Reading Through 2021 101: Morbius Epic Collection 1: The Living Vampire

 Morbius: The Living Vampire (Epic Collection 1), by Steve Gerber, Gil Kane, and dozens more 

1971 to 1974, collected in 2021

One of my great personal discoveries of the Covid era has been 70s Marvel. I became a Marvel reader in the 80s, and 60s stuff was sometimes reprinted then, but there was this window of publishing, roughly between Kirby leaving in the early 70s and Jim Shooter becoming editor-in-chief in the late 70s, that didn't get much if any attention. I can't argue that it's good stuff meant to stand the test of time, but it's been a pleasure to read.

Putting Blade on the cover: cash grab!

When I saw the Morbius Epic Collection, it seemed like a cash grab tie-in for the long-delayed Sony movie, and I'm sure it is. But I was surprised to learn that there was an attempt to make Morbius a headlining character for a while in the 70s. I'd read his first appearances in Amazing Spider-Man through a dollar bin copy, but that was over 30 years ago. I knew he was Dr. Michael Morbius, a doctor with a blood disease who attempted to cure himself with a vampire bat serum. In doing so, he gains vampire powers, but loses Martine, the love of his life. There was a lot about the character I didn't know.

The first appearance of Morbius was in a legendarily ridiculous story where Spider-Man gets six arms

That was the draw to picking this collection up, reading those headlining stories. I enjoy these Epic Collections overall, but I've avoided the collections of characters like Sub-Mariner (who I love) and Venom (who I don't) because they can be simply a lot of odds and ends appearances in other characters' books. About a quarter of the stories in this collection are just that: appearances as the villain in another character's book. The rest are a very deliberate attempt to make a lead character out of the living vampire.

His second appearance is against Spider-Man and the original X-Men in Marvel Team-Up, drawn with an absolute lack of love and attention by Gil Kane

After a few appearances as a villain in Spider-Man books, he was given the lead in a black and white magazine called Vampire Tales, and shortly after, he started headlining a second book called Fear (or more ridiculously, Adventures into Fear with the Man Called Morbius the Living Vampire).

No Comics Code Authority seal on Vampire Tales!

While I enjoy his appearances as a villain, it's these attempts to make Morbius a star that are the draw of this book. There's nothing connecting the two concurrent series except Morbius himself, and both feature a rotation of artists and writers keeping either from being coherent when read as a whole. There's a quality of the artist's game Decapitated Corpse here, where every few issues it's passed along to someone else and that creator tries to make heads or tails of what they've been given.

Paul Gulacy gives a sinewy take on the character

Let me try to break down the general structure of Fear, issues 20 - 26. If it doesn't exactly make sense, then, yes, you understand correctly:

-20, written by Mike Friedrich, art by Paul Gulacy. Morbius has come to Los Angeles. He is confronted by Reverend Daemond, a demonic priest who mind controls Morbius and sends him to kill "The most innocent child (he's) ever seen!"

-21, written by Steve Gerber, art by Gil Kane. The little girl he was sent to kill, Tara, is revealed to have powers to incarnate a future version of herself. Morbius saves her and takes her to the Caretakers, humanoid aliens that crashed on Earth when humanity was still in the trees, and helped guide us as a species. They frame the battle with Reverend Daemond as a battle between the supernatural and science for the fate of the world, and send Morbius to kill Daemond. Daemond sends a cat person to attack Morbius and is seen to be manipulating Morbius' love, Martine.

Is this the most innocent child you've ever seen?!

-22, written by Gerber, art by Rich Buckler and L. Dominguez. Morbius and the cat person are summoned to The Land Within, an underground city with a giant orb to light it. He was brought there by the leaders of the cat people to deal with a population crisis. Because life is so peaceful, the population keeps growing, and food and air will eventually run out. So they've brought a vampire to naturally lower the population. Morbius rejects being used as a weapon against innocents, so he jumps in a river. Yes, it ends with him on a river asking "Where does this river lead?"

I expect to see the Land Within around Phase 6 of the MCU

-23, written by Gerber, art by P. Craig Russell (credited here without his P.). Morbius finds himself on the planet Arcturus, a planet of freaks. He's guided by a character confusingly called "I", whose face is an eye. Gerber was having some fun, but the comic is utterly off the rails at this point. To connect it to the earlier issues, it's revealed that the reason everyone is a freak is because of the interference of the Caretakers before they'd reached Earth, casting doubt on whose side Morbius should be on.

What if the freaks were normal, and the normals were the freaks? Mind blown

-24, with the same creative team! Morbius and I take a spaceship to Earth that crashes in a city where Blade, Vampire Hunter is hunting vampires. I is killed in the crash, while Morbius escapes. Blade sees Morbius and they have a fight, but Blade is thrown off by the fact that science vampire Morbius isn't afraid of Christian symbols like a supernatural vampire would be, giving Morbius a chance to escape. 

