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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Thrill To A Mockingbird!

Mockingbird has one of the most disjointed introductions I can think of for a character in the Marvel Universe. She made her mark in the pages of West Coast Avengers as the wife of Hawkeye. She was a co-leader of the team and truth told was often more tactically adept than her husband, and she had the nerves to do what needed to be done. The long and convoluted story of Bobbie Morse is collected here but you can be forgiven if you forget it's about her while you read it. She spends a lot of time in the background. 

She first appears in the pages of Astonishing Tales #6 as a desperate, seemingly weak brown-haired woman who shows up at the estate of Lord Kevin Plunder (aka Ka-Zar) desperate to find the savage lord of the Savage Land. 

In the next issue we meet Barbara (Bobbi) Morse again as she decides to venture to the Savage Land to find Ka-Zar. Her mission remains an enigma. And frankly I'm reasonably sure that whatever Gerry Conway had in mind for the character, it got changed when others such as Roy Thomas and Gary Friedrich pitched in to write Ka-Zar stories. 

She and a man named Paul fly into the Savage Land and end up needing Ka-Zar's help almost immediately. Herb Trimpe gives us some robust art for this issue. 

Ka-Zar has his hands full rescuing the duo from a lost colony of WWII fanatics who want the war to rage perpetually. Barry Smith is on hand to wrap up this saga. 

The pair cling to Ka-Zar for their health and convince him to travel with them to the United States. The reasons remain murky. Gil Kane's art for Mike Friedrich's story reprises the origin of Ka-Zar and Zabu. This collection only contains the framing sequence featuring Bobbie and Paul.  

When finally, the trio arrives in Florida, in the Everglades to be specific, Ka-Zar learns for the first time that the Super-Soldier Serum is the maguffin which fires the mysteries. The mysterious Man-Thing is worked into the tapestry of his tale in a story originally intended for Savage Tales #2 by Len Wein and Neal Adams. A researcher named Dr. Calvin has been hurt and somehow or other it's imagined that Ka-Zar offers help. I never quite figured out how exactly to be honest. 

But Ka-Zar and Zabu battle the Man-Thing, bringing the shambling creature into the MU mainstream. Paul proves to be duplicitous as an AIM agent and Bobbi turns out to be a SHIELD operative. John Buscema wraps up his two-issue stint on the comic. 

Next stop is NYC where Ka-Zar is once again the savage man in the civilized jungle dispensing his hard justice. Mike Friedrich becomes the regular scribe on this series. This issue features some of Gil Kane's best work. 

Bobbi Morse recedes a bit in the story as Ka-Zar spends his time battling a street gang. Rich Buckler fills in as artist. 

Dan Adkins takes the art helm as the story focuses again on the Super-Soldier Serum which is wanted by a member of the Zodiac named Gemini. For the record Gemini is a strange blend of two brothers named Link who have their origin story told in Astonishing Tales #8.

It's also desired by The Plunderer, who makes use of the alien giant Gog to help him procure it. But there's more to Gog and meets the eye, despite the fact he's so very large. 

It eventually turns out that an insane scientist gets exposed to the serum and becomes the imposing villain, Victorious. Dan Adkins is the artist of record though a young Jim Starlin steps in to finish up the issue. 

The battle is a ferocious one and wraps up in Astonishing Tales #20, the final Ka-Zar issue before It, The Living Colossus took up residence. Bobbie Morse for her part has been tagging along helping out and actually gets a cover feature, the first since issue twelve. To be honest these stories are terrific and I'm happy to have them, but Bobbi Morse is a supporting character and supposed romantic interest for Ka-Zar. The latter role is never convincing really. For the record Marie Severin is the artist on the last chapter of this little epic. 

Then follows a three-part tale in the new Ka-Zar series. Written by Mike Friedrich and drawn by Don Heck, this story has godlike figure battle Ka-Zar and Shanna the She-Devil. Bobbi Morse shows up out of the blue to lend a hand. She and Shanna hang out but truth told contribute little to the story. They seem to be here mostly to make things uncomfortable for Ka-Zar. 

Bobbi and Shanna are both on hand in a black and white adventure in Savage Tales #8 which has Ka-Zar and Zabu battle a powerful alien force. John Buscema is the artist with Tony DeZuniga inks for this Gerry Conway yarn. Bobbi plays a small role and this is her last in these pages of Ka-Zar. 

It is three hundred pages into this collection before we get Bobbi Morse in solo action. The story is from Marvel Super Action #1, a one-shot magazine which headlined the Punisher who was just beginning to hot up at Marvel. Dominic Fortune by Howie Chaykin makes a notable appearance. But the "Huntress" is the story by Mike Friedrich, George Evans and Frank Springer which interests us today. Bobbi Morse has gone underground again for SHIELD, specifically to ferret out a double-agent who is a threat to the organization. To do that she adopts the masked identity of the Huntress. She finds her man. This was apparently originally a two-part tale which was smashed together at the last moment to fit this new format. 

Bobbi Morse disappears yet again, turning up of all places in Marvel Team-Up battling with and alongside Spider-Man. She has at long last adopted the codename Mockingbird. Turns out the character was originally to be a villain for Spider-Woman, but things changed when writer Steven Grant saw Mark Gruenwald's sketches and the Huntress became Mockingbird. Using her distinctive battle staves she is a worthy warrior but working again to uncover a SHIELD traitor she ends up at the finale of this story terribly wounded. This issue drawn by Jim Janes features one of my favorite Frank Miller covers. 

The catch-as-catch-can career of Mockingbird takes its most significant turn when she shows up in the debut issue of one of Marvel's earliest limited series starring Hawkeye. Clint Barton is riding high as a security chief for Cross Technologies when sadly he learns he's been duped, and the place is producing criminal hardware. Mockingbird is back, recovered from her wounds and is more that happy to help Hawkeye fight the villians. The duo find themselves under assault and must rely on one another to battle the likes of the Crossfire, Silencer, Oddball and Bombshell. Mark Gruenwald both writes and draws this series with help from inkers Brett Breeding and Danny Bulanadi. And it features some real changes to the characters. Hawkeye's hearing damaged in these battles and to great surprise of readers at the time Clint Barton and Bobbi Morse get hitched. This series set the stage for the duo to take the helm of the West Coast Avengers where both served for over one hundred issues. 

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We Spoke Out - The Duty Of A Man!

War is Hell from Marvel is a damn weird and offbeat book. Marvel put out an avalanche of reprints in the early Bronze Age and I loved them, since they were all new to me, but then they started using these mags to debut new features such as Thongor of Lemuria, Morbius the Living Vampire, and Man-Wolf. In this war comic reprint title, we get the misadventures of a dead soldier named John Kowalski who is returned to life, time and again to take part in some critical aspect of World War II.

Under an exciting Gil Kane cover, story artist George Evans tries to make sense of what I consider an overwritten Chris Claremont script. I found I didn't really know what was happening all the time as I read this story, though it's clear that Kowalski, who is resurrected this time as a German soldier, does his best to save Jews being delivered to the slaughter. There are echoes of the real-life events when thousands of Danish Jews were saved by a flotilla of fishing boats that sneaked them across German lines into Sweden. Wanted to like this one more as I like Evans, but it wore me out a bit. 

Note: This post originally appeared at Rip Jagger's Other Dojo. 

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