4 backstories about Marvel’s Morbius that will change how you watch the movie

If you saw the promos for the upcoming Morbius movie starring Jared Leto, you’d likely have the same reaction when the Guardians of the Galaxy promos came out:

Err… Siapa tu?

Unless you’re a massive comic geek, Morbius is going to be one of those Marvel characters that didn’t really have his day in the sun since he isn’t what naturally comes to mind when you think of a Spider-Man villain – which is a shame because he actually has a really interesting history both in lore and his actual creation.

Our friends over at Sony Pictures Malaysia definitely think so too, which is why they’re sponsoring this deeper dive into Morbius’s lore so that you can really sink your teeth into the movie when it comes out on March 31st 2022. For starters…

 

Morbius was the first horror character Marvel created after a 17-year ban

If you’ve read American comics up till the 2010’s, you’d definitely have seen this little logo somewhere on the cover:

There was a time when comics were seen as a bad influence on young people, with some towns in America banning the sale of some comics or outright burning them in public. So, as a sort of compromise, the Comics Code Authority was created in 1954 as a self-regulating body that controlled what could and couldn’t appear in the printed page. One of these criteria was:

“Scenes dealing with, or instruments associated with walking dead, torture, vampires and vampirism, ghouls, cannibalism, and werewolfism are prohibited.”

While the Comics Code kinda solved the whole “burn the evil comics” problem, the restrictions also made life hard for many publishers that relied on pulp topics like horror, murder, and risqué humor, leading some like MAD Magazine to switch formats, and many others like Atlas Comics (which became Marvel) to focus on superheroes.

The Code’s revision in 1971 which allowed some supernatural characters came at the right time for Spider-Man where, for the first time, Stan Lee was taking a step back from writing to focus on a different project. This task was entrusted to his right hand man Roy Thomas, who drew on his love of horror movies to create a new supernatural villain to challenge our favorite web-crawler. There’s a really great interview by Steven Biscotti on Roy Thomas’s creation of Morbius, but it’s interesting to note that Dracula wasn’t his inspiration for the character:

“…the biggest influence on Morbius was a circa-1957 b&w film called “The Vampire,” in which a man had to kill people and drink their blood to stay alive, so that he wasn’t a true vampire at all.” – Roy Thomas, as quoted by Steven Biscotti

So what came was a pseudo-vampire – one who has all the abilities but none of the weaknesses. But perhaps very aptly for a Spider-Man comic….

 

Morbius was created through science, not the supernatural

If you really think about it, many Spider-Man characters got their abilities from science – Spider-Man himself, Lizard, Doctor Octopus, Green Goblin…you get the idea. So it’s perhaps not surprising that Michael Morbius was once an ordinary man with a big brain and an ugly face.

Born in Greece, Morbius was raised by his single mother after his dad left to buy a pack of Gyros and never came back (/joke. Not canon). He had a rare blood disease that made him weak and with a face that only a mother could love. And she did. In fact, she was so overprotective that she kept him sheltered throughout his childhood, with only books and two best friends – the siblings Emil and Liza – for company. Coupled with his intellect, all this isolation and reading eventually led to him becoming a Nobel Prize winner in the field of biology, providing inspiration for Chinese helicopter parents all over the world.

Now with a loving fiancé and a new life ahead, Morbius and Emil (also a big brain scientist) tried to cure the blood disease that was slowly killing him by using a mix of vampire bat DNA and electricity to create more red blood cells. The good news is that it did actually cure his blood disease by giving him Wolverine-like healing. The bad news is that it also gave him an uncontrollable hunger for blood which led to him killing his childhood friend. And… he became even uglier.

This “cure” also gave him fangs, speed, strength, mind control, and echolocation – the usual abilities of a vampire – but not the traditional weaknesses like garlic, crosses, and a stake through the heart; and cannot change himself into a bat. Also, he can actually go out in the sun, although he loses his powers (but gains them back in the shade) – which is still a better backstory than Twilight. All this, plus the created-with-science thing made it more accurate to call him a pseudo-vampire rather than an actual one.

So. First horror character in almost 20 years. Non-traditional and tragic origin story. Pretty powerful abilities. Interesting appearance. You’d think this would be the character stealing the 1971 limelight from Spider-Man when the comic hit the shelves, but the webhead had an ace up his sleeve. In fact, he had 6 sleeves.

 

Morbius fought a 6-armed Spider-Man (!!!)

Before Morbius made his first appearance in The Amazing Spider-Man #101, the comics left fans with a cliffhanger where Peter Parker sprouted 4 extra arms after drinking a serum (more science!!!) to get rid of his spider powers in the story arc called The Six Arms Saga.

