Superior Carnage #5
Carnage has been freed and his first order of business is to impale Klaw. This causes a massive sonic boom that bowls over everyone on the scene, including Spider-Man and the Wizard. Although his physical body was destroyed, Klaw is a being of sound and he continues to watch the scene. He is helpless to stop the Carnage symbiote, which has abandoned Karl Malus —it’s current host — and is now bonding to the Wizard. However, Klaw is now becoming part of something called the sound wall and it gives him a unique perspective where he can observe the mistakes they made.
He begins looking back into the past and observing the history of Carnage. He sees the day the creature was birthed and ultimately bonded to serial killer Cletus Kasady.[1] The creature was enraged by being abandoned by its parent and found relief in finding a host that carried as much hatred as she did. However, over the years the creature has felt betrayal as it was passed from host to host to host.[2] He now views the moment when he and the Wizard captured Carnage for their experiments. He now knows that the rage within the symbiote had only grown over time and that the worst thing they could have done was separate it from Kasady. He then sees a moment from earlier where the Wizard was in front of media cameras and whimpered how he wanted to see his son.[3] He sees now that this was seen by Bentley-23, and sees the light of inspiration in the boy’s eyes. He now knows that the Carnage symbiote bonded to the Wizard because they are both angry about the same thing.
The Wizard, now fully bonded to the Carnage symbiote, goes on a rampage. He demands that Spider-Man give him his son, but the wall-crawler explains that he only promised to help if the Wizard helped him contain the Carnage symbiote, not bond with it. Spider-Man tries to get the Wizard to see reason, pointing out that the Carnage symbiote killed Klaw, his friend. Unfortunately, Carnage’s rage causes this logic to fall on deaf ears. As the Spiderlings arrive on the scene with flame throwers, Spider-Man tells Karl Malus to flee. Malus cannot, unfortunately, because his legs are paralyzed. The flamethrowers fail to work and Carnage then eats Malus alive.[4] That’s when a Spiderling informs Spider-Man that there is a boy in the crowd who claims to be the Wizard’s son. Spider-Man reprimands the Spiderling for saying that within earshot of Carnage, but it is too late.
Carnage attacks Spider-Man anew, having come to the conclusion that Spider-Man was lying to him and only sought to run out the clock on the Wizard’s mental illness.[5] Injured in the battle, Spider-Man finally gives in and orders his Spiderlings to bring “him” in. As it turns out, Bentley was never on the scene. Instead, Spider-Man was buying time for his Spiderlings to bring the catatonic body of Cletus Kasady onto the scene. Sure enough, when the Carnage symbiote sees its original host it quickly bonds with him. However, the Spiderlings working the containment unit are quickly slaughtered. The Carnage symbiote then leaps out and is about to kill the Wizard. Luckily, Klaw manages to pull himself back together long enough to incapacitate Carnage is a sonic blast before fading away into nothingness again.
Klaw watches events unfold as his consciousness begins to become lost in the sound wall. The injured are taken from the scene. Spider-Man takes the Carnage symbiote and contains it in his prison on Spider-Island.
Later, both Bentley Wittman and Cletus Kasady are incarcerated in a secret maximum security prison. The doctors there have learned that Wittman’s exposure to the Carnage symbiote has healed his brain and soon his cognitive functioning will return to normal. In his cell, the Wizard is doing an exam on a tablet to measure his functioning when he suddenly gets a text message from Bentley-23. Seeing that the boy is checking on his well being makes the Wizard smile. A Spiderling has come to get a status report and although the Wizard’s brain is a blank slate he is getting sudden flashes of memory. This isn’t good news but as the Spiderling heads out, he stops to confirm that the symbiote repaired Wittman’s brain. When the doctor asks why this is important, the Spiderling says its for no reason. However, in another cell, Cletus Kasady has written the phrase “Carnage Rules” on the wall of his cell with a piece of chalk.
