LYDIA VARADI
Real Name: Lydia Varadi
Identity/Class: Human
werewolf;
(late 18th century)
Occupation: Werewolf;
(when human) Unrevealed
Group Membership: Werewolves of Earth
Affiliations: None
Enemies: (Captor)
Dracula (Vlad III Dracula);
(victim)
Grigori, Baron Russoff
Known Relatives: Parents (names unrevealed, allegedly deceased)
Aliases: None
Base of Operations: Transylvania (then part of the Kingdom of Hungary);
imprisoned for a time in Castle Dracula at Borgo Pass, Transylvania
First Appearance: Werewolf by Night I#15 (March, 1974)
Powers/Abilities: In her human form, Lydia Varadi is not known to have possessed
any superhuman abilities.
However, when she was exposed to the light of the full moon, she transformed into a werewolf: a bipedal humanoid with wolf-like physical attributes that included a coat of fur, enlarged canine teeth (fangs), and fingernails and toenails elongated into claws.
As a werewolf, Lydia presumably possessed the standard abilities common to most werewolves, including enhanced human strength, speed, stamina, agility, reflexes, and senses. Her claws could rend flesh and may have been able to rend more durable substances, like cinderblock or even soft metals.
As a werewolf, Lydia presumably possessed superhuman durability that granted her increased resistance to most forms of conventional injury and, although she could be injured or stunned, she healed rapidly (approximately ten times as fast as normal humans) from most assaults.
As a werewolf, Lydia was immune to the mesmeric control that vampires (like Dracula) could exert over humans and animals.
When in her werewolf form, Lydia could pass the curse of lycanthropy to anyone she bit with her teeth (via her saliva) or scratched with her claws.
As a werewolf, Lydia may have had the potential to live for centuries, but this has not been confirmed.
Limitations/Weaknesses: When in her werewolf form, Lydia appeared to have an animalistic personality, and may not have been able to think normally or speak.
Like many werewolves, Lydia apparently only changed into her werewolf form when exposed to the light of the full moon. This change may have been an involuntary one that she was unable to control in any way.
Like many (or all) werewolves, Lydia was vulnerable to silver. Injuries that were inflicted upon her by silver weapons could permanently damage her body or kill her.
Like many (or all) werewolves, Lydia was probably also vulnerable to wolfsbane (aconitum) which may have been able repel or even tame her.
Height: 5' (guess - consistent with historical data)
Weight: Unrevealed
Eye color: Blue; (as werewolf) Orange and glowing
Hair color: Reddish-brown (auburn); (as werewolf) Pale brown (tan?)
History:
(Werewolf by Night I#15 (fb) - BTS) <1795 A.D.> - Lydia Varadi was a young woman (or a young
girl) who lived in the area of eastern Europe known as Transylvania which, at that time, was part of
the Kingdom of Hungary.
(Werewolf by Night I#15 (fb) - BTS) - Lydia's parents were allegedly murdered by Dracula.
(Werewolf by Night I#15 (fb) - BTS / Doctor Strange, Sorcerer Supreme#27/2 (fb) - BTS) - Lydia was subsequently captured/kidnapped by Dracula who brought her to his castle near Borgo Pass and imprisoned her in one of its rooms (or in its dungeons).
(Werewolf by Night I#15 (fb) - BTS) - At some point, either before or after her capture, Lydia's werewolf form encountered Dracula who discovered that he could not control the werewolf because something about her made her impervious to his commands.
(Werewolf by Night I#15 (fb) - BTS) - Lydia was allegedly imprisoned within Castle Dracula for a month.
(Werewolf By Night I#15 (fb) - BTS) - During her imprisonment, Dracula would come to Lydia each night and use his fangs to drain blood from her neck.
(Werewolf by Night I#15 (fb) - BTS) - Dracula allegedly kept Lydia alive only as long as her blood pleased him.
