We can’t completely blame– I mean credit– John Romita Jr. for this. After all, he’s the artist and Dan Slott is writing the thing. Who knows what exactly their creative process is for inventing new characters. But even if Slott invented the guy all by himself… Romita’s visual design isn’t helping matters much.

It’s Venom. But it’s not. Well, it’s a symbiote. But it’s different. Whatever.

Anti-Venom will make his comic book debut this summer in Amazing Spider-Man #568, as just reported a few hours ago on ew.com. Yep, this isn’t a joke– he’s really called Anti-Venom. Why do they call him Anti-Venom, you ask?? Um… because they’ve completely run out of ideas? Honestly, I don’t know. You’ll have to read it to find out. But even after you get past all the fan arguments (who seem mostly to be in agreement) that this is rehashing and just milking an old character (and yes, I too would agree) you have to wonder about practical application. What exactly is anti about him? He’s another alien symbiote with a spider on his chest and a giant, monster mouth. Maybe he’s anti in the sense that he’s nowhere near as cool-looking as Venom. He’s the opposite because he’s ugly and pathetic, rather than actually being Venom’s true opposite. Venom’s real opposite is Spider-Man… or maybe even Carnage. I guess the name works if the point is to have a really crappy looking Venom… not sure it’ll sell comics, but I’m not entirely convinced that’s Marvel’s biggest goal these days. In Civil War, Spider-Man revealed his identity, Iron Man got completely out of character rounding up anti-registry superheroes , and they killed Captain America… seems like Marvel’s made a lot of bad moves. Maybe after all of that we should be expecting silly things like an Anti-Venom.

I would probably have to read the book to be sure of this, but it doesn’t even look clever in a campy, comic kind of way. Anybody remember Anti-Spawn? In the early Spawn comics, there was a character sent by Heaven to eradicate spawn called the Anti-Spawn (he was actually Jason Wynn if I remember correctly). He had an awesome blue, armored costume that was completely different from Spawn’s, but what I loved about it was his belt. He actually had a logo of Spawn’s head with a slash through it. He was literally Anti-Spawn. Later they changed his name to Redeemer, which I admit sounds less-hokey. Maybe I just liked seeing a little camp in the middle of this very dark, graphic and brooding comic. Also the reason I loved psycho-plasm, which they later also changed to necro-plasm. But again, this guy doesn’t look like an anti-Venom… he just looks like a badly drawn Venom with  a different logo. I guess his costume is white and that’s the opposite of black… but that’s about it.

Carnage was an off-shoot of Venom and though you could argue they were just milking the symbiote idea, he was an entirely new and interesting character. Carnage was the one person Venom hated more than Spider-Man and he was fascinating because he was a serial killer who killed entirely for sport. He was a psycho almost in the vein of a Batman villain. He also had a MUCH different look and a his symbiote behaved differently. So I’m not saying you can’t get new, fresh ideas from old sources. I am saying that the Venom source is pretty well spent. If anything, Anti-Venom needs to be a new villain for VENOM, not Spider-Man, and unfortunately there’s no longer a monthly Venom series. If there were, I don’t think any of us would complain so much.

Oh, and to answer Peter’s thought at slashfilm.com… Anti-Venom in the new Spidey film? No chance. Anti-Venom won’t sell comics, much less a movie. He’ll be forgotten about long before it goes into production.

LLAP

-Cap’n Logan

Tags: Amazing Spider-Man, Anti-Venom, comics, John Romita Jr. Carnage, Marvel, Spider Man, superheroes, Venom

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 30th, 2008 at 3:12 pm and is filed under Capt Logan, comics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.