Morbius - The End Of The Living Vampire!

Clearly Marvel had high hopes for Morbius the Living Vampire. He's given a color series in Adventures into Fear and a black and white series in Vampire Tales. The latter turns out to be pretty good, but the latter suffers badly from a rotating army of artists and different writers as well. The strip spends most of its time in sci-fi wonderlands and seems to forget, unlike his B&W companion that vampires are a horror convention. Sadly, as the color series winds down, things don't improve all that much. 

Frank Robbins nails down the art for a few issues doing a good job in my estimation. The story by Doug Moench begins as a horror story but quickly dives down the science fiction route that had hampered the series to this point. 

Don Heck and Bill Mantlo step in as the Living Vampire finds himself in yet another weird dimension, this time battling a godlike creature with countless eyes. The police officer from the Man-Wolf series Simon Stroud is added to the cast and begins a hunt for Morbius as he had for Man-Wolf. He boisterous but just as effective. 

George Evans steps in to do the art as the story returns to Earth but keeps on pumping along. Martine who had been supportive of Morbius but often been used by his enemies against him, suffers a final indignity when she becomes a vampire herself. 

Frank Robbins returns for the final issue as Martine is at long last saved from her vampiric fate and Stroud for some reason lets Morbius fly away in the final panel of the color series. I'm often struck in these vampire tales how our heroes have such little regard for the nameless victims of characters like Morbius. 

In Vampire Tales things are much different. The series is written by Doug Moench and the art chores now fall to Sonny Trinidad who does an outstanding job. Under a striking Richard Hescox cover we find a compelling story of a lonely widow who is struggling alone against a desperate group of miners. She is kind but sadly her good intentions are not enough to spare her from tragedy. 

Under another Hescox cover we find a second story by Moench and Trinidad which has the Living Vampire battling the "Legion of the Undead", a gang of rich vampires who want to rule the world. There's some spicey treachery in this one before Morbius is able end the threat, at least some of it. 

This is all reprints but Bob Larkin's cover featuring Morbius is one of the finest images of the character ever done. 

In Legion of Monster, the Morbius story has our blood-thirsty protagonist up against a werewolf in a final story by Moench and Trinidad. I should also point out that these black and white stories share space with many ads and articles in which Morbius plays a role. 

Morbius is just one monster among many in this Marvel Premiere tale by Bill Mantlo and Frank Robbins which has this assembled group of creatures battling a demi-god from space. 

Mantlo is the writer again in this Marvel Two-In-One yarn which pits the Thing and Morbius against one of the craziest villains in Marvel history -- the Living Eraser. Arvell Jones and Dick Giordano supply the art. Morbius ends up using the Eraser's tech to send himself to a distant dimension at story's end. 

The story picks up in Peter Parker, the Spectacular Spider-Man when Morbius seeks to return to Earth. The first part of the story is a three-page frame which sets up a reprint of Marvel Team-Up number three. 

In the subsequent chapters written by Archie Goodwin and drawn by Sal Busema we find out that Morbius is under the influence of an ancient artificial lifeform called the Empathoid which lives off emotions. It possess Morbius and forces him to return to Earth where it can feast. At story's end Spidey lets Morbius fly off yet again after the Empathoid is defeated. 

He's back still sucking the blood of innocents in a story by Bill Mantlo and Sal Buscema. This time though at the end of the yarn a stray lightning bolt hits Morbius and mysteriously cures him (seemingly) of his vampire curse.

The follow-up is in four issues of The Savage She-Hulk. Mostly these are tales detailing the various woes of Jennifer Walters as she tries to cope with her still relatively role as the green bombshell. A potential cure though might be found by a researcher named Michael Morbius who is trying to find a lasting cure for himself as he lives under house arrest. Ultimately Walters becomes his attorney and gets the former "Living Vampire" off on manslaughter charges for his many crimes. These stories by David Anthony Kraft and artist Mike Vosburg are pretty good and deal with some complex issues but it seems a bit anti-climactic after all that has been written and drawn concerning Morbius. 

I got around to seeing the new Morbius movie a few weeks ago and I rather liked it. I know a bunch of these flicks get slammed for not having an upbeat theme, but this is a vampire movie. and I don't expect things to work out for the best in this universe. I was struck after reading the stories again after so long how close the movie was to the original source material. I'd forgotten all the stuff about the experiments on the ship. There are changes of course, but I expect those. Jared Leto was quite effective as the tortured "Living Vampire".  

No more Morbius to come, but reading through these two somewhat overpriced Epic volumes has really taken me back to a time when Marvel's ambitions often were grander than their capabilities. But in the dross, there are some amazing gems. Those stories in Vampire Tales have a lasting effect. 

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