Shocktober 10/15/21

The second volume of the adventures of Morbius the Living Vampire came out earlier this year, and it features much the same as the first: Michael Morbius, turned into a vampire by an experiment designed to cure him of a rare blood disease, wanders through the Marvel Universe, encountering various monsters and superheroes.

Considering that Morbius is slated to appear in his own big-screen adaptation--with Jared Leto in the title role--next year, now might be a good time to bone up on his past adventures.

Shocktober 10/7/21

Back in the early 1970s, horror comics and characters were relatively few and far between. Marvel Comics would, of course, publish the longest-running character-specific horror comic, Tomb of Dracula, but that wouldn't start until 1972. In the meantime, Marvel introduced the quasi-vampiric Morbius, the Living Vampire, in the pages of Amazing Spider-Man.

I can hear you now, fair reader: "Living vampire? Ain't no such thing." Well, back in the days when the Comics Code, instituted back in the 1950s to curb the proliferation of horror comics, was still enforced, Marvel couldn't introduce a real vampire on their pages, so Michael Morbius--a scientist with a rare blood condition who experimented on himself, as one does--became a creature who needed blood to survive, but didn't have any issues with garlic or crucifixes or stakes and such.

The character was an instant hit and was soon given his own series in the anthology comic Adventures into Fear, which lasted around 12 issues.

But his adventures didn't end there. Oh no. They continued on, as you shall see...another time.