(Werewolf by Night I#15 (fb)/Doctor Strange, Sorcerer Supreme#27/2 (fb)) - When Grigori, Baron Russoff refused to kneel to Dracula's power, the vampire slew his wife, Louisa. Enraged by his wife's death, the baron immediately raced to Castle Dracula before darkness could again cover Transylvania. Knowing that the castle would be unguarded, since there were none in the village below who would have dared venture towards it, Baron Russoff was able to easily enter the vampire's underground chambers, find him sleeping in his coffin, and drive a wooden stake through his heart. Dracula reacted with a brief scream that ended an instant later when his flesh turned to ash.
(Werewolf by Night I#15 (fb)) - Baron Russoff then encased Dracula in a coffin lined with balls of garlic, then threw the coffin over the balcony edge and into the cold waters of the Danube river below. Still enraged, the baron began smashing Dracula's valuables and was doing so when he heard a muffled cry that led him to a room whose door was sealed with a wooden beam. Baron Russoff opened the door and saw an auburn-haired girl wearing a green dress standing beside a table. When asked who she was and why she was imprisoned in that living hell, the girl replied, "I am called Lydia, sir...and it was Dracula who placed me here...after he murdered my father and mother." After calling Dracula a damned devil who deserved a more horrible death than he received, the baron asked the girl how long she had been there and Lydia replied, "One month, sir...and kept alive only as long as my blood pleased him. Each night he would come to me -- and each night his horrible fangs would drain the blood from my neck." As she spoke, two fang marks on her neck were clearly visible to the baron.
(Werewolf by Night I#15 (fb)) - Pleased to have been able to rescue one of Dracula's victims, Baron Russoff escorted the young girl out of the castle and, as they walked in shadows beneath the moon-speckled trees, the baron talked, believing that Lydia was listening. However, as he walked slightly ahead of her through the woods, the baron was unaware of the fact that Lydia, now exposed to the light of the full moon, had begun to (quietly?) tear off her dress. Then, once the moonlight had caused her to fully transform into her werewolf form, Lydia made a sound, a fierce, slavering growl that was "a wail from a being neither human nor animal."
(Werewolf by Night I#15 (fb) / Doctor Strange, Sorcerer Supreme#27/2 (fb)) - Turning towards that sound, the baron found himself facing the now mostly-naked werewolf. So shocked that he was unable to scream, the baron could only back up against a tree as the werewolf approached him, her claws glistening in the moonlight and her teeth, sharp as wooden nails, sparkling through the darkness. However, it was her fiery, glowing eyes that caught his gaze, transfixing him helplessly on the spot where he stood and paralyzing him as "his murderer" sank her fangs into his neck. Her saliva mixed with his sweat and blood, and from that moment on he was cursed.
(Werewolf by Night I#15 (fb) - BTS) - And then, for some unknown reason, the werewolf that was Lydia didn't kill Baron Russoff.
(Werewolf by Night I#15 (fb) - BTS) - On the two following nights, when the full moon rose, Baron Russoff uncontrollably shook off his mantle of humanity and became a mindless, rampaging werewolf.
(Werewolf by Night I#15 (fb) - BTS) - The baron somehow learned that Dracula had imprisoned Lydia because the vampire lord could not control her werewolf self as he was able to control others.
(Werewolf by Night I#15 (fb) - BTS) - Baron Russoff would record these events in his diary less than a week later, but made no reference to how he survived his encounter with Lydia or what happened to her after she had bitten him. He also wrote about how Dracula had been unable to control the female werewolf but did not explain how he had learned that fact.
(Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe I#12: Werewolf entry / Marvel Zombies: The Book of Angels, Demons & Various Monstrosities#1: Werewolves profile) - Baron Grigori Russoff was eventually slain by local villagers, presumably while he was prowling the countryside in his werewolf form during a night when the moon was full. However, no details about exactly how or when he was killed have ever been revealed.
What happened to Lydia Varadi has never been revealed.
(Tomb of Dracula I#18/Werewolf By Night I#15) - In the modern era, about a year after his werewolf curse first manifested on his eighteenth birthday, Baron Russoff's descendant Jack Russell and his girlfriend, Topaz, came to Transylvania looking for answers about Jack's past. While searching Russoff Manor, they found a diary that had been bound and locked. The following day, after Topaz managed to use her powers to open the unbreakable lock, Jack was able to quickly find and read his ancestor's account of his encounter with Lydia in 1795 A.D. and how being bitten by her had cursed him to become a werewolf.