Recurring Characters
Frightful Four (the Wizard, Carnage, Karl Malus, Klaw) Spider-Man, Bently-23, Sandman, Lizard
Continuity Notes
This would have been in Amazing Spider-Man #360. However, this is not the same symbiote that is at play here. See below.
The Carnage symbiote has had a number of short-term hosts. They include:
Ben Reilly, the clone of Peter Parker who briefly became Spider-Carnage in Amazing Spider-Man #410 and Spectacular Spider-Man #233.
The Silver Surfer also briefly bonded with the symbiote in Amazing Spider-Man #430-431.
Lastly, we’re shown Tanis Nieves who was forced to bond to the Carnage symbiote in Carnage #1-5.
This story omits that John Jameson was also a host to Carnage in Amazing Spider-Man #410.
It also omits all of the people of Doverton, Colorado, members of the Avengers, and zoo animals it possessed in Carnage USA #1-5.
Bently-23 is not the Wizard’s son, but his clone, as we learned in Fantastic Four #570.
Although Karl Malus appears to die here, he ends up living on inside the symbiote’s digestive tract (ew) and being reborn as a human/symbiote hybrid in Captain America: Sam Wilson #3.
The Wizard was diagnosed with a brain tumor in Fantastic Four #610. A condition only made worse when Black Bolt gave him dementia in FF (vol. 2) #7.
The Thing About the Carnage Symbiote In This Story…
At first glance, this story could be interpreted as though Cletus Kasady has always had the same symbiote the whole time he was Carnage. However, the original symbiote was consumed by Venom in Peter Parker: Spider-Man #10. Cletus later found a second identical symbiote in the Negative Zone in Webspinners: Tales of Spider-Man #13-14.
This story is one of many that overlooks this fact. Marvel has yet to provide an official explanation. The last profile for Carnage in the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe A-Z #2 makes a distinction between the two symbiotes. Long time Venom writer Cullen Bunn has suggested on Twitter that traces of the original symbiote absorbed the new one. However, Bunn has not written the character in many years and, moreover, Twitter comments do not reflect the editorial policy moving forward. A later writer could come in and do a story that completely contradicts this tweet. Needless to say, accepting a tweet as canon prior to an official say-so is the work of rank amateurs.
The same source that cites Cullen Bunn’s tweet also suggests that Klaw affirms that the symbiote in this story is the same as the original one birthed by Venom. Which is the conclusion you can draw when you have the reading comprehension skills of a fucking gnat. Klaw makes no such affirmation.
Here is the two-page spread in its entirety:
The only thing that even remotely suggests that Klaw is insinuating that the symbiote is still the same is when he speaks about how the symbiote became angrier as it went from host to host.
However, they only devoted two pages to the various hosts that Carnage had over the years and it omits many of the other hosts. As I’ve stated above, they omitted the fact that John Jameson was also taken over by the Carnage symbiote. It also omits all of the people of Doverton, the Avengers, and zoo animals that were all possessed by Carnage during Carnage USA. Obviously, Kevin Shinick was omitting less iconic moments for the sake of narrative pacing. So too, it is possible that Klaw could have overlooked the change in symbiotes. In-universe, this could be understandable since the guy’s consciousness was slowly fading away as he was becoming one with the sound wall. I somehow don’t think the guy is going to take a very detailed account of every nuance of Carnage’s life. Otherwise, he would have detailed all of the different hosts.
The fact that other hosts were omitted is more indicative that Klaw only saw snippets of Carnage’s past and not the totality of it. It could be very easy for him to not see the change of symbiotes, particularly because this happened in the Negative Zone. We have no way of knowing if someone within the sound wall can see into the Negative Zone since it’s in a completely different dimension. Another thing to note is that there are very few people who even know of the distinction: namely Peter Parker and Cletus Kasady, one of whom is fucking crazy.
As such, we should interpret this to mean that Klaw is assuming the symbiote has been the same this whole time until there is an official in-universe explanation.
