Nice Gil Kane cover!

This book has been for the most part painfully bad up to now, so when I saw Steve Englehart in the credits for this issue, I hoped we’d get something good.  And we do–but it’s good in a weird way.

Luke is hired to hunt down a vampire, but it turns out he’s just a guy with pale skin who is pretending to be a vampire to lower property values or something. 

This is apparently an old script Steve wrote for the Kolchak the Night Stalker TV show, adapted for Luke Cage.  This is the last time Steve would write Luke Cage.

We discover in the end that he’s just a self-hating albino who is jealous of Cage’s beautifully dark skin.  Come on now, sing it with me: “Ebony and ivory, living together in perfect harmony….”

You gotta love Englehart.  There were so many times that he came close to being as weird as Steve Gerber, but Englehart always kept his scripts mainstream enough that they didn’t seem completely weird.