(Doctor Strange, Sorcerer Supreme#27/2) <1991> (topical date) - Several years later, Doctor Stephen Strange, Earth's Sorcerer Supreme, read the chapter on werewolves ("Legacy of the Wolf") that existed within the Book of the Vishanti. By reading the second part of that chapter, Strange learned that "Baron Grigory Russoff" had been bitten by "a female werewolf" in 1795.
Comments: Created by Marv Wolfman, Mike Ploog and Frank Chiarmonte.
Given that at least one story set in the Marvel Universe has implied (or stated?) that werewolves, if they can avoid being killed, can sometimes live for several centuries, Lydia might still be alive in the present-day MU. It might be interesting if Jack Russell were to have an encounter with her and learn her side of what happened between her and his ancestor.
Lydia's last name was first revealed to be "Varadi" when she was included in a gallery of headshots that was part of the Werewolves profile in Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe A-Z HC#13 that was published in 2010, about 36 years after her character's first appearance. In contrast, Baron Russoff received his given name of "Grigori" in the entry for the Werewolf that appeared in The Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe I#12 (December, 1983), less than 10 years after his first appearance. I guess that, even for fictional characters, things just come more easily to nobility than to commoners. On the other hand, the Book of the Vishanti excerpt that was published in Doctor Strange, Sorcerer Supreme#27 (March, 1991) did later misspell his first name as "Grigory."
Listing Lydia's height as 5' is really a guesstimate on my part, based on what I could find online about average human heights from pre-modern times. Since the image of them walking together shows the top of her head reaching as high as the bottom quarter of the baron's face, I would estimate that she was maybe 4-6 inches shorter than him, but that's not much help since his height was never revealed. However, if Baron Russoff's height was average or less than average for the men of the time, then Lydia could have been less than 5 feet tall.
Baron Russoff's description of the werewolf as having "fiery, glowing eyes" may have been objectively inaccurate, something that he only imagined due to the terror he was experiencing. Alternatively, it's not impossible that the werewolf's eyes might have actually glowed, or seemed to have glowed, to the baron. Maybe werewolves have the same layer of tissue in their eyes, the tapetum lucidum, as many nocturnal animals do, a layer that reflects incoming visible light back from their retinas, making their eyes appear to glow at night. Or maybe the werewolf's eyes were glowing for some other, supernatural reason.
When writing Lydia's history, I chose to use the word "allegedly" several times. I did this because, of the five things about her that were revealed during the story, she chose to hide the fact that she was a werewolf from her rescuer, Baron Russoff, and this could mean that she might have been less than fully truthful about some elements of what she claimed had happened to her. While there is no doubt that she had been imprisoned by Dracula and that he had fed upon her, the duration of her captivity may have been different than she claimed, and the reason why Dracula was holding her captive probably had as much (if not more) to do with her being a werewolf as it did with her being a convenient source of blood. As for her claim that Dracula had murdered her parents, that could have been the truth or it could have been a lie, something she made up in order to portray herself as even more of a victim and thus someone who really deserved to be set free by her rescuer. As for the fact that Dracula had been unable to control her werewolf form, that was something that the baron recorded in his diary without revealing how he had learned it.
Having said all that, I can't really blame Lydia for not volunteering the fact that she was a werewolf to Baron Russoff. After all, werewolves are generally perceived as all being murderous monsters and she had every reason to fear that, if she told him what she was, the baron would have either re-imprisoned her in that room or simply have killed her himself on the spot. Given that her human form was that of a young girl, Lydia would probably have been unable to stop him from doing either of those things to her, so it was only sensible to keep her true nature a secret.
