Venom in the 2010s
It’s taken Marvel 24 years but they finally started taking risks with the Venom character, taking it to different heights with varied results. This series picks up after Amazing Spider-Man #654 which saw Flash Thompson become the newest host for the Venom symbiote. Prior to this, Mac Gargan — aka the Scorpion — had been Venom for a number of years.
The first 25 odd issues were written by Rick Remender with Cullen Bunn taking over until the series ended after 42ish issues.
This series starts off with the military using the symbiote as part of their Project Rebirth 2.0. Apparently, developing a new super-soldier serum was too much work and slapping an unstable alien creature on a crippled soldier seemed like a good idea to the military.
I like that they made the primary protagonist Flash Thompson, a character who has been struggling with a disability since he lost his legs in the pages of Amazing Spider-Man. The series is off to a good start by tackling outstanding issues such as Flash’s addictions and his relationship with his family, things that have usually taken the back seat due to often far removed from the life of Peter Parker and his exploits as Spider-Man.
Past writers were always quick to heap tragedy upon Flash Thompson but these never really stuck around long enough because a new creative team would take over and hit the reset button and bring Flashback to his usual one-dimensional jock that they always fall back on. I think this was the first time that writers actually saw Flash through his adversity instead of just having him suffer a setback and learn nothing from it.
Still, this series came out at a time when Marvel was focusing on shorter run series. While it lasted longer than some other Marvel titles, I feel like the push to move on to new storylines and the switch of writers half-way through its run makes everything seem rushed.
The series started off with Flash being Agent Venom on borrowed time before he gets retired out of the position before the symbiote permanently bonds with him. This plot constraint was done away with as soon as possible by having Flash eventually go rogue.
I feel that the series took a step back when the writers started adding supernatural elements to the symbiote. Notably in the Circle of Four story arc. This was an attempt to tie Agent Venom together with the Red Hulk, Ghost Rider, and X-23 for what I assume would have been a massive story arc. However, this was quickly pushed aside for other editorial mandates and the conclusion seemed like a rush to resolve it. Nothing that happens in this series has any real staying power.
Another mistake of this series is pushing Flash as far away from his social life when they move him out of New York. It makes his rekindled romance with Betty Brant kind of pointless and forced the writer to come up with a new supporting cast that hasn’t stood the test of time.
When Cullen Bunn took over as writer, he tried to set up a lot of different story arcs that didn’t really go anywhere. They set up big ideas, but by this time, Marvel titles were facing shorter and shorter runs with titles being rebooted or cancelled after a dozen or more issues unless they were very popular.
Bunn tried to expand on what Rick Remender did in issues #13 and 14, with Agent Venom getting a Hell-Mark. Apparently this was setting up for an event called the Descent which would see one of the various Hell-Lords of the Marvel Universe becoming the one true devil. Suddenly, Venom was possessed by a demon that gets trapped in his body and Venom starts going after the Department of Occult Armaments (DOA) to try and get answers.
After a handful of issues, this plot takes a back seat for a crossover with the Scarlet Spider titled Minimum Carnage which sees the two heroes travel to the Microverse to stop Carnage. It’s kind of a nice trip back to explore characters that were made popular in the 80s in the Micronauts book, but this story arc — like any involving Micronaut characters — really suffers since they can’t really include any Micronaut characters that Marvel doesn’t directly own. But we’ll talk about the Micronauts some other time. Minimum Carnage is a play on the Maximum Carnage, a Spider-Man crossover from the 90s. In a nod to that era of comics, I have to give kudos to the creative team on this one by book-ending the crossovers with two one-shots titles Minimum Carnage: Alpha and Omega respectively.
After Minimum Carnage, Bunn decides to relocate Flash to Philadelpha, removing him from a stable of well established Spider-Man supporting characters. I suppose this was an effort to distance Venom from what was going on in Amazing Spider-Man at the time (namely setting things up for Superior Spider-Man) but this left Bunn with the task of trying to fill the void of supporting cast members. There was an attempt to make Valkyrie a potential love interest for Flash, since they served together on the Secret Avengers. However, the Secret Avengers comic was cancelled not long after this and Valkyrie stopped appearing in Venom. Also with the move to Philly, Venom apparently drops the investigation into the Descent and the demon that also possesses his body is nearly forgotten about during the rest of the run.
Bunn also moves on to a three part story about the U-Foes acquiring fringe technology, some of which goes missing when Venom defeats them. This sets up yet another plot thread that eventually gets ignored when Flash switches gears again and starts fighting human traffickers and tries building an arsenal to be a better crime fighter.
By this point, the only recurring supporting characters in Venom are Katy Kiernan, a reporter who only serves as a plot contrivance. Either she’s giving Flash info that leads to his next battle, or she is the damsel in distress. The next is Andi, a goth teen who lives in Flash’s building and is one of the students at the high school where he is teaching phys-ed (yeah they make Flash a high school coach again despite his obvious disability) This leads to Andi getting part of the Venom symbiote and becoming Mania, a sidekick of sorts for Venom.
This, like other items in Cullen Bunn’s run on Venom, is a plotline that is cut short because Marvel was doing a company wide cancellation of all of their titles as part of the lead in to 2015’s Secret Wars. Agent Venom would appear in the Spider-Island limited series that came out of that company wide event before they restarted everything.
Ultimately, the second volume of Venom showed a lot of promise when Rick Remender was writing it. His story arcs were short and tied up nicely. When he ended his work on the title, most of the his plot threads were neatly tied up.
Unfortunately, this changed when Cullen Bunn took over. On and issue-to-issue basis, Bunn is not a bad writer. The problem at this point of his career was that he kept on throwing different ideas at the wall and leaving a plethora of loose ends in this book that would not get resolved until many years later.
After Secret Wars 2015, Venom would return in Venom: Space Knight, a title that brought Flash Thompson and the Venom symbiote into space fighting space crime. Ultimately, every successive Venom book has had to spend time going back and clearing up plot holes and unresolved threads left behind by Cullen Bunn’s run on Venom. As I write this, current Venom writer Donny Cates still finds himself going back and resolving plot issues from this volume of Venom. Issues like explaining how the Venom symbiote split in two allowing for creating Mania and so on.
The only real plot line that remains unresolved is this so-called Descent that was said to be coming. It seems pretty unlikely it will get resolved since two of the characters who got Hell-Marks along with Venom and X-23 are no longer active, namely the Red Hulk and the Alejandra Jones Ghost Rider, both have been depowered or are dead, or both. But hey, it’s the Marvel Universe and anything that has been done can be undone. However, it would be nice for somebody to get around to resolving this apparently abandoned plot thread because it actually sounds like it might be interesting.
