Written by: Cullen Bunn
Art by: Iban Coello
Published by: Marvel Comics
Evil doppelgängers are hit-or-miss for me. Sometimes they work – Sinestro, Professor Zoom, Negaduck. Sometimes they don’t – Bizarro, Ocean Master, Catman (yeah, I’m calling you out, Catman). And sometimes I can’t make up my mind – Zod (I know I already used Bizarro. Shut up. Superman has more than one), Abomination (I mean, the idea is pretty lazy, but it’s also a lot of fun to watch them punch each other), and of course, the subject of today’s review: Venom.
So, a little background – Venom showed up a little late to the party in terms of “establishing a hero’s rogues gallery.” He first showed up in 1988, and the farthest you can retcon him back is to 1984. For now, anyway. There are only a handful of “oh, I know that guy!” villains for Spider-Man (or any big hero, really) created after 1970. Morbius, Hobgoblin, maybe Hydro-Man, Black Cat if you want to count her as a villain (I don’t), and Venom. And Venom is by far the most recent debut on that list.
(And don’t you dare bring up Carnage. Carnage is garbage. Carnage is what would’ve happened if Venom had already been created by 1992, and then they went and did it anyway. Think of a snake just slowly enveloping a deer within its jaws.
Now imagine that snake is the 90s, covered in pouches and belts and muscle groups that don’t actually exist like wrist-ceps or neck abs. (The snake also doesn’t have feet, obviously, because it’s a snake for one, but also because feet are hard to draw).
Now imagine that snake slowly devouring the simplest, purest form of the character Venom, with its already-pushing-the-limits physical build and the whatever-is-happening-I-guess-with-the-tongue thing.
Now, for some reason, Imagine that 90s snake, with its fully engorged Venom deer, exploding. Whatever is left amongst the viscera – that’s Carnage. So don’t tell me I’m unjustly leaving him out of the “Rogues Gallery.” I’m leaving him out, very much justly. We good? Good.)
Anyway, where was I before I kind of blacked out and started old-man-rambling? Right. Origins of Venom. The origins are cool. We all know the gist, right? Spider-Man gets a cool new black costume. It turns out the costume is an alien. The alien may or may not be evil and feeding off of him. At the very least, if it’s not evil, it’s definitely alive and therefore has its own wants and needs outside of its host. It’s like if a Green Lantern ring was alive and needed to feed itself by punching people. It’ll let you fly, but you gotta make with the fists if you want to keep getting the goods.
I digress. So, Spider-Man gets rid of potentially-evil-but-definitely-alive symbiote suit because the cost of business is too high for his morals, and symbiote suit finds Eddie Brock whose own checkered past makes him a bit more flexible with the height of the moral bar.
That’s a pretty good origin, right? Two rejected individuals (yes, I’m calling the suit an individual) find each other and go on to be a morally ambiguous anti-hero before the 90s anti-hero boom was a thing. You could even make the argument (I don’t, but some do and Wikipedia is certainly among them) that Venom is Spider-Man’s archenemy. I won’t rant about that today. I’ve ranted enough. Just know that the sentiment is out there.
So the status quo goes on for a good while, but weird shake-ups eventually take their toll: For some reason Mac Gargan (yes, the Scorpion one) gets the suit and becomes Venom for a good chunk of time. For like six or seven years. Yes, really. And then it’s Flash Thompson for another few years. Also, yes, really.
Meanwhile, Eddie Brock becomes something called Anti-Venom. The symbiote tried to rebond with Brock after Brock had been cured of cancer, but since he was cured by, well, magic really, the symbiote couldn’t bond properly and he turned into a white version of Venom. Again, yes, this is something that actually happened. Later, apparently, Brock becomes something called Toxin? I don’t know. I’m just finding this out as I research for this review. So I literally don’t even know.
Comics are gloriously weird.
Toxin identity aside, I knew about all of the above stuff. So imagine my surprise when I open this book up and there’s Eddie Brock as Venom. Just, regular Eddie Brock, regular symbiote, doing regular Venom-y anti-hero things. No explanation was given. I’m sure it was explained somewhere, in some book, but after a minute or two, I decided no explanation was needed or wanted. Things were “normal,” especially to a casual reader, and that’s a great place to start any event.
From there it was smooth sailing. Brock gets magically transported (by a Venomized Doctor Strange) to another reality where all the other alternate-reality Venoms are teaming up to stop a race of symbiote parasites. Did that make sense? These new parasites, called Poisons, take over the symbiote and the host, presumably killing, or at the very least, enslaving them in the process.
We get Venomized versions of a bunch of our favorite characters. We get Poisonized versions of a couple more. (And if you know me, you know I’m a sucker for alternate-reality versions of heroes and villains.) The art was fun. The plot was fun. This was just a solid book all-around.
(I did get momentarily confused when Brock first showed up in this alternate reality. Some of the panels seemed out of sequence or just read weird to me. But I was reading digitally, which I don’t usually do, so I’m going to blame it on that and not actually dock any points for it.)
Overall, a really good start for something which I admittedly had zero expectations. It’ll be fun to see where this story goes from here.
