Inspirations for design : Venom (Tom Hardy) Insomniac Venom Marvel Nemesis

I've nerve damage, so painting details can be a problem. Even the gills on this guy were tricksy. But keeping up practice maintains mobility! Technically the least bad of four failed prints. Checking out the print qualities of a new resin, and I ended up overshooting the supports. Ended up with a lumpy underbelly that didn't want to fully dremel put. Screw it. Wabi Sabi.

I’ve been thinking about writing this for a while. Originally I thought against it because I had no gripe against people who call the symbiote/Eddie’s other/big guy/sqib one way or another, Venom or not, because it’s their own personal opinion and none of my concern. What I dislike a lot however is how I’ve seen some people get mad at other fans or certain comic book writers for calling it "Venom". So I’m giving my personal reasoning for why it’s alright to call the symbiote Venom, and hope it helps a bit to soften the conflict.

The main issue is that symbiote names are pretty complicated. You’ve got some who have their own separate pronounceable names to that which they become when fused with their host (Red becomes Carnage, Rascal becomes Red Goblin, Sleeper becomes the Sleeper Agent), you’ve got some who have pronounceable names which stay the same regardless of if they’re alone or in symbiosis (Mania, Toxin, the Life Foundation squad), and then you’ve got the Symbiote which makes up Venom, who seemingly has an unpronounceable name according to itself, more of a "chemical signature". We’ve had nicknames but to this day the Symbiote has had no precise name given, which has led to the conflict we know today.

So whatever you wanna do you keep doing, but I think calling the Symbiote Venom is not wrong. Because the Symbiote is very much Venom. Half of what makes Venom up at least in most cases. The thoughts and personalities that make Venom come in half from the symbiote. You could call the symbiote alone Venom in the same way you could call Eddie by himself Venom. And you technically wouldn’t be wrong, right ? Dylan is Venom too. It’s like one big puzzle without defined borders so more and more pieces get added. Depending on who is the host (and even who is the symbiote if we look at things like Codex or Agent Anti-Venom) it won’t exactly be the same Venom but it’s always a combination of two. And we could technically I think see each pieces to be Venom too by themselves.

Sure they aren’t the big toothy guy with the spider logo and the tendrils but they’ve been "it". They know and remember being Venom and in a way they continue to be that. It’s like the Spider-Man mantle except worn by way more than two people. And I think that applies to the symbiote too. You can call the symbiote Venom because without it there wouldn’t be any Venom anyway. So be it the symbiote, Eddie, Dylan, McGargan, Flash or so, once you’ve accepted the mantle you’re "it". It’s like one big dark web. All are Venom.

Again this is in no way a post meant to change your opinion or force you to start calling the Symbiote Venom. Just a stitched together thesis to show people a way as to why you could call it Venom and not be wrong. In the end all I want is to put an end to the discourse and aggressiveness towards people who DO call it Venom by itself because you gotta admit it’s not very simple and there ain’t a thousand ways to go about it.

TL;DR : You can call the Symbiote "Venom" in the same way you can call Eddie all by himself Venom and not be wrong because they both technically are Venom in personality, mind and DNA, like two heads on a single body. The reason we don’t do it for Eddie is that he has an actual canon, given name and we don’t have to resort to calling him The Human and get really confused about it. I agree it’s cooler to think Venom only exists when the two are together and that it’s pretty much how it canonically is but the naming of the Symbiote is simply done for reasons of practicality. In any way please stop downvoting, arguing with or putting down people who choose the easy option by calling the symbiote alone Venom.

Could the Venom symbiote heal Wolverine of his adamantium metal poisoning?

I'd like to ask for some patience first, since English isn't my main language and I can predict myself writing sometimes wrong. I'd also like to warn you that this will be a long, arguably my longest, and there will be spoilers of the entire run.

Read at your own peril. And thank you, if you try.

I went looking for the truth, and Lord help me I found it. I witnessed the void that drives us to spend our lives cultivating an inner darkness. It's blacker than ink. Darker than the grave. I was there. I touched it. –Eddie Brock(1996).

I'm not sure if I've shared this before, but I had a few gripes regarding the ending of Cates’ run. I remember being somewhat excited for the exploration of Eddie as a God, but I don't remember being too convinced about passing the Venom Symbiote onto Dylan. I've found ways to cope, but to this day I don't think that transition made too much sense.

“Son, I know you carry a lot of rage inside due to me being an absent dad, specially after I became Symbiote God and started space-traveling like a Starfield addict. Here, wear my old long johns in order to have powers again. Never mind the fact that Symbiotes are influenced by negative emotions, most of all anger, and in turn make the host angrier the longer it goes. No, this will be good for you, you wannabe Spawn.”

