Superior Carnage Annual #1

Dec 26

Dec 26 Superior Carnage Annual #1

At the Kramer Prison in New Jersey, Cletus Kasady has been called into a meeting with Doctor Jenner, the prison doctor. The doctor wants to know how Cletus is doing since he was separated from the Carnage symbiote. He is pleased to hear Kasady refer to the alien creature as the other and not his other and figures that being placed in a normal prison among the general population has given Cletus a kind of freedom he hasn’t felt in a long time.

When Cletus is let out onto the exercise yard, he attracts the attention of a trio of prisoners who agree to make a reputation for themselves by killing the man who used to be Carnage. At that same moment, on Spider-Island 2, the Carnage symbiote starts screaming for the first time since it was contained in the facility. Two guards wonder what’s wrong with it. One of them figures it must be scared.

Back in New Jersey, Cletus is in the laundry room of the prison when one of the other prisoners stabs him in the back with a shiv carved out of a toothbrush. When this happens, the Carnage symbiote starts convulsing and eventually dies. One of the Spiderlings notes that they sent samples of the symbiote to various labs, but they were chemically neutered. With the primary mass now dead, he figures that this is the end of Carnage. By this time, Cletus has been taken into the prison infirmary, where they tell Doctor Jennings that Kasady doesn’t belong here and that they don’t think he’ll live through the night. Left alone with his patient, Jennings leans in to listen to what Cletus is saying. Apparently, he still has a connection to the symbiote and it is it’s hurt and crying out for him to save it as it died. However, he can hear another, a “little one” that is mewling like a kitten.

This is the fragment of the symbiote that has been sent to Morse Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Observing the sample is Carla Unger, who is invited to join her co-workers for some happy hour drinks. She politely declines the offer, telling them that she has some more tests to run. She is annoyed because they are supposed to be examining the symbiote’s regenerative properties but Spider-Man loaded it with so many chemicals that it is hampering their work. As she puts the sample on a microscope slide her phone starts ringing. The call is from her husband and he is furious that she is not home yet. As he accuses her of being up to something no good, his anger can be heard by the sample of the symbiote and it begins to react. After Carla’s husband tells him to get home and make her dinner, she ends the call and looks into the microscope. The fragment of the symbiote then leaps up through the viewing lens and enters Carla’s body through her eyeball. Not fully in control of herself, she lunges over to where the rest of the sample is contained and presses a button that incinerates it.

Carla then heads home where her husband, Will, continues to demand she make him dinner. She has grown incredibly ill and quickly rushes to the bathroom. Will follows her and begins pounding on the bathroom door and continues making demands. This starts making Carla angry and soon the symbiote grows enough to completely bond with her. Assaulting her husband as Carnage, Carla tells him that it’s not the symbiote that is making her about to kill him, but her own hatred for all the years of abuse he has made her endure. As Carla slaughters her husband, Cletus Kasady suddenly screams the word Carnage from his hospital bed. The nurse fears that he is going into a seizer, but Doctor Jennings tells her to let him work through it. Sure enough, Kasady eventually calms down and falls asleep.

Later, Carla Unger has pulled into a gas station to buy some food as the symbiote seems to be eating away at her. By this time, news about her disappearance and her husband’s murder have hit the news. As a concerned towtruck driver asks if she is okay, Carla suddenly vomits up the Carnage symbiote and it takes possession of this man instead. When she asks it if she is free now, the creature repays her kindness and kills her. The Carnage symbiote then compels its new host to get into his truck and drive away.

Back at the prison, Doctor Jennings is left alone with Cletus Kasady. He tells Cletus that he is going to die an ordinary man and that the Carnage symbiote won’t want a used up has bin like him. He then smothers Kasady with a pillow until he stops breathing, intending to be there when the Carnage symbiote arrives so he can take it for himself.

Meanwhile, the Carnage symbiote jumps from host to host as it makes its way up from New Mexico. When it arrives in New Jersey, it manages to find the warden of Kramer Prison and takes possession of him so it can get onto the prison grounds undetected. When the warden enters the prison, Doctor Jennings tells him how Cletus Kasady died in the night. The warden asks to see the body and is taken into the morgue. The Carnage symbiote is furious to see what has been done to its host, which it has come to view as family. That’s when Doctor Jennings enters the morgue and points out that Cletus was its adopted family and offers himself as a new and better host. Instead of taking Jennings up on this offer, the Carnage symbiote leaves the body of the warden and bonds with the corpse of Cletus Kasady instead.

Miraculously, this brings Kasady back to life and he gets up off the slab ready to paint the town red. Doctor Jennings can’t understand how this can be happening. Pinning the doctor to the wall, Cletus explains that both he and the symbiote are two halves of a whole. When they were separated both grew sick and now that they were reunited they were able to heal each other. As he smothers Jennings with his symbiotic mass, Carnage explains that there is no host/symbiote anymore, just Carnage. With Jennings dead, Carnage emerges from the morgue and begins slaughtering everyone on his path to the cell block. There he finds the man who shived him earlier and returns the favor by stabbing him the back with the symbiote’s tendrils.

After slaughtering everyone in the prison Carnage muses over the saying that “you can never go home” but feels like he has finally come home and is ready for the old times to start all over again.