As for Baron Russoff, we readers have only his version of what happened at Castle Dracula. While there is no evidence that it was inaccurate, the fact that the flashback was of what he wrote in his diary instead of something we readers saw him remembering leaves open the possibility that he might have been an unreliable narrator. For example, while the diary portrays the baron as someone who was driven to kill Dracula to avenge the murder of his beloved wife Louisa, maybe their marriage was less happy and he was an abusive, possessive husband whose anger at Dracula had more to do to the fact that the vampire had deprived him of someone who belonged to him. If that were true, then one could even speculate that, after having rescued Lydia, the baron may have felt that she owed him something for being rescued and that it might have been an attempt at collecting what he felt he was owed that led to her dress being so torn away, if you know what I mean. Of course, as I said before, there is no evidence that anything like that happened, but, still, it would be interesting to know what Lydia would have had to say about their fateful encounter.
While "Death of a Monster!" is an interesting story, the minimal information
that it provides about Lydia does leave a lot of questions unanswered. So, here is a list of some of those
questions:
A list of unanswered questions about Lydia's parents can be found in their subprofile.
Aside from those unanswered questions, there were three things about "Death of a Monster!" that bothered me. First of all, the idea that Lydia was able to transform into her werewolf form and tear apart her dress without Baron Russoff, who was walking only a few feet ahead of her, becoming aware of what she was doing until she growled seems rather unlikely. Admittedly, I don't actually know how noisy transforming into a werewolf or ripping apart a dress would really be, but Jack Russell's early Werewolf transformations seemed to be accompanied by a lot of loud and involuntary growling and there was that scene from X-Men I#98 where Wolverine tore off the bottom of Jean Grey's black evening dress with a very loud "RRIP!" On the other hand, if Baron Russoff was slightly hard of hearing and/or talked loudly, then I suppose it's less unlikely that he might have remained so clueless as to what was going on so close behind him.
The second problem I have with this story is the fact that it seems to slightly change the origin of the hereditary Russoff curse. Remember, back in Werewolf by Night I#3, Aelfric the Mad Monk, while possessing the body of Father Ramón Jóquez, had told the Werewolf how a certain Balkan baron (Jack Russell's father) had become a werewolf by night after the act of reading from the Darkhold had catalyzed "a long-hidden demon which had lain dormant in (his) ancestors' veins for nigh on eighteen centuries." That story, published just over a year earlier, had seemingly indicated that the Russoff bloodline had been cursed since about 200 A.D. and now this story was moving the start date of the curse to (at time of publication) just under 180 years ago. I found this irritating because I had wanted to know what had happened to that distant ancestor (who may not have even been named Russoff) that had left his (or her) bloodline cursed for such a long time. Of course, the revelation that Grigori Russoff had become a werewolf in 1795 A.D. does not necessarily negate the idea that his bloodline had actually already been cursed for sixteen hundred years before his birth, and that's something that I would like to see explored further in some future story.
The third problem I have with this story is not actually with the story as it appeared in Werewolf by Night I#15 but with how it was recapped in the second story in Doctor Strange, Sorcerer Supreme#27. While the text provided for that excerpt from the Book of the Vishanti is sparse but adequate, the artwork depicts the baron and the female werewolf in a way that is oddly inconsistent with their original portrayal. Specifically, in WBN I#15, Lydia was an auburn-haired girl wearing a green dress who transformed into a tan-furred werewolf wearing what was left of her dress down around her hips while Baron Russoff was an older, grey-haired man with a circle beard who was wearing a dark blue double-breasted coat and dark blue pants. In contrast, the story in DSSS#27 depicts the unnamed female werewolf as having fur that is a darker reddish-brown than Lydia's hair had been and wearing the remnants of her blue dress around her hips while Baron Grigory Russoff is presented as being a younger man, with hair that is black instead of grey, a circle beard with a much smaller tuft on hair on his chin and a mustache that is so faint it looks like stubble, and who is wearing a brown jacket and brown pants, with what looks like a red ascot around his neck. It's like neither the artist nor the colorist for that recap bothered to use the original story as a reference before they did their work.]
On a slightly relevant note, I suppose it's worth mentioning that, while the original story made sure that the female werewolf's naked upper body was carefully obscured from the sight of the readers, the image from the recap had no problem showing her naked (but fur-covered) breasts. When you think about it, that's a bit odd. After all, Tigra's breasts are also fur-covered, but I suspect that it would get some attention if Marvel began publishing comics in which she was depicted running around without her usual bikini top.