I also didn't liked the idea of Eddie being aged into an old man, and I thought it was out of character to see Eddie Brock allow Dylan to be Venom this quickly. He, of all people, should know better about the dangers of being bonded to a symbiote and being Venom, so I don't think he should've been written as accepting that quick.

Ewing and Ram V's run started by sort of fixing and sort of not fixing that major gripe of mine: It de-aged Eddie a bit, but it didn't offered an explanation why. I've tried to come up with one before, but I don't recall the comic itself offering an explanation. Eddie also did a 180° in regards to allowing Dylan to be Venom, which felt jarring compared to the previous one yet it's how I wished Eddie to act before anyway, so I'm willing to give it a pass, sort of.

I remember also being very frustrated with the writing starting with the idea of calling the Symbiote “Venom” on its own, something I've repeatedly stated to detest, but it becomes even more frustrating once you take into account that Cates himself put great effort on deconstructing this, only for the writers to ignore if not downright ruin it. There are earlier examples of the Symbiote being called Venom on its own, but I feel like each of them can be explained within that era’s context, whereas here it feels like it has returned because the writers were initially more familiar with the Sony movies’ version of the character.

But these so far are nitpicks. I assume you're wondering what were my thoughts on the plot and characterization. Well, I felt like Eddie and Dylan's eventual confrontation felt like a natural follow-up to Cates’ run, because as much as he tried to leave it a “happy ending”, he himself heavily implied on that very same comic that Eddie had become an absent father figure. It's very much a repetition of Cates’ themes of parenthood and a reflection on self-worth, but it felt better in some areas and worse in others for me.

I thought that the plot was boring to me up until at least issue#10, and that's because they carried Cates’ same flaw of reducing the main character into a passive force who needs to be strapped down and have the plot and lore explained to him as a vehicle for the audience. I'd argue they did it worse in fact, which made the comic less engaging and more of a chore with checkboxes.

Mind you, you could argue that issue#10, the very issue I've just praised, is guilty of the same thing, and i don't necessarily disagree, however, I think it worked here for me because it's in the context of Eddie's existential crisis and self-loathing. The reveal was obvious in hindsight, but for me personally, it struck a cord and left me genuinely excited for these new characters. I'd genuinely love to engage in conversations about all the time variants of Eddie and what I think they mean to him from a psychological standpoint. I think Tyro and Wilde were sadly underused, but I wouldn't mind to invest in a conversation about them either.

And then it goes right back to being boring again, specially when it comes to the Dylan half of the run. I can count on my fingers the amount of issues that I enjoyed. Ram V felt like a very poor choice in my opinion, both because his writing felt like the duller of the duo and because he seems too fond of writing characters as long-winded, and it feels awkward to see teenagers such as Dylan and Normie speaking like this. I get that he's going for a "wiser beyond their years" vibe, but it felt too far.

I also just agreed that the father-son confrontation made sense within Ewing's overarching story, and yet at the same time, I'd say Dylan's story became too defined by Eddie's, to the point he never even got a book of his own but rather shared the main one with Eddie, which affected the runs’ pacing and conflicts with the very idea of giving Dylan his own story. Unless you want to frame his story as a tragedy due to his Inability to move away from the conflict of the Brocks/symbiote family, but the run felt conflicted in this regard for me.

Again, the father-son confrontation made sense for me, but in hindsight, Meridius and the overarching conflict also felt a bit too soon, and perhaps the two of them should've gotten separated books, with different stories, and then interconnected a bit later.

In short, the Dylan half was the more wasted one. I can count on my fingers the amount of Dylan-centric stories which I've enjoyed. Eddie's, while with plenty of room for criticism, felt more interesting to follow, and that's because Eddie is a more interesting character and nobody managed to make Dylan as interesting on his own, so far.

Coincidentally, and ironically given the main event's reputation, I'd say that both halves of the Venom run improved during the Dark Web tie-ins, although the Eddie half again hooked me in more. I genuinely enjoyed to figure the origin behind Bedlam and Ewing's way for them to coexist simultaneously. It felt convoluted like time-travel stuff tend to be, but delightfully so this time, which is a feeling I had very rarely while reading the run, but was always appreciative of when I felt it. It also doesn't hurt that's when Bryan Hitch left and CAFU came on-board, and the latter's art was a huge improvement.

I felt completely confused reading Venom#17, and yet I loved the confusion and in how it used the panels to tell its story.

Venom#18 is the turning point of the run: CAFU is here to stay, Ram V has also left as a writer. This however is an Eddie-centric issue, and it's a turning point for him because it's when he finally sees the full scope of everything around him.

What I'm about to say is bound to be controversial amongst the fandom and even outside it, but I don't mind the cosmic stuff at all. I confess being conflicted about it for a long time, but this issue was the last time I felt any conflict about it. I don't think I would've liked it in my younger years, but I changed my mind overtime and specially after reading through Starlin's Thanos and Adam Warlock stuff, and even Ewing's Loki: Agents of Asgard. Ewing's Venom run and his cosmic lore, when it works, reminds me of it.

