Blade and Doctor Strange Team Up for a Supernatural Train Heist (Exclusive)

ComicBook.com has an exclusive preview of Marvel’s Blade #4.

October 5, 2023, 2:40pm

The Daywalker and Sorcerer Supreme are working together to retrieve a weapon to stop the apocalypse in a new Marvel preview. Blade is headlining his own solo series from writer Bryan Hill and artist Elena Casagrande. In the first issue, they introduce a new supernatural threat called the Adana, which Blade accidentally unleashed. Now the vampire hunter is the only one who can right his wrong, but he needs some help from familiar faces along the way. Doctor Strange is one of those individuals, and helped Blade in the previous issue board a train that’s carrying the weapon to bring down Adana.

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ComicBook.com has the exclusive preview of Blade #4 from Bryan Hill, Valentina Pinti, Elena Casagrande, KJ Diaz, and VC’s Cory Petit. It picks up with Doctor Strange opening a portal inside the high-speed, armored train, where Blade, Tulip (Blade’s ex and a supernatural weapons dealer), and Rotha (rogue member of a secret sect of warriors) enter the fray. The train is the property of a sinister collector named Hamilton Achilles.

The team splits up with two separate agendas: Blade is off to find Achilles while Tulip and Rotha are tasked with freeing prisoners stuck on the train. Our exclusive preview ends with Blade squaring off in a train car against five vampires who are about to find out why he’s Marvel’s premier vampire hunter.

Blade writer introduces an apocalyptic threat to the Marvel Universe

ComicBook.com spoke to writer Bryan Hill ahead of the launch of the new Blade series, where we got some new details on the Adana and its effect on the larger Marvel Universe.

Well, one of my intentions with Blade is to create a seismic shift in the world of monsters and the occult within the Marvel universe as a whole,” Hill said. “And so without giving too much away about the Adana, the Adana is something primordial. I wanted to bring in something Byzantine, something older than old really, that has come with a singular goal of ushering in the hidden evils and monsters and atrophy of the universe. Kind of embodying all of that and bringing that character into the Blade book has been really interesting. That she is a primordial force in a lot of ways and will have both a direct and indirect effect on the world.

“And we’ll start to see how that evolves as the story goes on. But there are so many influences I have here from what’s been going on in the Blade books as of late, the Wolfman stuff, the films obviously are kind of burned into my subconscious, but I also wanted to bring in some primordial, almost Lovecraftian kind of Clive Barker ideas here. Because Blade ultimately is a character who is both monster and man. And so that character represents the conflict between monster and man. And it seemed wise to have a villain that is peak monstrosity in that way with a singular goal of returning the world to the monsters, basically. And that seemed like a great way to kick this off.”

The exclusive preview of Blade #4 can be found below. The issue goes on sale Wednesday, October 11th.

Blade #4

BRYAN HILL (W) • Valentina Pinti (A) • COVER BY ELENA CASAGRANDE
VARIANT COVER BY CARMEN CARNERO • HOWARD THE DUCK VARIANT COVER BY AMANDA CONNER
NEW CHAMPIONS VARIANT COVER BY MATEUS MANHANINI
DOCTOR STRANGE JOINS BLADE ON A HIGH-SPEED HEIST!
• Blade must break into the armored fortress of a weapons collector to steal a sword of unknown power – the key to defeating the Adana.
• But the fortress isn’t just heavily armored. It’s mobile.
• Doctor Strange guest-stars in this action-packed heist that gives new meaning to the term “bullet train”!
32 PGS./Parental Advisory …$3.99