Marvel Comics’ Blade as the Ultimate Vampire Hybrid: Patrolling Boundaries

Blade’s release has not only been viewed as helping to create the now-dominant form of superhero and comic book movies popular in the late 1990s, but also to modernize and inject more action into the genre of the vampire film. This hybridity, combining one element with another to produce something stronger than both, is inherent to the character of Blade himself: a half-human, half-vampire who possesses vampiric abilities but not their weaknesses. This chapter explores the character of Blade through the lens of this hybridity. It will examine how Blade’s cinematic outing, composite nature across media, and perhaps most importantly his racial and biracial hybridity, all contribute toward making him not only continually up to date, but the perfect vessel for demonstrating boundaries that often go unseen.