Since his introduction in Amazing Spider-Man #299, Venom quickly became one of Spider-Man’s most popular foes. After recurring appearances in various Spider-Man titles, it was only a matter of time before they gave Venom his own series. Sort of. I read somewhere (and I don’t recall where sadly) that Tom DeFalco, then editor-in-chief for Marvel at the time, didn’t like the idea of a villain getting his own ongoing series and opted instead to do a limited series. The first limited series was a hit and was followed up by another sixteen limited series that were published between 1993 and 1998. When it comes to Marvel’s Legacy numbering it counts all of these limited series in the total issue count of Venom comic books.

Each of these limited series were of varying quality. Let’s get into each one:

Lethal Protector

By David Michelinie, Mary Bagley (issues #1-3) and Ron Lim (#4-6)

The first of the Venom limited series it was published following the events of Amazing Spider-Man #375 when Spider-Man and Venom make a truce. Venom relocates to San Francisco where he ends up helping out a society of homeless people living in an underground city. He ends up fighting the Jury, high tech mercenaries seeking to avenge the death of a guard that was killed during one of Venom’s jailbreaks from the Vault. He is also targeted by the Life Foundation who extracts eggs from Venom’s symbiote to create an army of symbiotes. If that’s not enough for you, Spider-Man decides he can’t trust Venom to stay out of trouble and goes to California to find him. This limited series has far too much going on it that all the plots seemed rushed. It’s almost as if Michelinie was writing as though he was going to be doing an ongoing series and was told at the last minute that it was being truncated to a six-issue mini-series. Still, it sets Venom up as an anti-hero, gives him some rogues to fight, and tries to set up a supporting cast. Too bad other writers didn’t really pay much mind to this set up.

Funeral Pyre

By Carl Potts and Tom Lyle

This was a three-issue limited series that features Venom trying to deal with some street gangs and ends up clashing with the Punisher. The “Pyre” they are referring to in the title is a young gang member who is turned into Pyre partway through the second issue. This arc has everything wrong with these limited series: no personal development, no supporting cast, an unnecessary guest star (because apparently, nobody thought Venom could carry a title on his own), and a newly created character that is seldom, if ever, seen again. In the case of Pyre, he is not seen again after this limited series which is just as well because he was your typical “teenager with attitude” who talks the way an out of touch adult thinks a teenager to speak.

The Madness

By Ann Nocenti and Kelley Jones

This three-parter is abject garbage. It suffers from another trope of the Venom books: Trying to cram too much into a short run of comics. This story, in particular, has Venom trying to stop a company dumping toxic waste, fighting the Juggernaut, being possessed by something in said toxic waste, and being manipulated by beings that look like they belong in a bad parody of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman. This is just too much going on. Nocenti at least tried to give Venom a romantic interest in reporter Beck Underwood, but this would later be ignored by other writers.

The Enemy Within

by Bruce Jones and Bob McLeod

This three-issue arc has Venom and Morbius the Living Vampire work together to stop a corrupt politician from unleashing a horde of goblins led by Demogoblin. This story has to really stretch far in order to get Demogoblin and Morbius (who stick around New York) to suddenly get to San Francisco. Which seems like a needlessly complicated exercise.

The Mace

By Carl Potts and Liam Sharp

This is another title that wastes most of its time trying to introduce us to a new character. This time it’s the very 90’s cyborg assassin warrior called Mace. It’s another example of a story that spends time focusing on the wrong thing. It’s a Venom comic book, why not focus on developing and expanding the title character instead of creating another derivative character who is barely seen afterward.

Night of Vengeance

By Howard Mackie and Ron Lim

Mackie was given four issues to write this story which is an overly long team-up between Venom and Vengeance, a character that was introduced in the pages of Ghost Rider who was himself a 90s comic book trope on wheels. In this story, they fight some mercenaries who get infected with a technorganic virus, another belabored comic book trope.

