MORBIUS

In The Amazing Spider-Man #101 (October 1971), “A Monster Called Morbius!”, readers met Dr. Michael Morbius — and for the first time in the flagship title’s history, the script wasn’t Stan Lee’s. Lee had left for Hollywood to write a screenplay for an unproduced science-fiction film, bequeathing the series to Roy Thomas, who introduced Marvel’s living vampire with artist Gil Kane. Thomas later recalled: “We were talking about doing Dracula, but Stan wanted a costumed villain.”

What made the debut possible at all was a rule change. For decades the Comics Code Authority had banned vampires outright; the Code’s February 1971 revision lifted that ban, and Morbius arrived within months — among the very first vampire characters the Code ever allowed. But Thomas made him a vampire of the laboratory, not the crypt: a Nobel Prize–winning biochemist dying of a rare blood disease, who dosed himself with vampire-bat DNA and electroshock and woke with chalk-white skin, red eyes, fangs — and a hunger he never asked for.

The issue he crashed into was stranger still. Peter Parker was mid-crisis: a formula meant to strip his spider-powers had instead given him six arms, and he sought out Morbius hoping the hematologist’s blood research held a cure. The debut of Marvel’s most scientific vampire landed in the middle of Spider-Man’s most arachnid nightmare — in the first issue of the series its co-creator didn’t write.