-25, script by Doug Moench, plot by Gerber, and art by Frank Robbins.  The sixth part of this storyline starts to tie it all together, as Morbius returns to confront Reverend Daemond. Morbius joins up with the Tara to take down Daemond's forces, but the Caretakers realize that Morbius is against them too, so they decide to go after both Daemond and Morbius, leading to the seventh and final part.

This reads as someone who was looking at Kirby, but didn't quite have the energy to fully channel his mojo

26, written by Moench, art by Robbins. The Caretakers' forces arrive to fight the Daemond, but realize they have a common enemy in Morbius and Tara. Tara is revealed to have pitted the two sides against one another, and energy swirls around her as she begs Morbius to kill her while she is still in control. He kills her. Then the plug is pulled on the arc and it's over.

I don't think Marvel today would allow a vampire to feed on a child, even a possessed one

The seven issue run had three writers and five artists, and this was at the height of the Marvel method where writers gave artists plots, not scripts, so the artists were contributing a fair amount to the story, and it was tied together with the final script. 

On the one hand, it's like a sprawling sci-fi version of The Big Sleep or The Long Goodbye, with Morbius being bounced around from side to side, and the outcome being there are no good guys. On the other hand, it's a complete mess, and utterly incoherent, with characters switching directions over and over because the artists couldn't be bothered to follow what came before. I think a single writer and artist could actually remake this into something amazing, but that would be the key: a single set of creators for the whole of it.

And I kind of loved it. If this was all I ever read, it'd wear me down pretty quickly, but it felt like a wonderful antidote to the seriousness of contemporary genre writing. It's a treat to be surprised in every issue, and not merely have a plodding progression (I was reading Jonathan Hickman's Fantastic Four run as I read this, and they couldn't be more different).

I never saw this on the shelf, but it does take me back to the style of stuff that was out when I was a kid

The stories in Vampire Tales are of a very different tone, much more episodic. They reminded me of TV series with an overarching dramatic stake from back in the day, like the Fugitive or Quantum Leap.  Morbius and a woman he saves, Amanda, travel from town to town, and each one has some member of her family who has joined a Satanic cult. It's very B-movie type stuff. At a plot level, I could barely follow them, but in the moment they were fun. These were black and white magazines meant for a little older readership, so there's more sexual energy than the full color comics of the day, and lots of blood. 

Gallow's Bend is the setting for High Midnight, the vampire Western

The stories each try to have their own unique setting: a small town, a lighthouse on the shore, a Western ghost town. I enjoyed them well enough, but I had had enough by the time I finished the collection and wasn't itching for more. They were more professionally done than issues of Fear, but the drama in them didn't hook me.

It was baffling that these two series were running at the same time, but it shows that Marvel thought it was an interesting character, and probably there was positive, though not overwhelming, fan reaction at the time.

No, that was the formula that would finally allow Michael Morbius to live a normal life again!

The final story in the book is from another 70s character I have virtually no experience with, Werewolf by Night. Here, Morbius seems more like a Hulk character, a thoughtful scientist looking to cure his affliction. 

It seems like Marvel (I'm guessing Roy Thomas in particular) decided Morbius was something Marvel needed, as the Comics Code was loosening up and allowing supernatural characters to be published again. Marvel had science heroes, magic and mystical heroes, but not so much supernatural. Morbius wasn't a real vampire, he was a living vampire. But he was immediately sold as a vampire. That's not all that interesting, and when Morbius has been revived every ten to fifteen years, I haven't been compelled to check it out. I might have bought an issue of his Midnight Sons series in the 90s, but I don't even remember for sure... I bought some issues of Marvel's supernatural comics at that time, flipped through them and never touched them again. The supernatural in the Marvel universe has never been that appealing to me.  I don't think the character Morbius itself is very compelling either, it relies a lot on the creative team bringing something to it.

Of the issues in this collection, I really enjoyed the craziness of Fear.  It made the whole thing worth reading. And I always enjoy reading 70s Spider-Man, a book that would be hard to mess up; the foundation of the character, setting and design were so strong. All the same, there are other collections of 70s comics I'd recommend before this. This collection isn't consistent and the quality jumps from issue to issue. 

I did get to see a planet of freaks though, and that definitely made it worth my time.

Reading Through 2021 100: The Interview, by Manuele Fior

 The Interview, by Manuele Fior

2013, English edition 2017

I had originally meant to stop at 100 entries in this blog, and as I prepared my 100th in May, a sprawling look at Uncanny X-Men Omnibus 3, I suffered extreme disillusion. The Internet is extremely disillusioning. I realized that people clicked through on reviews mainly on things they'd already read or had interest in, and mainly commented to express a disagreement. I think the saddest thing was posting some reviews on Reddit, and one time having negative votes. For posting a review. As if what American comics needed was fewer people thinking about, writing about, and caring about comics.  