How did Baron Russoff's descendants inherit the curse?
In Marvel Spotlight I#2 (February, 1972), Jack Russell became a werewolf on
the night of his eighteenth year and, on her deathbed, his mother Laura revealed that it was "an hereditary
curse" that Jack and Lissa "may well have been damned with." However, this fact was seemingly contradicted
in Werewolf by Night I#3 (January, 1973) when the spirit of Aelfric the Mad Monk claimed that Jack's father
had only become a werewolf after he read/translated the Darkhold.
This contradiction was resolved in The Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe I#12 (December, 1983) when the entry for the Werewolf stated that Jack's ancestor Grigori had first brought the supernatural curse of lycanthropy upon the family when he had been bitten by a female werewolf in 1795 but that, "because his children were born before he was so afflicted, Grigori Russoff's offspring and the succeeding generations were spared the agony of turning into werewolves themselves. The curse, however, was mystically transmitted to Russoff's descendants, awaiting a supernatural catalyst to trigger it."
So, with an explanation for why the generations of Russoffs who lived between Grigori and Gregory hadn't been werewolves, everything was fine, right? Well, not exactly. It turns out that the Official Handbook writers, aside from making a few significant mistakes when they summarized Jack Russell's history, had also overlooked an article in Tomb of Dracula II#3 (February, 1980) entitled "Bloodline: A Probable Outline of the Career of Count Vlad Dracula" that writer Peter Gillis had compiled. According to the section on events involving Dracula that had occurred in 1795, this VERY thoroughly-researched article states that, after Baron Russoff's wife Louisa had been killed by Dracula, the baron had retaliated by driving a stake through the vampire's heart but then encountered a woman named Lydia who was a werewolf and infected "Russoff and all his offspring (by a second wife, evidently) with the curse of the werewolf."
Okay, now we readers had two conflicting sources of information, one which claims that Grigori's wife Louisa was the mother of all of his children, and one which states that Grigori had a second wife and that the Russoffs who inherited the werewolf curse were descended from children that Grigori sired with her after he had been cursed.
On the face of it, both scenarios (mystically-transmitted curse vs. genetically-transmitted curse) seem equally plausible. It's worth noting that Peter Gillis seems to have come to the conclusion that Grigori Russoff must have had a second wife based on an ASSumption that the werewolf curse acted like a mystical virus that infected every cell of its victim's body and inserted some werewolf genes into them. Since the gametes were presumably also infected by this virus, that would have been how any children sired by Grigori after he had been cursed would have inherited that curse. However, it doesn't really explain why the werewolf genes they had inherited would have been in a dormant state until triggered by a supernatural catalyst.
Anyway, the Official Handbook staff has apparently decided that, yes, Grigori Russoff did remarry after the death of his first wife Louisa, and that it was from his union with his second wife, whose name was Krisztina, that all of his blood-descendants originated. The handbook does acknowledge that there is as yet no real explanation for why those descendants didn't inherit the curse in an active form, as Jacob/Jack inherited it from his father Gregory. Maybe some future story will provide some clarification.
Since the idea that lycanthropy is caused by the presence of a "lupine gene" that somehow (magically) inserts itself into every cell of the bodies of those humans who are cursed to be werewolves is apparently canon, does that mean that a genetic test for lycanthropy could be developed? Or would the affected gene sequences be too difficult to detect by any technology?
It should be noted that, although there is clearly a physical/genetic component to the werewolf curse, there must also be a non-physical/spiritual component as well. This is demonstrated by the fact that (at least) two people who inherited lycanthropy or should have been infected by a werewolf have had their curse removed or prevented by having their souls replaced by those of other, non-cursed people.
