What would you do if your world was facing overpopulation? What if the main civilization on that world was so peaceful that there were no wars, no plagues and no murder but the population just kept growing until it reached a critical mass?
Would you limit the size of families? Maybe do something to improve food supplies? Perhaps explore outer space or new areas of your own as a way to find more room for your citizens? Maybe you could just build out to the hills and valleys surrounding your town to find more space?
Or would you impersonate a devil-worshipper, hide your true form, and kidnap a vampire to your dimension to help thin out your population?
Sure, the plan sounds insane and pointless, the biggest waste of time, energy and resources imaginable, but why apply logic to something that has the breath of genius about it? All of this dream logic makes perfect sense in a poorly selling comic about a forgotten hero-villain that aimed to attract fans of b-movies.
Last week I wrote about Steve Gerber’s first issue writing Morbius the Living Vampire. As I described it, the comic had a loose improvisational feel, as if Gerber was making up the story as he and artist Gil Kane moved along. That same improvisational feel highlights Fear #22. This issue is also written by Steve Gerber but is illustrated by Rich Buckler and Luis Dominguez, both talented artists who lacked the slickness of their counterpart who illustrated the previous issue. However, what Buckler’s lacks in flash, it makes up for it by the gritty gorgeousness of their art, supporting Gerber’s frankly insane script.
Last issue concluded with Morbius, the vampire who is alive, being attacked by a giant cat named Balkatar (“brother to the jungle cat”) as daylight dawns. That attack by claw and light spells double peril for any vampire, but as we soon learn:
It’s kind of Morbius to give us exposition (we get a lot of exposition in this issue because this issue is so high-concept). It’s also nice of Buckler and Dominguez to deliver such an interesting layout on the segment above. Though this may have been swiped from the work of Barry Windsor-Smith, there’s power in the forced perspective that the team delivers. It emphasizes the drama in a charming way.
Soon Morbius is abducted by Balkatar’s brethren and taken to an alien planet. We learn during the abduction that the aliens from the last issue also wanted to abduct Morbius for their own purposes (“to infiltrate Earth’s population with the super-race we are creating”). Remember, these are the beings who were responsible for creating humanity on the planet Earth and are feeling some buyer’s remorse that humanity has turned out so mediocre. I wonder if we’ll see those aliens again. If Fear was a well-plotted comic book, with Gerber setting seeds for future germination, we could expect that. However, in a story like this, I bet that nothing comes of this dangling plot thread. That’s what happens in edgy, unloved 1970s comics.
Buckler and Dominguez again deliver some effective storytelling with that split panel in the grid above. It looks dated now, but in 1974 that presentation was state of the art.
Balkatar’s buddies take Morbius to an alternate dimension in which these cat people live on the inside of a planet, like something out of Edgar Rice Burroughs or Chris Claremont. We get a lovely two-page spread of “The Land Within” that makes the city look gorgeous, like something out of the 1939 New York World’s Fair, all golden domes, impressive bridges and superhighways. Though we’re told this land is a dystopia, it looks like a utopia from this spread.
The cat people are stuck in this beautiful world; Balkatar tells Morbius “there is no escape from this land… save the summons.” As the pair walk the city, we learn that this hidden land isn’t the paradise that it first appears to be. The king hates Balkatar, laws are sacred and the population explosion continues unabated.
The story and art don’t really match up because the vampire and cat person walk the streets of the Land Within without seeing very many people. I’d imagine there are more people waiting for a subway at a random station in New York at noon on a Tuesday, and nobody is suggesting that we kill all New Yorkers. Since the Marvel method had comics drawn before they were scripted, this could be a case in which the artist delivered art different from what the writer expected. Unfortunately, Gerber passed away and records from the time are scant.
This inner world is full of grown-up kitty cats from our worlds, which sounds like a cat-person grandmother’s fantasy but are in fact the complicated plans of some very strange schemer. Sorcerers turn house cats into vicious killers, then exile them to another dimension where they become super-intelligent and wear togas but never invent a birth control pill and what the fuck did I just write? Was this story improvised or is a drug trip dropped on the comic page? None of this makes a lick of sense.
Screw logic, because as we soon learn, Morbius was transported to this oddball world in order to thin the herd of grown-up kitty cats; after all, the cure for overpopulation has to be bringing in one lone vampire to kill one or two cats per night. That math adds up perfectly, right? Oh damn.
This presents a moral dilemma for our protagonist, but one of the weirdest moral dilemmas that any comic ever presented. You gotta love Morbius’s sense of morality in the panels above. This is a living vampire with principles.
Despite the morality, Morbius’s great hunger overwhelms him and he attacks a cat in order to suck his blood, which we can assume hasn’t been mutated by his time away from Earth. That action immediately causes the equally moral cat people to become killing mad at the vampire despite the earlier assertions that they were a placid people. As the issue ends, the cat people toss Morbius into a river, his fate and end goal a mystery to be solved in the next issue.
There is absolutely no way a reader can have the slightest idea what will come next because everything to this point has been completely random. It follows no logic at all. The cover to this issue screams that it offers “fear-fraught thrills in the tradition of Dracula” but nobody who ever wrote a vampire story like this one. This surreal improvisation is a literal and metaphorical trip that has a completely unknown destination. As Morbius says, “I need only wonder… where does the river lead?”
As readers, I guess we’ll just float down this lazy river in the sun with the pallid vampire and see what random place this journey takes us.