Separation Anxiety

By Mackie and Lim

Credit where credit is due, this is one of the better Venom stories of the era. In it, Eddie Brock and his symbiote are separated and he has to fight government agents to get it back. It also features the return of the five symbiotes we saw in Lethal Protector. But instead of developing the characters to be anything other than cookie-cutter versions of Venom and Carnage, the characters end up killing each other off with only one survivor, the female symbiote that is later named Scream (yeah, they didn’t even bother giving these characters official names before they started killing them off)

Carnage Unleashed

By Larry Hama and Andrew Wildman

Larry Hama and Andrew Wildman were two well-regarded creators over at Marvel. Hama for his long run on G.I. Joe and Wildman for his work on both G.I. Joe and Transformers. However, when it came to this limited series, about a fight between Venom and Carnage it proved to be a total dud. If you ever wanted to know how badly you can fuck up a story where Venom fights Carnage, then Carnage Unleashed is the story for you. The story has two b-plots going on in it. One, Venom befriends a young girl named Kristen whose boyfriend is a drug addict, while a software developer wants to make an online video game where Carnage fights against other players over the internet. It’s an absurd over the top story which ends with Venom and Carnage literally going inside a computer to fight each other. It’s patently stupid. From here on, Hama becomes a regular writer on all future Venom books for the rest of the 90s, and Carnage Unleashed is not the worst of his work, believe it or not.

Sinner Takes All

By Hama, Greg Luzniak (#1-4) and Ted Halsted (#5)

This story had Venom reconnect with his ex-wife Anne Weying. Although it ran for five issues (the longest since Lethal Protector) it also suffers from too much going on. On top of the romantic drama, there’s a new Sin-Eater going around killing people, and we also have Venom briefly transfer his symbiote to Anne making her She-Venom. It fails as a story because on the surface it seems like Venom finally gets a chance to redeem himself by taking down Sin-Eater, it’s not even the original or the guy who caused Eddie Brock to lose his job as a reporter. It’s a new guy. Another annoying part of this story is that Hama uses it as an excuse to ejaculate his knowledge of military ordinance across the page. I get it, Hama was a military vet, but this sort of detailed knowledge of weapons had more of a place in the pages of G.I. Joe, The ‘Nam, and Punisher. Here it’s just pointless fetishizing weapons for no particular reason.

Issues #2-5 had a back-up story about the Jury freeing the Tarantula from a foreign prison just to execute him for crimes he committed in America. It was written by Dan Slott and drawn by John Calimee. It is leagues away from the type of great writing Slott would later do on Amazing Spider-Man, but it’s not bad. It made an attempt at giving the Jury something to do other than failing to capture Venom.

Along Came a Spider

By Hama and Joe St. Pierre

This four-issue arc was written in the middle of the Clone Saga and had Venom fighting Ben Reilly, who had just recently taken over as Spider-Man. The pair had previously fought in Web of Spider-Man when he was the Scarlet Spider, so this is more of a rematch. It’s also very incredibly dull. It follows similar beats to Sinner Takes All wit Anne Weying becoming She-Venom again. Hama uses the title to bring back a character named L.D. 50, a drug dealer that appeared in a handful of issues of Avengers. It’s another excuse for Larry to scratch that military ordinance itch that he has to scratch every time he writes a comic.

This series also has a back-up feature Evan Skolnick and Derec Aucoin, which introduces a new character named Hybrid a guy bonded to four (count ‘em four) symbiotes and uses them to clean up his shitty neighborhood.

The Hunted

Hama (again) and Duncan Rouleau

This is a 3 part story about an alien symbiote killer that comes to Earth and tries to destroy Venom. It also features the return of Scream who then starts palling around with Venom whenever Hama writes a Venom story. This story is so unremarkable that there’s not really much I can say about it.

The back-up story in this series is another Hybrid yarn by Evan Skolnick and artist Jim Calafiore (a personal favorite of mine). In that story the Jury kidnaps Hybrid and he is rescued by the New Warriors. It’s another meh story because there’s nothing done here that is very different from any other story about the Jury.

