1 out of 5

This is one of those times I wish I had more insight into exactly how this shook out behind the scenes.  A ‘new’ version of Morbius spun out of a Spider-Man Marvel Now! issue into his own series, the intro and resulting ongoing written by Joe Keatinge.  The idea was to de-vampire him, in a sense, making him a vagrant in ‘Brownsville,’ Marvel’s somewhere-in-New York version of a bad neighborhood that’s conveniently overlooked by heroes and cops (no idea how/if this crosses over with Brownsville, Brooklyn), even though, like, heroes love those kinds of neighborhoods.  I guess Hell’s Kitchen is far enough away that DD can’t pay it any mind, eh?  Comic book jokes, anyone?  The first issue wasn’t bad, there were definitely some hiccups from the get-go in both art and writing, and while Keatinge was trying his stream-lined, building approach used in Hell Yeah! and Glory, Marvel pulled the plug on Morbius, requiring the series to be whittled down to 9 issues and our timeline condensed.  So when did this happen?  With how much notice?  How much of our story would’ve been spaced out had it run its course?  Were all of the issues with the book due to editorial fiddling, or was this just Joe’s inability to work his ‘extreme’ sensibilities into a big published book?  And for now, I can’t know.  But regardless, it’s a bumpy ride with some pretty ridiculous editing oversights and seemingly rushed art, and though never outright bad you can tell its just not clicking in the way desired.

Basically: Morbius lands in B-Ville, riles up the local gang (run by a ridiculous only-in-comic-books multi-pierced and mohawked ‘well-spoken’ brawler), becomes a hero of the working class, then finds out that he’s mixed up in some kind of gang war nonsense with a shadowy villain of course pulling all the strings.  The timeline is incredibly compressed, making the trek less impactful than probably hoped, and some flashbacks of Michael’s past in book one – plus one of the reveals later – suggests that exploring the character would’ve been more of a component of the book, but it doesn’t get to happen.

Richard Elson’s art is serviceable in still frames but the characters are foreshortening starts to look uncomfortable and ugly when movement is required.  Plus, there’s this trend with trying to use non-standard paneling (something I think brought to the fore of the majors by J. H. Williams III work on Rucka’s Detective Comics and Morrison’s Batman, just a guess), but it’s a skill like any other, and so our pages with patterned or staggered framing just seem pointless.  And even though we get plenty of bloodshed in Marvel and DC books, perhaps a recent-ish editorial friendly-for-kids decision required a lot of in-panel violence to be blocked, which also doesn’t work well with Keatinge’s attempts to juxtapose Morbius’ bloodlust with his desire to do right… so he makes a difficult to decision to indulge in feasting, but the ‘camera’ pans away, with some telling blood spurting into the corner while Mike rears his head back post-bite, but it just doesn’t sell the mood.  I’m not saying the book required violence, just that it felt over-censored and thus diluted, so maybe both writer and artist felt outside pressure to change and rework things.  A fill-in artist doesn’t help things for the couple issues where ‘Superior’ Spider-Man appears (whose personality I couldn’t really get until I read elsewhere that this version of Spidey is actually, uh, Doc Ock’s brain in Spidey, so that makes sense), nor does the clunkily added guest spot seem necessary for the story.  Antonio Fabela’s colors were, frankly, atrocious.  I don’t read a lot of Marvel or DC currently, so I can’t speak to their current coloring trends, but the computer color gradients on everything and the computer shadows (and tattoos…) don’t layer well at all with the pencils.  I don’t know if this technique was used to add spice to the blank backgrounds, but the book just ends up looking cheap as a result, and the garish contrast within the art doesn’t help to highlight anything except its flaws.

Between Keatinge and his editor, too many writing sins are committed: non-sensible “one hour later,’ or “fifteen minutes earlier” jumps, done for punctuations sake but making the character interactions pretty effing dumb if you stitch scenes back together in sequence; and frequently repeated phrases within one word bubble.  This happens when you’re writing fast; it doesn’t come across as a ‘natural’ way of speaking, it just sounds disruptive, and should’ve been smoothed out.  On the list of curiosities are ‘cues’ in the text that were either unfulfilled by Elson or were references to plot beats Joe couldn’t work in.

So it started with enough momentum to earn a second issue, but Morbius is never able to fully collect itself into a proper tone, hindered in unseen ways by early cancellation.  And reading it in one go, some pacing and art problems were apparent from the start, those holes only widening as the team rushed toward a pushed-forward conclusion.  Unfortunately, despite my belief in some good intentions, there’s not a single moment in ‘The Living Vampire’ that makes you want to really stick around.  As a fan of Mr. Keatinge’s other work up to this point, I hope this ends up being the oddity in the pack.