Spider-Man: Vengeance of Venom

Last year for Spider-Man month I covered the collection Birth of Venom, and I highly recommend you check out that review first as it leads directly into this one. But let me give you some highlights to help ya out anyway. In the 80s, Spider-Man returned from the Secret Wars with his now famous black suit, but with help from the Fantastic Four quickly learned that the suit was a living symbiote that was attempting to permanently bond to him. When the suit tried to take control of him, he managed to get to a church and used its bell to create strong enough sound waves to kill the symbiote, as sound is one of its main weaknesses. But that ended up not being the end of it, as this death was retconned to instead suggest the suit simply moved into the church where it found and bonded with down on his luck reporter Eddie Brock to form Venom. 

Venom and Spidey fought, but Spidey was able to outwit his opponent and Venom ended up in the supervillains prison the Vault, but almost immediately he escaped by using his suit’s appearance changing abilities to disguise himself as a guard. 

He then came after Spider-Man again, nearly managing to kill our wall-crawlin’ hero, but again was outsmarted and sent back to the Vault. 

Which is the precise point that this volume picks up at, so come see what further torment Venom has planned for Peter Parker and check out the video above!

Breakdown

I said in my Birth of Venom review that it was easy to see what made Venom a popular character, that it was largely the ways he’s so similar and yet so different from Spider-Man, and that holds largely true here, as well, especially as the plots lean ever more and more into the idea of Venom not being a villain but instead more of an unstable antihero. In that sense, Carnage was essentially inevitable. He’s the other end of the spectrum from Spider-Man with Venom right in the middle.  Carnage is the villain Venom could never be because Marvel was worried it would hurt his popularity while Spidey’s the hero Venom can never be because Marvel wanted him to be a villain. You can visibly see Michelinie struggle with that balance in this collection, trying to show Venom both as hero and villain by hanging onto a thread of a ludicrous, nonsensical moral justification that he clearly didn’t understand, which isn’t surprising coming from the guy who literally equated all metal fans with serial killers. Talk about your Brown vs. Quayle moments. I think it could’ve worked to an extent, though, if Venom hadn’t proven to be such a monumentally popular character that they were throwing him back into the story more and more frequently, no matter what they did to end it. So yes, I think Venom as a character ended up suffering on the whole from his own popularity among fans, and I think it’s difficult to read through this collection and not feel that. It’s the progression of tone of trying to make the stories darker and darker, like how Peter doesn’t quip when fighting Venom. Most of the time he barely even talks, and simply narrates his actions and concerns in thought bubbles. Or how Peter’s social life connections receive drastically less focus in these stories. There’s a moment where Mary Jane is confessing something deeply important about herself to him about why she’s started smoking again and Pete’s just like, “Shut up, babe, I’m watching the news.” Jesus, Pete. No wonder you two eventually broke up. It was just an awkward mess of trying to appeal to what they thought to be a more jaded young audience and yet still keep the classic feel of Spider-Man comics. Still, all that considered, I think they did about as good of a job with that as they could, and the stories are still interesting and fun to read.

Series Recommendation Level: High

If you’re at all a Venom fan or just curious about the character, these early venom stories will tell you pretty much everything you need to know.

If you would like to read other major symbiote stories, I recommend:

• Venom: Lethal Protector by David Micheline, Mark Bagley, and Ron Lim
• Venom vs. Carnage by Peter Milligan and Clayton Crain
• Venom: Carnage Unleashed by David Micheline and Andrew Wildman
• Venomverse by Cullen Bunn and Iban Coello

Collected Edition:

Spider-Man: Vengeance of Venom gets (1) Venom logo. Which as I said, basically goes right in the middle between bad and good. There are very few bonuses, pretty much just a few bonus and alternate covers, and a short Venom story that is also in the Birth of Venom collection, for some reason, but with this many issues collected in one volume, how many bonuses do you need?