Monday, February 18, 2019

Amazing Spider-Man #101


Marvel - Oct 1971

Key Issue Notes
First appearance of Morbius (Dr. Michael Morbius)

There's a lot of news out there about Sony expanding it's Spider-Man universe by adding a new character into the mix. As you can tell from the Key Issue Notes above, that character is going to be Morbius: The Living Vampire.

He is the next to join Sony's Spider-verse, (or should I say Spider-less-verse) after the confirmation that Jared Leto will be playing the character on the big screen. I for one don't now how to take this news. He was, for me personally, the worst Joker to be portrayed to date. I guess I'll have to play the "wait and see" game to see if his Morbius will be any better than his Clown Prince of Crime.

How this movie is going to work without everyone's favorite webslinger being involved is beyond me. The Venom movie seemed to do alright at the box office, so maybe this movie has a chance to as well?

Ok, enough about that. Let's get into just who the hell this Morbius guy is, as it pertains to this issue. When we first meet Morbius, he is being chased down by crew members on a boat after a few mysterious deaths occur. Since he was a mystery man that was picked up by the passing boat as he was adrift at sea, he was the logical person to point the blame at, and with good cause. But, to make a short story even shorter, he winds up killing everyone on board and jumping overboard, only to be washed up on shore.

He doesn't just wash up on any shore, no sir. He just happens to wash up on the beachfront of the vacation home of one Dr, Curt Connors. You may know him by his alter ego of The Lizard.

I should go back in the story a little bit. In the last issue (Amazing Spider-Man #100), Peter Parker decides that he can't be Spider-Man and be with the woman that he loves (Gwen Stacey). He created a formula that would rid him of his powers, but when he took it, it didn't have the effect that he thought it would. This is where the infamous six armed Spider-Man story line starts.

Jump back to this issue. Since Peter can't go out in public with newly acquired arms, he decides to lay low and try to figure out a solution to his newly formed problem, or problems as the case may be. Where does good ol Pete decide to go? Curt Connors vacation home.

Needless to say, a battle ensues between our six armed webslinger and Morbius: The Living Vampire. Who wins this battle? Well, no one. Not in this issue anyway.

Overall, nothing really exciting happens in this issue, other than the fact that it holds the first appearance of a popular Spider-Man villain.

Variants
2nd print or reprint?
I don't believe that there are any true variants for this issue. In my research, I found a few European foreign editions, so I guess they can be considered variants.

There is also a "second print" copy that has a blue title with a silver background, but seeing as that it was printed in 1992, I'd consider that to be a reprint, and not a variant. I mean, it even says "Reprinting the first appearance of Morbius The Living Vampire right on the cover. CGC does label this a second print on their label but I don't know if CBCS does or not.

On the other hand, it is from the same title and is the same number, so I suppose that it could also be considered a second print, even though it was printed 21 years after the original. I'll let you decide what it should be called but I'm saying that it's a reprint.

Census
As I expected, the CGC census has quite a few copies of this comic listed, but to be honest, not as many as I had expected. With this being a well known key issue of a somewhat popular character, and the amount of copies that I can only guess that are out there, I did expect this number to be higher. At the time of this writing, there have only been 2,317 copies graded by CGC.

Most of these copies are in mid to high grade, but there are a few nice, really high grade copies floating around out there somewhere. So far, there are 63 9.6 NM+ and 31 9.8 NM/M copies out there. So, if you're looking for a nice high grade copy, there are some available.

Again, CBCS and PGX don't have a census on their sites so I'm sure the number of graded copies is higher.

Values
Values for Amazing Spider-Man #101
On Gocollect
As you may already know, with any movie announcement, demand for these key issues goes crazy. This comic isn't any different. It wasn't a bargain bin comic before the announcement, but now, sales for some grades have gotten pretty up there in value. It wasn't that long ago you could buy a midgrade 7.0 copy for less than $200. That's definitely not the case now. If you're loooking for a copy in that grade, you'll probably be shelling out over $600 for it. All grades have had a similar rise in value over that same time period.


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