The Hunger

Len Kaminski and Ted Halsted

We are given a much-needed break from the garbage that Larry Hama was churning out for this story. In the early days of Venom it was a running gag that Venom would threaten to eat people’s brains. They even had a talking action figure that said the line. However, by this point Venom had never actually eaten anyone’s brains. That changed with this storyline — sorta. By this point, Eddie Brock learns that his symbiote feeds on phenethylamine that is produced by the human brain and the pair had been bonded so long that the symbiote had depleted Brock’s supply of the chemical. Starving to death, the creature separated from Eddie and went on a feeding frenzy. It’s an interesting take, however, the story also has Eddie Brock take on the role of a commando, apparently knowing how to use military-grade weapons with ease even though he was just a reporter before he became Venom. Ultimately, Eddie forces the symbiote to bond with him again after he discovers that he can feed the creature by eating chocolate which produces more phenethylamine. It’s such a washout conclusion to the story.

Tooth and Claw

Hama and Josh Hood

This three-part story guest stars Wolverine and is an excuse for Hama to wrap up some loose ends from his run on Wolverine. The art is atrocious and the story barely makes sense. It is by far the worst of the Venom limited series.

On Trail

Hamma, Joe St. Pierre

In this story, Venom is arrested and put on trial. It guest stars Spider-Man and Daredevil and also has Carnage put on the stand as a witness for some reason. The whole trial is really an exercise to make people believe that Venom is being sentenced to death when in reality he is enlisted by the military to be one of their assassins. If the plot sounds incredibly derivative to you, that’s because writer Jon Ostrander did the same thing with the Punisher two years previously.

License to Kill

Hama, Derek Aucoin and Josh Hood

By this point, Hama basically disregards anything that has been established about Venom. In this story, he becomes a walking joke, carrying big guns and killing people for the government. In this case, he is trying to stop Russian operatives from unleashing a deadly toxin. It’s one thing to put the character in a situation that he typically doesn’t find himself in, but to completely abandon previously established character development to make him some one-dimensional action hero just speaks of how little Hama really understood about the character.

Sign of the Boss

Ivan Velez, Jr. Tom Derenick

By this point, Venom’s popularity was tanking big time and given the caliber of stories that were being put out, is anyone really surprised? Even Marvel didn’t have much faith in the ability for Venom to sell his own book and Sign of the Boss is the shortest mini-series of the bunch by only having two issues. This story fucking sucks. It’s also got the holy trinity of Venom tropes: A new (and horrible) villain, a new superhero created for no particular reason, and an unnecessary guest star. It also features a scene where Eddie Brock disguises himself as a nun to fool some terrorists, just in case you weren’t convinced this story wasn’t a huge piece of shit.

The Finale

Hama, Mark Pajarillo

By this point, Venom was a failure as a title. Everyone knew it. For some reason, Hama was brought back for the “final” Venom story which sees Brock lose his government assassin job because he was “too brutal”… Because brutality is something you worry about when you hire an assassin! There’s a fight with Spider-Man (naturally). Ultimately Brock is injected with dopamine inhibitors and his symbiote is separated from him and killed.

The idea of “killing” Venom here was entirely stupid on the part of Hama. Yeah, the character couldn’t sell his own books anymore, but that’s no fault of the character, that’s a fault of the creative teams driving the property into the ground. Venom was still a popular character and his “death” here was totally unnecessary. All it did was necessitate future creative teams to walk back what Larry Hama did. Howard Mackie and John Romita, Jr. managed this not even a year later without even working a sweat. They also not only bring Venom back but made him a worthwhile foe again because making Venom an interesting character is not fucking rocket scientist if you’re a halfway competent writer.

I know I’ve been very critical of Larry Hama here, that’s not to say that he wasn’t a good writer — he was — provided he was writing the right kind of story. His war stories (even the ones based on toys) are great, but any time he was put behind a superhero title his stories fucking stank. His problem was that he always tried to inject his military knowledge into stories, which works if it’s a military-themed story, but when it’s crammed into an unrelated title (like Venom) it’s just not a good fit, but I digress.

Venom got other chances at his own title. A new monthly title was done in 2003 which lasted 18 issues. A second volume came out in 2011 which featured Flash Thompson as the new Venom which ran for 42 issues. A follow-up series “Venom: Space Knight” followed in 2016 which ran for 13 issues. The third volume of Venom launched in 2017 which tried to introduce a new venom named Lee Price. This new Venom was so disliked that they gave the symbiote back to Eddie Brock. As of this writing, a fourth volume of Venom has been in publication for over 20 issues.

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