Ja, det var han absolut. Whedon citerar "Blade the Vampire Slayer" (och specifikt Dracula's grav ) som en av viktiga influenser i utvecklingen av karaktärerna Robin och Nikki Wood. Han och Doug Petric är på rekord som chuffed till bitar som de faktiskt fick Gene Colan (medskaparen av Blade) att skriva en senare Buffy comic i " Tales of the Slayers # 7 ::
Westfield: Can you say anything more about the Tales of the Slayers book?
Whedon: We don't have a date for it, but we talked about this when we were shooting the seventies flashback of Spike killing a slayer on a subway. I said to Doug Petric, who's one of my writers and who's written some of the Buffy comics and is, like me, a comic book nut, "God. We should do a compendium of stories of slayers throughout history." And he was like "I get to do the seventies slayer on the subway." He's actually doing it with Gene Colan. There was so much of the original Blade and Tomb of Dracula in that whole sequence. We were so into that. We pitched that to Scott and he was all over it and it turned out that practically my entire staff wanted to do it. They all picked an era and we talked about length and I'm doing three little pieces in it myself. It's a different artist for every piece and we're getting some really exciting people to
Intressant är att Robin Woods karaktär tycks ha varit kraftigt formad av (och eventuellt namngiven) den arketypiska "hemsökta krigare" som beskrivs i det skilda 1979-uppsatsen " En introduktion till den amerikanska skräckfilmen ", skriven av filmkritiker Robin Wood, något som fortfarande är en viktig läsning för alla filmstudenter och var nästan säkert referenspunkten för Whedons utveckling av Buffy och senare "Cabin in the Woods".