Venom in the 2000s
Venom had been overplayed in the 1990s after a constant run of limited series of varying qualities (you can read my take on it here) They tried to bring it to the end with Venom: The Finale limited series. However, the character still had enduring popularity and it wasn’t very long until Venom reappeared in the pages of Amazing Spider-Man in the 2000s. Writers John Byrne and Howard Mackie decided that it was time to go back to basics with the character who, for years, was an anti-hero. So with that, Venom became a villain again. However, since Venom long since buried his animosity toward Spider-Man, it kind of made the character directionless. Still, the powers that be at Marvel decided to give Venom a shot at his own series again. This time, instead of a series of limited series, this would be the first time Venom would given his own self-titled ongoing series.
The series was written by Daniel Way and featured a handful of artist which included Francisco Herrera, Paco Medina, Sean Galloway, Skottie Young, as well as inkers Carlos Cuevas, Juan Valsco, Wayne Faucher and Rick Ketcham.
Way’s run on the character took Venom into a different direction, instead of focusing on Eddie Brock it instead focused on the symbiote — or at least what we discovered was a clone of the symbiote. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Daniel Way was clearly inspired by John Carpenter’s The Thing as well as conspiracy-minded shows like the X-Files which had just finished its first network television run. This series has a long-running conspiracy involving a sinister corporation, alien bounty hunters disguised as secret agents, and of course a clone of the Venom symbiote. It’s confusing at first, because you are left wondering if this series is considered part of the mainstream Marvel Universe, something that doesn’t become apparent until after the first story arc when Wolverine guest stars, but even then it’s not very clear because what is going on appears to be happening counter to established Venom continuity. It’s not until the penultimate story arc, Patterns that runs from issue #11 to 14 do we learn that we’ve been following a clone of the symbiote that was created years prior and has been existing parallel from Eddie Brock and the original symbiote.
It’s all very jarring at first and the final explanation makes this series feel like a cheap exercise to do a story that heavily borrows tropes from other popular media. This is not to say that Daniel Way is a bad writer, it’s just that his creative choices for this story don’t are based on a massive stretch to get the readers to the point where he can tell the type of story he wants. I also feel that he was tapping into themes that, by 2003, were overdone as similar conspiracy themed plots were already beaten to death in mainstream comics. Marvel was doing something very similar on the Incredible Hulk comic book at the time. It was just done to death.
It almost feels as though this was intended to be a series that had nothing to do with Eddie Brock or the symbiote’s past history, but a brand new symbiote, and editorial decided to walk it back and tie it into Eddie Brock and his symbiote at the end. Way spends all those issues backtracking and explaining a rather lengthy and convoluted set of details to explain how things go to the way they were in issue #1 like one huge colonic dump of exposition.
The final story arc is, of course, a conclusion that crams Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four, and the real Venom and ties up all the loose ends so that the status quo is restored, Eddie Brock is back as Venom, and there isn’t a symbiote clone running around.
I would conclude that this series is not as bad as some of the limited series in the decade before it, but it’s still missing something from it making it a great series. I like how Way decided to do something experimental and different, but dislike how derivative it was of popular culture of the era it was published in. Following this series, Venom was downgraded back to being appearing in other titles. However, he would still pop up in limited series devoted to him during the 2000s. This included Venom vs. Carnage which came out in 2004 which introduced a new symbiote, Toxin as well as 2008’s Venom: Dark Origin which featured a retelling of how Eddie Brock came to be bonded to the symbiote a story that, honestly, hadn’t been really fleshed out like this since the character’s inception.
Brock and Venom would also be featured heavily in this decades Spectacular Spider-Man and Marvel Knights: Spider-Man. This featured a story arc wherein Brock discovers that he has cancer and gives up the symbiote, where it eventually ends up bonding to Mac Gargan, the Scorpion. Gargan would keep the Venom symbiote for some time. Brock on the other hand, would become Anti-Venom in the New Ways to Die storyline in Amazing Spider-Man.
There will not be another Venom title until the series is revived 2011 with Flash Thompson as the new Venom. But we’ll get into that some other time.