It feels like an improvement over most of Cates’ own cosmic additions, because no offense, but I think Cates was a very poor writer regarding that side of Venom he himself envisioned. I liked Knull for what he represented but I think he was largely uninteresting himself, and ultimately, I think Cates himself didn't fully realized what Knull could represent and fumbled with his demise. But Ewing, through his views in the lore and the themes of predestination, seemed to frame Knull as a slightly tragic figure, and to better highlight him as a foil for Eddie.

In my eyes, through this, Ewing framed Knull as the Freudian Death Pulse incarnate, which was always there but barely touched on. Knull wanted to reduce the universe into nothingness by erasing all life, yet he himself is a living being in a sense, so his crusade is by default of self-destruction, and we get a reason for it through this recontextualization of his feud with the Celestials. All of this, in turn, explained Knull's inconsistencies in power and in a way rewrote the ending of King in Black as Knull's victory rather than defeat.

In hindsight, Knull may have been searching and grooming his own successor, likely meaning to be Dylan but Eddie proved himself more fitting. All of his actions, in my eyes, were recontextualized as him intentionally setting up his own defeat and ensuring that the universe wouldn't have a need to bring him back. He won by returning to nothingness and staying there, getting what he wanted and running from his responsibilities, which again, parallels with Eddie, making all of his journey from King in Black to Venom#18 even more of a spiritual journey, which I like it quite a bit.

I also surprisingly like the Eventuality, though I think Ewing didn't used it as much as he should've. It felt better written on Ewing's Venomverse stuff and the Venom: Original Sin Infinity Comic, but regardless, Ewing deserves the credit for its creation.

It is after learning the bigger picture that Eddie finally breaks this trope of being a passive character and becomes more active again, bringing himself back to life by will and becoming…a human symbiote?

I'm not fond of the idea. I think Ewing wrote himself into a corner and that was his way to solve it, but it just didn't appealed to me. Granted, you could argue it's true to the zany side of Venom's character, but I've also felt that can often be used as an excuse for cheap writing, and that feels like one of its cases. And yet, the arc of Eddie tracking down Bedlam and facing head-on was stellar. I wouldn't just call it one of the best arcs of this run, I'd call it one of the best Venom stories, period.

However, it kind of falls in quality again later. The Dylan issues are initially written by Ewing for a time and then taken over by Torunn Grønbekk, who also started to write for Carnage, and while I'd argue both are better than Ram V's takes, it's not by a wide margin, and I have my own gripes with Torunn's own writing, specially the overuse of narration boxes, which take me away from the stories completely. As for the Eddie half, the one arc I remember fondly was the one involving Doom(which I'd also call one of the best Venom stories), but that's about it.

I did praised this run for the cosmic stuff, and yet in counterpart, I also think the entire run suffered from over ambition, and arguably editorial interference. It feels like it was intended to be much shorter but was pushed to last longer and create more symbiote characters, which granted, led to some cool runs(loved Misery and Red Goblin), but for the most part it just felt too chaotic. As for being over ambitious, what I mean is that it brought in a lot of concepts but some were ham-fisted, and some downright forgotten.

The book teased the return of Big Mama, the Life Foundation, and it carried over Cates’ previous plot thread about symbiotes coexisting with mankind à la X-men, yet overtime and specially with the transition from Ram V to Torunn, all of that was forgotten. The one thing that remained, seemingly, was Carnage, which I also can't tell if it was their plan all along or editorial demand. It felt too soon to bring in Carnage, and although they seemed to have a clear direction for him, which was to make him the Symbiote equivalent of the Devil essentially, they seemed to have lost track midway and so Carnage was just really overwhelming, and in someways even more convoluted than Eddie is now, because the latter is at least intentional and part of the arc, whereas the former just feels directionless. He was written well under a handful of issues by Torunn, including Symbiosis Necrosis, but that's about it.

And now, let's talk about Venom War. Honestly, considering the scale of the run itself, it felt very underwhelming for the father-son conflict, with Carnage included, to mostly take place on a wrestling ring. The way it was going, I excepted something like space-Lord of the Rings, and while I imagined some can find overwhelming, I think it would've been more true to the writing we've had up until this point. Remember what I said about Venom's zany and goofy side sometimes feeling like a handicap to excuse cheap writing? That crossed my mind when reflecting on Venom War. I'll admit it often felt energetic, but I never quite lost this thought from the back of my mind.

I was surprisingly fond of Spider-Man's inclusion, specially for what was set up regarding his current views on the Venom Symbiote. I found his tie-in comic to be very underwhelming, but there were plenty of good ideas in some of it and the main book also. I particularly liked the Symbiote's more conflicted and reflective characterization, which reminded me of the Costa run at its best, and yet Venom War doesn't follow up on it much in my opinion and so it was wasted, alongside other ideas.

