Blade (vol. 3) #1
Title: “Blood Allies, Book 1”
Medium: comic
Cover date: Nov. 1998
Publisher:
1 characters in this story:
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black; Bloodshadows...  |
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Labeling the "volumes" of the various Marvel comic book series starring Blade (a.k.a. Eric Brooks) is helpful, but can be tricky. The first series Blade starred in began in July 1994. It was titled "Blade: The Vampire Hunter." The name "Blade" is quite large and the words "The Vampire Hunter" appear as a smaller subtitle. The subtitle is clearly part of the title of the series, but one can easily view this as simply the "Blade" series, and regard it as "Blade volume 1."
The next series to star Blade began in November 1998. This series was titled simply Blade, without the "Vampire Hunter" subtitle. Some sources refer to this as "Blade volume 1", distinct from "Blade: The Vampire Hunter volume 1." Marvel later published additional series titled simply "Blade" or titled "Blade: Vampire Hunter."
We think it is simpler to consider each of these as essentially being about the same character and hence being continuations of the same general series of comics about Blade. So we are following a convention that has been used by a number of other sources and numbering the "volumes" sequentially, whether or not the "Vampire Hunter" subtitle is used. But we are identifying the comics by their actual title as it appears on the cover. Thus we have "Blade: The Vampire Hunter volume 1" and "Blade volume 2." We do not refer to "Blade: The Vampire Hunter volume 2" because the second Blade series did not actually use this subtitle on the cover.
Making things even more confusing, there was a Blade one-shot comic published in March 1998. As this publication was a one-shot and not really a series, some sources have opted to not consider it in numbering the "volumes" of Blade comics. We identify that one-shot as volume 2, because it is Marvel's second Blade #1 (counting Blade: The Vampire Hunter #1 as the first).
The volume numbering we use is similar to that used by marvel.wikia.com, except that we number the 1998 Blade one-shot as volume 2 and the 1998 Blade 3-issue mini-series (which was published later) as volume 3, while they do the opposite.
