Waaaay back in the summer, I wrote a little blog about John Romita’s “brand new Spider-Man villain,” Anti-Venom. It sounded like the dumbest thing I’d ever heard. It looked like the dumbest thing I’d ever seen. Recently, I read Amazing Spider-Man 568-570 (haven’t pick up the final couple of issues of the arc) and I’m changing my tune. Anti-Venom turned out to be pretty cool.

 Back in the summer, we only got a couple pieces of info on this guy. We had John Romita’s drawing, which, despite that it’s beautiful art, looked like yet-another generic symbiote. And we had the name, Anti-Venom, a laughable idea that screams “we’re all outta ideas” when it’s read out of context. I wish the press releases had given us just a little more to go on, or not mentioned it at all, because Dan Slott and John Romita really surprised me. And considering how disappointed I’ve been with Marvel lately (though I’m waiting for the trades to read ANY of Secret Invasion, so don’t rake me over the coals if it’s good… I just had major issues with Civil War) that’s really saying something.

 I won’t spoil too much because I want to encourage fans to read this arc, especially those who haven’t been reading Spidey for a long time, and fans of Venom, Carnage, and black costume Spider-Man. In a nutshell, Anti-Venom isn’t just another symbiote. It’s Eddie Brock, who hasn’t been Venom for quite a while. Mac Gargan, the Scorpion, has been merged with the symbiote lately, and since Brock lost it, he’s discovered the symbiote left him with cancer.

Eddie has been working with a mysterious  man who runs a homeless shelter, trying to do some good before the cancer kills him. People keep miraculously getting healed at this shelter, and the same thing happens to Eddie– when this guy touches him, the cancer is eradicated, but it also seems to be placed with something else.

Suddenly, he becomes Anti-Venom, and he’s really more of an anti-body. Eddie now has the ability to eradicate his old symbiote, which he tries to do as soon as it attempts to merge with him again. He also tries to do the same to the traces of the symbiote left inside Peter Parker… the problem is, he might also eradicate the very radioactivity that gives Parker his powers!

I guess I should have known that Romita wouldn’t work on anything as silly as what Anti-Venom originally sounded like to me, but like I said, after Civil War and killing off Captain America, I haven’t been able to put much past Marvel. And this isn’t nearly as brilliant as the original black costume and Venom stories, but it’s certainly well-written and worthy of the team that worked on it. If I had known Anti-Venom was going to be Eddie Brock, I never would have written that other blog. It’s great to see one of my favorite characters doing something intersting again, and thanks to this arc, I’m finally putting Amazing Spider-Man on my pull-list for the forseable future.

Also check out Venom: Dark Origin, a new five-part mini-series that tells Eddie Brock’s past from childhood, and gives us the Venom saga completey from Brock’s perspective.

LLAP

-Cap’n Logan

The web is suddenly inundated with news and rumors about Spider-Man 4 as Sony suddenly starts talking about the web-spinner again. Gee, I wonder why? Could it be because another hugely popular comic book franchise has already eaten almost every box office record for breakfast and just keeps going back for more helpings? The Dark Knight has only been in the theater for just under three weeks and according to Entertainment Weekly, it’s hit the $300 million mark faster than any film in history and is almost sure to beat Titanic’s all-time record. Of course, Spider-Man used to be the talk of the town– the first in the trilogy held the record for largest opening weekend gross, and each film has beaten the previous by leaps and bounds.

But Sony’s only got one problem with their logic– the reason each Spider-Man film has done better than the last is because of the success of the one before it. Spider-Man 3 did so well because Spider-Man 2 was so good; for a long time it was even christened by a lot of critics the best super hero film of all time (though that title was just snagged three weeks ago– Dark Knight is still at 94% on Rotten Tomatoes’ tomatometer). Spider-Man 3 may have grossed well at the Box Office, but it’s received a lot of bad press since then and most fans agree that the franchise lost its magic when it tried to make too many different kinds of people happy instead of making the crisp, solid picture Spider-Man 2 was. In short, most of us are a little tired of Spidey on the big screen by this point. I doubt a fourth film would flop, but it’s certainly not going to make as many people rich.

So what about a spin-off? Wha-huh? you timidly ask. Yep, they’re also seriously talking Venom now. Maybe they should have thought about that before they KILLED HIM OFF at the end of Spider-Man 3.

Sony wants to pull an X-Men Origins: Wolverine and spin off the ever popular Venom into his own picture. Naturally, everyone’s concerned. Some are worried that it’ll be a different character than Eddie Brock (which would be a big, big mistake, since that’s who all the fans know and love– please don’t do to Venom what they did to Catwoman…). Others are wondering who will play him and whether or not Topher Grace can head a whole movie all by himself. Personally, I think Venom and his origins were handled with such disrespect in Spider-Man 3 that Sony should be thinking less X-Men Origins: Wolverine and more The Incredible Hulk. His story and Brock’s character were over-simplified and he appears an hour into the movie like an after-thought, after all the “important” has been introduced, which barely includes him. He looks absolutely fantastic but gets so little screen time that it hardly matters.  Venom needs a complete reboot. I don’t really want a Venom completely without Spider-Man, but I also don’t want some contrived plot device to save Brock, because there’s no way he survives what happens to him at the end of the last movie, and no one can tell me a spin-off was ever planned way back then.

The biggest concern is one I’m not sure I get: can a villain be the protagonist for a whole film? Even Todd McFarlane (who created Venom, in case you weren’t aware) has suggested this is a problem.  First, if you can have a movie like The Punisher (which I absolutely hated, but a lot of people didn’t), who is a brutal killing machine who kills for vengeance, you can do a Venom movie. There are certainly ways to make misguided characters sympathetic. Venom has never been just pure evil– that’s what Carnage is for. He was called the “Lethal Protector” in a lot of the 90s comics, and there was even a mini-series entitled that. I think the concept of a Venom who hates Spider-Man but simultaneously brutally kills in order to protect innocents may have been well after McFarlane left Marvel to start Image Comics, but it’s certainly the way he was for a lot of years. I always thought Venom was interesting because he judged everyone by his own standards, and if he thought someone was harming whomever he deemed “innocent,” they were dead. This isn’t a mustache-twirling villain– this is a guy who really thinks he’s doing the right thing and that every good person should be doing what he’s doing. So even though he’s certainly more of a villain than a hero, I say that makes him sympathetic enough for his own film.

The only question now is, can a Venom movie make money after Spider-Man 3 left a lot of fans cold? I say yes, but only if the trailers make it absolutely obvious that A) it’s Eddie Brock and B) this is much deeper, much more meaningful, and with a much more character-driven story than the last Spider-Man film.

After all, that’s why Dark Knight suddenly has critics taking the medium of comic-book movies seriously.

LLAP

-Cap’n Logan