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Beginning in October 1968, Gold Key Comics published a series of Dark Shadows adventures that actually outlived the TV show. While the show left the air in 1971, Barnabas and friends cavorted through the pages of the comics until February 1976.
Over the years, Gold Key also published comics based on dozens of classic TV shows, including I Love Lucy, Mission Impossible, and The Munsters.
The quality of the art in the DS comics varies --and characters don't always resemble themselves from issue to issue, even though the same artist (Joe Certa) worked on all 35 issues. And most of the stories, while not exactly bad, aren't very true to the world established on the TV show. For example, on TV, Barnabas lives in a decaying old mansion near Collinwood, the family home. In the comic series, no one seems to notice when Barnabas slips away to the Collinwood basement to crawl into his coffin each morning....
The covers of the
first seven issues of the comic series feature photos of Jonathan
Frid as Barnabas Collins. (He's joined by David Henesy as David
Collins on the cover of Issue 6--in a photo from the same shoot
that produced the photo used on the cover of The Dark Shadows
Collectibles Book.) Issues #1 and #3 include pull-out posters
of Frid as the vampire.
Starting with Issue #8, the covers feature illustrations by artist George Wilson--and a tiny portrait of Frid in the upper right hand corner. For some reason, instead of that tiny photo, a small drawing of Barnabas occupies the corner on the very last issue in the series -- #35.
Many of the most popular DS characters don't appear in the comic book. The main comic characters are Barnabas, Julia, Roger, Elizabeth, Prof. Stokes, Quentin and Angelique. Fan favorites like Vicky, Carolyn, David and Laura are nowhere to be seen.
There was also a Dark Shadows daily newspaper comic strip which was syndicated and carried in papers throughout the country from March 1971 to March 1972. Pomegranate Press reprinted these strips in The Dark Shadows Comic Strip Book in 1996.
Click here to read more about the comic strip.
In 1971, a parody of DS, called "Darn Shadows," was printed in the first issue of a comic book called Spoof. Click here to read about that comic.
And after the NBC revival of Dark Shadows left the air in 1991, a short-lived comic book series was published by a West Virginia-based company called Innovation Publishing. Click here to read more about those comics.
Click here to order The Dark Shadows Collectibles
Book