The first case is that of the sister of the infamous Werewolf by Night, Lissa Russell. Like her brother Jack, Lissa inherited the lycanthropic curse from their father and began to transform into a werewolf on the first full moon after her eighteenth birthday. However, being exposed to both moonlight and the Dark Light from Doctor Glitternight caused her to transform into a weredemon instead. On the next night, Glitternight used his powers to remove the weredemon's soul and transform it into a "chain of light" which he used to control her. Later that night, Jack's girlfriend Topaz, at the request of her deceased foster father Taboo, used her psychic powers to convert Taboo's physical body back into it true form of ectoplasm which then entered the weredemon's body and transformed her back into her human form. The presence of Taboo's extra "life essence" (and possibly Lissa's own soul, which may have returned to her body after the leash disappeared) has apparently been enough to prevent Lissa from transforming into the werewolf since that night. Unfortunately, this cure was unable to prevent the curse from being inherited by Lissa's daughter, Nina Price.
The second case is that of Jack's Russell's closest friend, Buck Cowan, who was once badly mauled and nearly killed by the Werewolf. Cowan would have died if the spirit of Gideon Blaine hadn't voluntarily sacrificed his identity in order for his soul to enter into Cowan's body and prevent his death. The fact that Cowan, who had been scratched by the Werewolf, did not subsequently become a werewolf himself suggests that it was the presence of Blaine's soul which prevented him from being infected by lycanthropy. However, it's possible that the curse does exist within him in a dormant state, just waiting for some magical catalyst to activate it.
A third case that deserves to be mentioned is that of Raymond Coker, a werewolf who was "cured" of the curse of the wolf by killing another werewolf when they were both in their werewolf forms under a full moon. However, Coker's case seems to have been something of an anomaly since werewolves have been documented fighting and killing each other under full moons without being cured like Coker was. Presumably some other factor has to be present in order for this "cure" to take effect.
Given that vampires consider the humans they turn into vampires (or sire) to be their offspring, do werewolves in the Marvel Universe also regard those humans they have turned into werewolves to be part of their pack? After all, the warning that the ghost of Gregory Russoff gave his son Jack to "beware the grandchildren" was a reference to the threat posed by the group known as the Braineaters, murderous motorcycle-riding hedonists who roamed the country killing humans for fun or food after having been turned into werewolves by Jack's werewolf self. Could this mean that Lydia (and any Varadi descendants she might have produced through more conventional means) would consider the Russoffs to be part of their family?
Profile by Donald Campbell.
CLARIFICATIONS:
Lydia Varadi has no known connections to:
Lydia's parents
(presumably Mr. and Mrs. Varadi)
In 1795 A.D., after being freed from the room in Castle Dracula in which she had been imprisoned, Lydia told Baron Russoff that it had been Dracula who had placed her there after he had murdered her father and mother. And that's all that has ever been revealed about them.
While there's no evidence that Lydia was lying when she told Baron
Russoff about her parents, the fact that she didn't tell him that she was a werewolf could indicate that
she might have been less than totally honest about her parents. With that in mind, here's a list of
unanswered questions about Lydia's parents:
This sub-profile would have been a LOT shorter if writer Marv Wolfman had just provided Lydia with something more than a bare bones backstory. The scarcity of the few facts available has made the rampant speculation that can be seen above possible.
--Mentioned in Werewolf By Night I#15
images: (without ads)
Werewolf by Night I#15, page 10, panel 5 (main image)
page 10, panel 6 (head shot)
page 10, panel 4 (meeting Baron Russoff)
page 10, panel 8 (walking in the moonlight with the baron)
page 10, panel 9 (head shot - werewolf)
page 11, panel 1 (face to face with the baron)
page 11, panel 2 (backing the baron against a tree)
page 11, panel 3 (about to put the bite on the baron)
Doctor Strange, Sorcerer Supreme#27, page 21, panel 2 (sitting on the baron)
Appearances:
Werewolf By Night I#15 (March, 1974) - Marv Wolfman (writer), Mike Ploog (artist), Frank Chiarmonte
(inker), Roy Thomas (editor)
Doctor Strange, Sorcerer Supreme#27/2 (March, 1991) - Roy Thomas & R.J.M. Lofficier (writers), Geoff
Isherwood (artist), Ralph Macchio (editor)
First Posted: 10/31/2024
Last updated: 10/31/2024
Any Additions/Corrections? please let me know.
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