Written by: Genevieve Hammang
Edited by: Adina Vega and Michelle Sosa
Marvel Comics’ The Tomb of Dracula #1 was published in April 1972 with cover art by Neal Adams
Lardas: Where do you think the vampire trend is going?
Melton: When this present vampire wave took off in the early nineties, we kept expecting it to collapse. But it hasn’t. It’s flourishing. New groups are coming along, Buffy is now a big thing among vampire aficionados and we keep saying it’s got to slow down, it’s got to exhaust itself as a theme for the popular culture, but it hasn’t. Goth music has come and gone, Anne Rice has come and gone, but the theme itself seems to be there.
Professor J. Gordon Melton’s predictions about the popularity of vampires have proven true: Americans are still obsessed. In the nearly quarter century since this interview, we’ve seen the rise and fall of numerous vampire media, from the Underworld film franchise to HBO’s current TV adaptation of Interview with a Vampire to the wildly successful Twilight books and movies.
Melton himself was no exception to this obsession. After picking up vampire books, comics, and clippings for several decades in an effort to appease what he calls his “collector’s mentality,” his collection contained several thousand items. Now housed at San Diego State University, the J. Gordon Melton Vampire Collection is an incredible testament to the staying power of beautiful bloodsuckers in media.
The SDSU Library has over 130,000 print and digital books in circulation.
According to the school’s Comic Arts Curator Pamela Jackson, Melton donated, “…what we believe is the largest collection of English language books related to vampires to SDSU. So that collection includes over 10,000 vampire related comics.”
It consists of a nearly complete collection of vampire-related comics in the English language up to the year 2000, the majority of which are single-issue floppy comics. Also represented are English translations of Japanese manga and comics in Italian, French, Spanish, German, and Swedish. The comic collection includes titles like Vampirella, the Buffy the Vampire Slayer franchise (including Buffy, Angel, and Spike), comic adaptations of Carmilla and Dracula, Pinocchio Vampire Slayer, the dark comedy Fangs, Lament of the Lamb manga, Vampironica, and even early Batman comics. In addition to comics, Melton’s donation also included a huge array of fiction, non-fiction, and children’s books. The library is still digitizing this massive collection, which can be found in its online catalog.
Professor J. Gordon Melton is a scholar of American religious history who has written over 50 books on religion and vampires.
Melton attributes his interest in vampires to a long-time curiosity about life on the fringe. He considers his work as a scholar of American religious history, with a special focus on alternative religions and anti-cult and countercult movements, as another aspect of that curiosity. He founded the Institute for the Study of American Religion and was a Distinguished Professor of American Religious History with the Institute for Studies of Religion at Baylor University until his retirement. Interestingly, he was also called in by Aum Shinrikyo, the Japanese doomsday cult responsible for the sarin gas attack in Tokyo in 1995, to look into human rights violations of its members during the consequent investigation. Most of his sizable bibliography is devoted to scholarship on alternative religions, though he has published two major encyclopedic works on vampires: The Vampire Book: An Encyclopedia of the Undead in 1992 and The Vampire Almanac; The Complete History in 2021.
Although Melton described the 90s as the beginning of the then “current” wave of vampire media, we’ve been reading about and watching vampires for a long, long time. Bram Stoker’s 1897 Dracula is, of course, the best-known literary vampire and popularized the version that most people know today. But even Dracula was not the first to appear in a novel: that honor goes to Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla, published 25 years beforehand. The vampire as a literary figure dates back even further to the 1700s, popularized by writers like Goethe. The origin point of the European vampire genre is believed to be a historical vampire “craze” in Serbia during the 1720 and 1730s. But the concept of a blood-sucking creature has been seen across cultures for millennia, from the Mesopotamians to the ancient Greeks, to the Visayan people of the Philippines.
In short: while different versions of vampires have waxed and waned over the years, we are just as riveted by the possibility of a monster sucking away our vital essence now as we always have been. And what better way to honor that obsession than with an enormous library of books and comics? Happy Halloween! 🎃 👻 🕸️
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