"At the going down of the sun": vampires, comics and the world wars (vol. II)

The First World War inspired many fictional responses from its outbreak in August 1914, encompassing many genres. Though fantastical stories were written between 1914 and 1918, they seldom conformed to the conventions of the horror genre. The war was considered horrific enough without the inclusion of such mythical creatures as vampires and werewolves. Much the same could be said for the events of the Second World War. As Nina Auerbach suggests, both world wars were “rich in the rhetoric of Armageddon, but they were sparse in monsters.”¹ Attitudes to the wars changed in the second half of the twentieth century.