Oh right, the Zombiotes. You can't convince me on any way shape or form that this wasn't an editorial move, because fans looove symbiotes or something. It led to some fun tie-ins, but most of it was just a waste of time and space.

And Meridius and Carnage barely do anything throughout this entire event, which is the exact same criticism I had regarding Cates’ Knull on King in ***Black, ***not to mention Dr. Doom and Kang, which have been set-up to play a major role for a long time, feeling just as much if not more underwhelming. You could argue all of this made it even more underwhelming than Cates’ Knull in King in Black, and I'd agree wholeheartedly.

The same also applies to “Old Man Dylan”. While reviewing his arc, I remember criticizing it for being pointless, but I take that back now due to ***Venom#39 ***and Venom ***War#5 ***recontextualizing everything: His role is the same as Silver Surfer's on KiB, which is to clean the path for the Deus Ex Machina. Actually, the same goes for Carnage.

If I had a nickel everytime Venom got a power boost and became golden to fight a symbiote God, I'd get two nickels, which is not much but it's weird it happened twice. Also, Eganrac? What the heck?

And again, it ended up repeating the same mistake as King in Black with Knull, but worse: It was even more rushed, and Meridius, alongside virtually every variant, felt even more wasted. Torunn’s Old Man Dylan somehow used Meridius better, which again reminded me of my experience reading King in Black, whose Venom tie-ins felt much better.

I suspect it felt rushed because it needed to set-up the status quo for All-new Venom and Eddie Brock: Carnage, but my point stands: It was a very underwhelming conclusion to a run that, although not without many flaws, it held a lot of potential in my eyes, but it rarely achieved said potential. There were some interesting character writing, but rarely as much on the plot. I could argue that his misses are still leagues better than many past writers, and yet it doesnt make it less of a disappointment, given Al Ewing's name carried weight after Immortal Hulk and yet “Immortal Venom” didn't even came close to the same writing.

I think, if I'm being fair and generous, that this whole run ranged from average to slightly below average, rarely deviating into something better. I appreciate the experimental nature, which helped it stand out in good and bad ways, but it's not enough for an indispensable read. The art was fine at least. But now, what remains is awaiting for*** All-new*** Venom, also written by Ewing, which will come out next week. It seems essentially a back-to-basics approach with Venom, that is, to a degree; It sets up street-level, only it's creating a mystery around who the host is. As for Eddie Brock: Carnage, it reminds me slightly of the Lethal Protector/the Hunger mixed in with Sony Venom's tropes, but all of it with Red as Eddie's symbiote now. I do have more information about it, but it's speculation for now and I promised not to share, sorry. What will say is that, if true, the people who disliked cosmic Venom may dislike this even more.

I confess being curious, but not excited about the status quo, both because Ewing's first run disappointed me in lots of areas and because it doesn't appeal to me much. I'll try to stay save judgment for now, but half of me has made up his mind and the other half hopes to be proven wrong.

Time will tell.

Thought about it all afternoon yesterday. Thinking about it again this morning traveling for Thanksgiving. Kinda want it as a print. I love this horse.

What are the most important comics to read?

I'm not gonna write an in depth review or give any spoilers. But. It is not at all what I expected (not sure what I expected). About halfway through I started skipping the Venom chapters bc his narration is terrible and felt pointless. Especially in audiobook, the voice the guy uses is pretty unbearable. I have decided that MK really needs to be a visual character. ESPECIALLY in this story. If you read it you will understand why, as if the 3 personalities and khonshu werent enough. Especially on audiobook its hard to keep track of, and while I like the different voices used for each of the altars (Jake and Steven) and other characters. there were times when I wanted to go back and clarify who was talking/narrating, and couldn't just flip back a page. The writer makes this especially worse by not managing to stick to a 1st or 3rd person consistent storytelling. For example in one chapter Steven will be narrating in first person throughout, then the next chapter will be about Jake and in the third person. Again, the audiobook furthers this confusing change by having both of those chapters read in Steven and Jake's voices. It is interesting, and a somewhat creative plot, though is a bit messier than it needs to be, they picked a pretty confusing plot for a wildly complex character.

I read someone felt they didn't get the altars right, but I thoroughly enjoyed them. That is the #1 thing I'd tell someone about this book- Marc Spector is barely in it. Jake and Steven are the main characters.

Congrats if you got this far, I had no idea I had this much to say about this book.

So what the hell just happened yall? I guess we don't get to know who the host is? Where does this leave everyone (except Eddie that's pretty obvious)? This event was a little hard for me to follow tbh since I haven't been super invested in this story. I don't see why Eddie couldn't just remake Venom if he's the KIB but maybe they've changed what I thought that meant