The House of Mystery, like all the Horror anthology comics, found the 1980s harder than the 70s. To beef up sales, continuing characters were introduced like the Creature Commandos in Weird War Tales. In HoM it was “I, Vampire”, created by J. M. DeMatteis and first drawn by Tom Sutton in House of Mystery #290. The comic ran to a final #321 and Lord Andrew Bennett, our vampire narrator was there at the end.
The covers for most of that run were done by two legends. The first was Joe Kubert, he of Tarzan fame. But the other was master Mike Kaluta. Mike had been doing DC covers since House of Mystery #200 (March 1972) . Most of these had been for the horror titles. Admittedly these “I, Vampire” covers don’t have the impact his non-series covers do, but it is interesting to see how he challenged himself month to month. Mike would do a similar cover run for Conan the King in 1985.
