Last issue, we saw Morbius decide to become a vigilante—since he has to eat humans to survive, he’s made the decision to only eat bad humans. We’ve seen this before with Venom, and we’ve come to accept Punisher as a sympathetic character, so this isn’t exactly a new thing. It’s an early ’90s emerging theme, in response to the increasing use of violence as a way to establish that comics are an “adult” medium now. While I credit this–and the overmuscled influence of Image Comics artists–as the main reasons for comics largely sucking in the ’90s, Morbius uses the idea fairly well.
He beats up junkies and makes them tell who they get their drugs from, and then he eats the dealers and suppliers.
Morbius does, to his credit, experiment with ideas on how to avoid eating people altogether. One of those ideas is a transfusion from Spider-Man.
Spider-Man, of course, doesn’t want to give his blood to Morbius because he fears that may compromise his secret identity.
Further complicating matters, Simon Stroud, who has been a part of the Morbius mythology for decades, will be a character in this new Morbius series as the guy looking to hunt down and neutralize the living vampire.
But the main purpose of these issues is to establish the basic premise and clarify that Morbius has psionic powers that enable hypnosis (like Dracula) and give him flight power.
I like the storytelling, even if taking the first four issues for basic “premise set up” seems like pretty slow pacing.