Movie star Morbius is ready for his close-up in Amazing Spider-Man #78 preview

In a happy bit of coincidence for Marvel Comics (...or is it..?), on Wednesday, November 10 Morbius the Living Vampire will stop by the pages of Amazing Spider-Man #78, just days removed from Sony's newest trailer for January 2022's Morbius film starring Jared Leto.

Amazing Spider-Man #78 ... or Amazing Spider-Man #879 for you legacy number old-timers, is by writer Kelly Thompson and artist Sara Pichelli, with a hockey assist from the "Beyond Board" of writers - Saladin Ahmed, Cody Ziglar, Patrick Gleason, and Zeb Wells.

Brand name artist Arthur Adams provides the cover.

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It's just Ben Reilly's second outing since his return and his Beyond Corporation-sponsored tenure as Spider-Man, and according to the publisher, the Spidey-Morbius face-off does not go well for Ben, and he gets the "the hurt" put on him in a big way.

In Marvel comic books, Dr. Michael Morbius is a Greek biologist and biochemist who suffers from a rare blood disorder. While traveling to New York, Morbius attempted to find a cure for his lifelong illness, which, at that stage, was actually killing him. Morbius experimented with a radical treatment involving vampire bat DNA and electroshock therapy.

Instead, Morbius became afflicted with a far worse disease that resembled the bloodlust of supernatural vampirism. The reason Morbius' powers are science-based and not supernatural is that the Comics Code Authority had a rule stating that supernatural characters that had a demonic nature weren't allowed to be published.

Since his creation in 1971, Morbius has tiptoed the line between villain and anti-hero and somewhat like another classic Spider-Man villain the Lizard, goes through cycles of keeping his affliction under control and not.

By the looks of these Amazing Spider-Man #78 preview pages, he appears to be in a "not" phase at the moment.

Check them out in our preview gallery:

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Check out all the Spider-Man comics, graphic novels, collections from Marvel arriving in 2021 and beyond.

I'm not just the Newsarama founder and editor-in-chief, I'm also a reader. And that reference is just a little bit older than the beginning of my Newsarama journey. I founded what would become the comic book news site in 1996, and except for a brief sojourn at Marvel Comics as its marketing and communications manager in 2003, I've been writing about new comic book titles, creative changes, and occasionally offering my perspective on important industry events and developments for the 25 years since. Despite many changes to Newsarama, my passion for the medium of comic books and the characters makes the last quarter-century (it's crazy to see that in writing) time spent doing what I love most.