Say what you will about Stan Lee, but the man is a maverick, isn’t he? After Frederic Wertham’s harmful statement that comic books lead to juvenile delinquency, the Comics Code Authority was invented to make sure that nothing like the brilliance of E.C. Comics by William Gaines and company would ever grace the back pocket of a young boy. The result was the era of the fuzzy animal comic and many a comic book creator scratching his head to figure out clever ways around the restrictions put upon them.I doubt that vampires held any interest to Stan. I think he just realized that the word ‘vampire’ along with any blood sucking or other such activities was denied him and that just burned him up. So he called in Roy ‘The Boy’ Thomas and Gil ‘Sugar’ Kane to solve the riddle of how you can create a vampire without it being a ‘vampire.’
The result was the howling success of Morbius, the Living Vampire. Though he appears to be yet another Halloween monster villain for the Amazing Spider-Man in his first appearance, the reader later learns that Michael Morbius was once a biochemist. Stricken with a rare blood disorder, he rather foolishly tries to cure himself with a mix of electro shock therapy and bats.
If that sounds weird, let me tell you that I’ve had kidney stone treatments that are far more sound in their execution, trust me.
In any case, this bypassed the whole supernatural un-Christian vampire bugaboo and left Marvel in the clear. Pretty smart, huh? The experiment turns Michael into a science-based vampire and a virtual freak at the same time Peter Parker is trying to solve his own blood disorder that makes him into Spider-Man… and grants him extra appendages in one of the most incredible visuals of the entire Spider-Man series.
Like many of the web crawler’s super villains, Morbius rides the thin line between hero and villain, earning him a starring role in Adventure into Fear and much later thanks to the blockbuster success of the 1990’s Ghost Rider and the Midnight Sons (think Lorenzo Lamas in Renegade… only on fire).
Like many of his kind, Morbius‘ glamor was short-lived. He dwindled away from the comic scene with nary a notice from readers.
Sad, really.
I’d have loved to see him in a Spider-Man 4 movie.