A very confused and distraught Morbius washed ashore in America (more on this later), and took refuge in a beach house. A beach house that was coincidentally owned by Dr. Curt Conners aka Lizard, which Peter Parker borrowed to use as a safe house until he found a way to cure his illegal arms problem. This of course leads to a fight with Morbius getting the upper hand over Spider-Man’s six (okay last arm joke, we promise), and made worse when Dr. Connor arrives and changes into Lizard after getting the living daylights scared out of him by a white-skinned ghoul fighting a 6-armed man in a spider costume.

Morbius and Lizard then fight over who gets to kill Spider-Man, and Morbius again wins the fight and escapes; but not before biting Lizard for a quick snack. This bite caused Dr. Conners to somewhat take control of his lizard brain and, together, the two figured out that Morbius’s blood was the key to curing both Dr. Connors from his Lizard transformations and Spider-Man’s extra arms. So, they reached an armistice (sorry!) and teamed up to get a sample of Morbius’s blood.

And yes, it’s basically a reverse Uno card – the scary bloodsucking demon introduced as a Spider-Man villain ended up being hunted for his blood by Spider-Man. While this might make him sound like a joke character, it actually isn’t.

 

Actually, Morbius’s character is super tragic

During the main fight in issue #102, Dr. Connors recognized Michael Morbius (since they were both prominent scientists) which led Spider-Man to realize how he was subconsciously pulling his punches because he somehow sensed the internal conflict and identified with the unwilling vampire.

“And you wonder– what would it do to you, if suddenly you needed human blood–just to survive? Would you do the sensible thing, and turn yourself in–? … Or would you become a murderous man-monster–just as Morbius has? Face it fella. You don’t know.” – Spider-Man internal monologuing to himself, The Amazing Spider-Man #102

The guilt that tormented Morbius was actually apparent from the moment he came to his senses after killing Emil. When most villains at the time either gave in and became the bad guy or committed in search for a cure, Morbius instead decided to drown himself by jumping off the ship where they were conducting the experiments.

But Emil wasn’t the only person Morbius lost because of his transformation. Emil’s sister, Liza, dedicated her life to avenging her brother, while Morbius’s fiancé Martine Bancroft approached other characters such as The Fantastic Four to find and help him. Her love for him eventually led her to become a vampire herself to be with him, but she became a “true” vampire, lost control, and forced Morbius to pierce her heart with a stake – watching as she crumbled into dust.

Even after his transformation, he still tried to help people that he came across but was usually forced to see them die, in many cases by his own hand (or fangs) when he couldn’t control his thirst for blood. It took 21 real-world years, but it was in his self-titled series Morbius the Living Vampire Vol 1 that Ghost Rider gave him a partial solution:

And yes, he’s crossed paths with many characters over the years, which leads to our speculation:

 

OMG is Morbius a link to the multiverse????

So, this is entirely speculation based on what we know from the comics and watching theory videos on Youtube, but hear us out anyway. Although the Marvel and Sony Pictures universes are separate, we were all screaming at the crossover that happened in Spider-Man: No Way Home. And perhaps Morbius might be continuing the bridge between the two since Adrian Toomes aka The Vulture from the MCU universe appeared in the official trailer.

But what makes this crazier is that there’s a theory from ScreenRant that Morbius was actually in the mid-credits scene from Spider-Man: Homecoming since there’s a guy walking by in the background prison scene that looks a lot like him – though with an eyepatch and the actor definitely not being Jared Leto. The Morbius trailer also shows Morbius in a prison jumpsuit, so…

Okay that was admittedly clutching at straws, but the idea of Morbius crossing universes isn’t really that out of this world, because he’s worked with Dr. Strange a bunch of times – most notably in the Midnight Sons crossover. And as you know, Dr. Strange will be following up with the Multiverse of Madness that he started after the events of Spider-Man: No Way Home. But what adds perhaps a little more credence to this theory is that, in the comics, Morbius was a member of A.R.M.O.R (Alternate Reality Monitoring and Operational Response Agency), which is similar to S.H.I.E.L.D but to defend the active universe (Earth 616) from contamination and conflict from other realities.

But still, we don’t really know what the movies’ storyline is going to be – or if there’ll be a surprise Spider-Man cameo – since Sony Pictures Malaysia didn’t let us watch the movie in advance to write this article (it was worth a shot), but we know that the movies usually make small tweaks and adjustments from the comic source material. And Jared Leto himself drops a hint at the end of his teaser video:

Perhaps, like Morbius, surprises are more powerful in the dark….until we all find out from March 31st onwards.