King in Black has taken over the Marvel Universe, and it’s done the unthinkable by making Blade turn to some of his worst enemies for help.
WARNING: The following contains spoilers for King in Black #2 by Donny Cates, Ryan Stegman, JP Mayer, Frank Martin and VC’s Clayton Cowles, on sale now.
As the symbiote god Knull reigns terror down upon the Marvel Universe, it didn’t take long for things to go from bad to worse during the King In Black. Knull has already “recruited” many of Marvel’s strongest X-Men and Avengers for his symbiote army and everyone else is in hiding and figuring out their next move. As always, Tony Stark has a mad idea that involves highjacking a symbiote dragon and using it to nurse Eddy Brock back to health. In the meantime, he has other ideas that will heavily involve Namor and Blade’s help.
As of King in Black #2, Knull has drowned the Earth in darkness, so Iron Man wants to build an army that can fight in the dark, Namor and Blade have plenty of experience fighting in the dark, but so do their enemies. Tony tells Namor to wake up the Black Tide in the depths of the Mariana Trench while Blade is sent to Chernobyl to recruit his deadliest nemesis, Dracula.
However, it doesn’t appear the vampires are keen on joining Blade’s cause, as he’s standing in a room full of dead vampires covered in their blood while telling Iron Man how “eager” they are to work with Blade. It appears that if Dracula helps Blade, it will be begrudgingly at best. But Knull isn’t going to just stop with humans and superheroes, he will inevitably turn all of the vampires into part of his symbiote army too, which is a key factor that should persuade Dracula to work with Blade and the Avengers.
This whole situation has similarities to the Blade II film in which Blade begrudgingly works with vampires to hunt down a threat to humans and vampires alike. In the film, Wesley Snipes’ character is recruited by the vampiric lords to help them hunt down the mutated experiments called Reapers. These were monsters the vampires genetically engineered to be more like Blade. However, these monsters were uncontrollable and starting killing vampires as well, which is why Blade was hired to track down their nest and take it out.