*ARCHIE GOODWIN
Award winning Archie Goodwin has been writing and editing comics for close to four decades. He took over the Vampirella storyline starting with 8 and changed the direction of the strip forever, replacing satire with hard core supernatural melodrama. "I had gotten into H.P. Lovecraft when I was originally editing the CREEPY and EERIE books" he recalls, "and certainly that was a major influence. What I hope to do was to take some of the ongoing continuity-the soap opera aspects if you will-of doing a superhero strip, but meld them to some of the things that people expected from horror comics. The Lovecraft style mythos worked very well in that framework. It was a nebulous evil for Vampirella to oppose. It gave her a kind of reason to turn her vampire-like proclivities toward something positive."
Vampirella invades Europe in the French language edition of the original magazine.
FRONT: A memorable Sanjulain cover, from VAMPIRELLA #16. This painting depicts Dracula, from Vampi's home world of Drakulon, granted special powers by the forces of Chaos. *Source: Back of card