Welcome to the latest chapter of my exploration of perhaps Steve Gerber’s most obscure and most oddly great comic series, “Morbius the Living Vampire” in Fear #24 (Oct. 1974).
As you might remember from previous chapters, random shit happened, then other unconnected random shit happened, and then still more random unconnected shit happened.
Okay, I’m being a little bit sarcastic here, but if ever a comic book begged for a dose of Ritalin, it was “Morbius.” In five desultory issues, this comic veers erratically between being a satire of religion, a supernatural spookfest, an Edgar Rice Burroughs “worlds inside worlds” adventure comic featuring giant cats who walk on two legs, and a bizarre sci-fi saga that barely makes a lick of sense.
Think I’m exaggerating? See if writer Gerber’s description of this comic makes any more sense than what I just described:
There are so many words on that page! And they all barely make a lick of sense in context with each other. It’s all brilliant and insane and oh so 1970s, when the idea of planning a comic book story instead of charging in and writing every word straight from your id simply didn’t respect the anti-authoritarian zeitgeist of the era (or maybe it was a sign that the writer simply had no time to reread last month’s issue).
What those words do deliver, though, is some heady classic Gerberesque philosophy (it’s hard to imagine a phrase that sounds more like typical Steve Gerber than “man must earn his own right to continued existence – that if humankind is intent upon its own self-destruction, it should have its way.”) and a rather surreal plot recap. This page is archetypical ‘70s Marvel verbal vomit on the page, which gives it a berserk, obsessive density that you seldom find in more modern comics. If Stan Lee could fill up every corner of a page with text, so too could Steve Gerber. Though Gerber uses some fascinating and insightful words that both illuminate and obfuscate.
Artist P. Craig Russell usually delivered comics that were open and had the opportunity to display his ornate artistic approach. Here, though, Russell delivers a comic that has an unbelievably uneven pace. There are pages like the one above, so suffused with words that it barely seems to breathe. Then there are pages like the one below, which features twelve pages of action (twelve!) and feels claustrophobic, as if Gerber had plot points he had to hit and about half the pages he thought he had.
You might remember from last week’s column that the Eye Guy was in battle with artificial barbarians who were preventing him from getting to his spaceship (did I really write those words?). This week we see the wild and wacky chase to get to the spaceship. For three pages the chase is on, in pages that contain 12, 11 and 11 panels, respectively, before Eye Guy and Morbius make it to the spaceship. The multi-panel pages are full of dialogue and captions, dragging on and on in a kind of glorious pain until we finally get relief with this very Russell scene of the characters on the ship:
Gerber keeps vainly trying to return his story with its original plot, with Eye Guy mumbling about the Caretakers, but there’s a sense that the overall plot has been completely lost and that this adventure will wander and meander wherever Gerber’s whims chose to take it.
My theory appears to be correct when the comic shifts its scene back to Earth and to (of all people) Blade the vampire slayer. These days we tend to think of Blade as the character Wesley Snipes played in three pretty decent movies, but here Blade was still in his Blaxpliotation phase, prowling the city at night like Blacula’s slayer, fighting nasty vamps in an unforgiving urban environment.
Why Blade needs to be in this comic nobody knows, though he had recently premiered in the pages of Tomb of Dracula and therefore patrolled the same spiky-teethed center of the Marvel Universe that Morbius (theoretically) stalked. He also had some solo stories in Marvel’s black and white mags, where a second Morbius series also lurked. (I hope to get to that series in a future set of Classic Comics Cavalcades.)
The problem is that this battle between Morbius and Blade is yet another shift of focus in a comic that desperately is striving to have some tiny modicum of focus. After all the shifts of mood that came before this issue, it seems absurd for this to suddenly become a man-against-vampire story in the classic Mighty Marvel Manner, but that’s what happens suddenly in the second half of this issue.
All that said, though, Gerber is still clearly having a fantastic time writing this comic. He presents some delightfully clever twists on the page below, showing why it is important that Morbius is a living vampire and showing Blade that he needs to embrace diversity among vampires. The bit about how the cross is anathema to vampires but not any problem for Morbius is a delightfully clever twist. The idea probably originated with Roy Thomas when he wrote the origin of the Living Vampire, but Gerber delivers this scene with obvious delight (and yet still more classically overblown Marvel narration).
Russell’s use of silhouette and colorist George “Inky” Roussos’s coloring on the penultimate panel on this page deliver a scene that ends with real power and intensity. They know how to sell the grace, power and confusion of Blade and the entire sequence has real power.
But of course since this comic never sits still, we get yet another change on the final page of the issue. Morbius has decided to take to the rails like some luridly costumed hobo, boarding a freight train for a free ride to Los Angeles. There he may be able to uncover the secrets behind this whole insanely tangled conspiracy. Or he may just have yet another unrelated adventure. Please join me next week to learn what in the world happens next in this incredibly unpredictable comic book.