The Darkhold is supposed to be a mysterious and impossible place, yet there’s no end to the stories about it.
Ostensibly Marvel’s answer to Lovecraft’s Necronomicon, the Darkhold first appeared in the “Werewolf by Night” issue of Marvel Spotlight back in 1972, meaning the book has existed for over 50 years in the real world and, of course, since the ancient times of Earth-616. It’s the recognizable MacGuffin of Marvel’s supernatural characters, from the aforementioned werewolves to Wanda Maximoff, the Scarlet Witch, who, at the time of writing, is a living, breathing, real boy.
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The Darkhold: Book of Sins saga presents only a small portion of those stories, and while most of the stories included are important, the book only covers the first eleven years of the Darkhold (1972-1983). Several comic book eras have passed since then — in fact, the Darkhold has had not one, but two series since then — meaning that readers expecting a definitive understanding of the Book of Sins will likely come away feeling just as confused as they were when they came to this book.
Like a lot of fun miscellany in the Marvel Universe, the Darkhold started out as an overblown plot contrivance, easily disposable when needed. The first Werewolf expansion barely touches on the book (there’s a mutant Medusa for Jack Russell to worry about), and then the guy gets attached to it soon after, but there’s no indication that it was going to become a staple of the Marvel Universe. Like the Infinity Gems a little later, the Darkhold didn’t sink into the bedrock of Marvel mythology until much later.
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By limiting the scope to these select early stories, we can in no way convey an accurate understanding of the Darkhold as it is used these days; however, we do provide insight into the organic formation of the comic book artifact. One of the most fascinating pieces collected in The Saga of the Book of Sins is a very short, very basic strip from Dracula Lives! #6 by Steve Gerber and Gene Colan. In this story, Dracula pursues a priest named Montessi who discovers an anti-vampire spell from the Darkhold. Doctor Strange uses this “Montessi Formula” later in the collection to wipe out all vampires.
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This same Montessi formula would have been extremely useful for this summer’s Blood Hunt event, and while the central section of the collection focuses heavily on the Scarlet Witch connection, one has to assume that this release was intended to synergize in some way with the vampire aspects of the mythos, Darkhold (boy) was only used briefly in Blood Hunt’s Strange Academy tie-in.
However, the book’s narrow scope is a shame, given that a denser, more complete exploration of the Darkhold was released in 2018 under the title Avengers: Doctor Strange: Rise of the Darkhold , Saga of the Book of Sins might have lived up to the “Saga” title with a more diverse selection of subsequent stories.