I've continued to think about and care about comics, but not write about them. I'm sure I've read another 100 books in the last four months. The previous books in this blog feel like a year ago, not months. But I still do want to talk about and share the comics I read, especially the work that hasn't gotten the attention it should. 

In April, I read 5,000 km per second by Italian artist Manuele Fior. It was beautiful, emotional, and really exciting. It wasn't entertaining, or of the zeitgeist, nor did it have Batman in it. It was just a good book. I ordered two more of his books, and months later they arrived. I wasn't prepared for just how good and how different the first one I read would be.

Weird sexuality is a theme of the book

The first thing I noticed about it was that, while graphically in line with 5,000, he really was working a different part of his skillset with this. 5,000 was done in loose watercolors, with shifts in color palette throughout the book to match shifts in time and space. Here, he works in ink, both chunky brush and precise nib work. He uses something to texture the pages. Sometimes it's a gray wash, sometimes it's a pencil-like texture. His illustrations are, at their core, cartoony, but the pages carry a photographic weight in many places.

The book has a unique atmosphere, never exactly realistic, but with very natural structure underlying  the images

Like 5,000, it's a mild sci-fi. The story takes place in 2048, but it's very recognizable as our world. Some youth fashion shows it's in the future, and most of the cars are self-driven (part of an early plot point has the middle-class protagonist driving his own car as a luxurious indulgence), but for the most part, this is our world. In 5,000, the story takes place over a few decades, so it was clear why the later half would go into the future. Here, the future setting isn't so important other than it gives Fior space to play with youth movements and how the older generations have difficulty grasping them.

This was the first real virtuoso page in the book. The movement on display with his hair and broken glass flying conveys the scene perfectly, with even the camera angle seeming to rock from left to right. It feels like being in a car accident

The book has two intertwined plot threads: The protagonist, a psychologist named Raniero, has a car accident late at night after a UFO sighting. This is haunting to him, as he knows it's 'crazy', but he also trusts himself enough to trust his experience. This happens as he's in the midst of separating from his wife.

The second thread involves a young patient named Dora he starts seeing, who has been admitted by her parents. She's a part of The New Convention, a youth movement that is against monogamy and traditional family structure. Immediately there is some connection between them as she doesn't feel she needs psychiatric assistance at all, and is only there because her parents can't understand her point of view. The two of them have their views of the world rubbing up against the conventional understanding of life.

If this were a modern American mainstream book, the artist would have simply copy-pasted the illustrations. Fior animates his characters from panel to panel, breathing life into them.

From there, there is some inevitability that they will sleep together, as dual protagonists in a story, but also that they have established an emotional connection. But that isn't the story. I'd be hard-pressed to say what the story actually is. It's a series of emotional shifts as two people with unstable lives navigate the world, a world that pushes against their own personal realities. 

I haven't watched them in decades, but I greatly enjoyed the 60's New Wave films of Jean-Luc Godard when I was in my twenties. There was barely a story, just emotional truths and gorgeous images. This book has a lot of that. In the wrong hands, this book will be extremely boring. This book is much closer to 'art' than to entertainment. I have a lot of entertainment books, not a lot of 'art' books, which is probably why this resonated so strongly with me. I'm hungry for work like this.

While the art has a feeling of cartooned realism like the best of Disney movies, a sex scene is interrupted by a nude panel that is borderline photographic except for Dora's face. It stops you in its tracks, and likely that is the emotion Raniero himself is feeling as his world stops and he takes in the body in front of him. 

I have no idea of the techniques going on here

Fior has violence trickle through the book as well, that casts a shadow over the rest of "normal" life.

Fior's storytelling is fluent, if I had to choose one word

Fior balances down to earth talky scenes with panoramic scenery, and spurts of sex and violence. It's about the glacial shifts of emotion people go through in their lives. People change slowly, but they still decidedly change.

At the end of the book, I was wondering just what I had read. It was not a story in a conventional sense. But I loved it. It had resonance. I thought about it for days after and opened it up again to look at the art a few times. It's a short list of books that come off the shelf so soon after they go up.

Young people, ugh

I was taken by the body language, the facial expressions, the lighting, the architecture. Fior is a comic artist at heart, but he's working in a school of art far outside of what I'm accustomed to. I've been reading alternative comics for decades now, through Raw, Drawn & Quarterly, Fantagraphics, L'Association, and so on, and while I've often seen masterclass work through those venues, I don't see so much these days where the artist is staking out new territory like Fior seems to. 

Once you see what you're looking at, this is a pretty incredible two panel sequence

I have one more Fior book on the pile, and I'm just going to have to order the others Fantagraphics have made available. I don't know if they'll all be as exquisite as this, but they have to be worth the read.