Marvel’s Vampires Get Their Own Avengers With 6 “Supervampires Fed on the Blood of Superhumans”

As Marvel’s terrifying Blood Hunt event approaches, the Avengers are facing a whole new type of vampiric bloodsucker. As an eldritch night settles over Earth, the planet will be overrun by an army of the undead. However, as Marvel’s heroes band together, they’ll also face a new kind of threat – six “supervampires” fed on the blood of superhumans, with wildly different different powers, appearances, and philosophies to everything Earth’s protectors know.

These villains are the Bloodcoven, the central villains of Blood Hunt. Led by Bloodstorm One – a terrifying clone of Dracula created by Hydra – this elite group is comprised of Cruel, Damascene, Megrim, Unusual, and Smoke Eater. Marvel has always had a huge variety of vampire species, but these villains – created by Jed MacKay and Pepe Larraz – show how diverse the children of the night actually are.

Blood Hunt will be a hugely ambitious event, with a range of limited series starring heroes like Spider-Man, Wolverine, the Midnight Sons, and even underrated vamp-killer Union Jack. There will also be one-shots and tie-ins to other series, however the main series is where the biggest events will happen, as Blade and the Avengers face off against the Bloodcoven. Speaking about these new villains, MacKay tells Marvel:

I knew going in that vampires weren’t bad enough. If the children of the night were going up against the Avengers, let alone the other heroes of the world, bigger guns were required. Hence the Bloodcoven – supervampires, fed on the blood of superhumans that follow different vampiric philosophies, subsisting not only on blood but pain, or magic, or thoughts, or even ghosts! I threw together a list of names and some thoughts about powers, but it was Pepe who really brought these characters to (un)life, creating an extremely gnarly set of predators!

Blood Hunt #1 (2024)
Release Date:	May 1, 2024
Writer:	Jed MacKay
Artists:	Pepe Larraz
Cover Artist:	Pepe Larraz
THE BLOODIEST MARVEL EVENT EVER! The skies have gone dark, the sun hiding its face from the carnage to come. The children of the night, the vampires, have risen from the dark and hidden places of the world as one to drown the Marvel Universe in blood. Earth’s final night has fallen — can even the heroes of this doomed world stem the tide of blood that is to come? Join the AVENGERS, BLADE, BLOODLINE, SPIDER-MAN, HUNTER’S MOON, TIGRA, DOCTOR STRANGE and CLEA as the dance of death begins in BLOOD HUNT #1!

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Marvel’s Blood Hunt Event Introduces Terrifying Bloodcoven

Marvel’s Vampires Get Their Own Dark Avengers

The Blood Hunt event follows years of stories showing Marvel’s vampires consolidating their power. Recently, Dracula founded an official Vampire Nation in Chernobyl which was recognized by the UN, giving vampires a nation state that allowed them to begin operating out in the open. Now, Blood Hunt will see the vampires strike all over the world, with the Bloodcoven leading the way. Blood Hunt promises a truly blood-drenched event story, with Marvel even releasing adults-only editions of each mainline issue, showing all the R-rated violence of this battle for the fate of humanity.

The Bloodcoven follow Jed MacKay’s recent trend for introducing major villain teams into Marvel lore, springing from the same mold as the Ashen Combine and Three Mothers. However, MacKay credits Larraz with truly realizing each character’s identity. As part of Marvel’s announcement of the villains, Larraz shares some design notes on each of the new characters. These descriptions reveal some of the core characteristics of each villain, as well as a genius reference to 1992’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula movie:

Bloodcoven Members
Vampire Codename	Appearance	Pepe Larraz’s Design Notes
Cruel		“This one was pretty straightforward. A character wrapped in razor wire by his own will is terrifying enough, so that is what I did. I added the cloud of wires at his feet and neck, always moving like some kind of metal gorgon.”
Smoke Eater		“The idea is that he inhales ghosts to acquire their strength in combat, so I made a physical representation of that. He becomes the unification of multiple beings, therefore the multiple limbs, which makes his silhouette pretty recognizable in battle scenes, and makes him one of the heavy hitters of the team. The idea is that he shows all the eyes of the ghosts on his forehead. I have a thing with eyes – on my designs, I either put none or too many!”
Damascene		“My initial idea was to make them bi-dimensional, like a paper sheet that will cut you when you try to grab it, but it was very difficult to convey that idea in comics, without movement. So I did his body absolutely geometrical to remark the sharpness of the body. Again, I decided to put no face. Expressionless beings are more scary, in my opinion.”
Megrim		“Probably the most vampire-looking of the litter. I hid her face on red cloth but my idea is that the cloth was always drenched in blood. The skirt’s folds make shapes like faces screaming of pain. Everything is super intense with her. She must be unbearable.”
Unusual		“The initial idea by Jed was to make him a collage of old engravings, always changing, like some kind of sinister Max Ernst picture in movement, but that would present a copyright issue so I came up with a weird idea. I started with a bunch of parallel lines and used a liquify tool from Clip Studio to make shapes with those lines, and finally adapted these shapes to a human silhouette. It’s probably the weirdest and fastest design I’ve even done.”
Bloodstorm One		“I gave him a lot of thought because I didn’t want to do a vampire super hero, but a true monster, who is scary enough that he’s even scared of himself. He hides his true nature under a perfect human shell, like some kind of Michelangelo’s David which is rotten inside, twisted, homicidal. The worst monster of all is the one who wants to look as the perfect human. The armor is an homage to Vlad Tepes’ armor from Coppola’s Dracula film, which seemed to me like a proper reference.”

While the idea of a vampire uprising taking Marvel’s Earth by storm is a fun one, it’s particularly exciting to know the Avengers will be going up against individual supervillains with their own powers and perspectives on vampiric lore. The Bloodcoven show how ambitious Marvel’s Blood Hunt will be, and the scale of the challenge the Avengers will face as they take on vampires not one group at a time, but simultaneously across the globe.

Blood Hunt #1 is coming from Marvel Comics May 1.

Source: Marvel