No. 34 (31st January, 1976) – you can read about the making of the mask in the same interview of Mr. Bave in the Summer 1986 edition of GOLDEN FUN. The strip survived merger with BUSTER and continued there for another fourteen months until 10th December 1977.