written by Dan Slott and Mike Costa
drawn by Ryan Stegman and Gerardo Sandoval
colored by Brian Reber and David Curiel
It should be said that as a rule, I really do not care for crossover events, especially those that involve picking up multiple titles just to follow one story. Exceptions to the rule would be when the story is done by a fixed set of creators, like the fabled "Kraven's Last Hunt" which, though it cut through THREE Spider-Man titles for two months back in 1987, was solely the work of writer J.M. DeMatteis and artists Mick Zeck and Bob McLeod, and even the infamous "One More Day" which was also the work of one team, namely J. Michael Straczynski, Joe Quesada and Danny Miki, even though it cut across titles. In the case of the latter, as reviled as the story was, at least it was tonally consistent.
This story, unlike the "Astonishing X-Men" book I despise, is limited to two creative teams, but it's not particularly enjoyable anyway.
Former military-man-turned-crime-lord Lee Price obtains a symbiote from ex-Venom Flash Thompson's protege Andi Benton, aka Mania, and sets his sights on using the symbiote, which he can actually use to possess people, to conquer New York's underworld. It falls to Spider-Man, Flash, and the original Venom himself, Eddie Brock, to stop Price and his growing army of symbiote-possessed thugs, who include such heavyweight Spider-Man bad guys as Hammerhead, the Scorpion, and Spidey's former-flame-turned-crimelord the Black Cat. Will even their combined strength be enough?
As someone who followed Venom from his creation in late '80s, I was never a fan of the character himself; I just wanted to see how Spidey would beat him, AND I was a fan of then Spidey artist Todd McFarlane. Todd moved on to break down walls for comic book creators with Image and his Spawn series, and Marvel managed to stretch the Venom character more thinly than I could have imagined possible. I didn't stick around for the creation of a character than only children of the 90s could love, the paper-thin symbiote-infused-psychopath Carnage, nor was I around for the whole "Lethal Protector" nonsense where Venom went from being a one-note Spidey villain to some kind of twisted antihero.
I did note, though, that the character of Eddie Brock was so shallow and that Venom's appeal was so dependent on the symbiote that Marvel was even able to swap out the human host for several years, with the symbiote bonding with known Spidey villain Mac Gargan, aka the Scorpion, and later with double-amputee war veteran Flash Thompson, and the character was none the worse for it. There was some narrative merit to giving Eddie cancer a few years back as it infused him with some needed pathos and made him more sympathetic, but for me he never really felt like more than flesh to fill out the suit.
Now that Sony's finally making its long ballyhooed Venom spinoff movie with Tom Hardy, Marvel seems keen to give the character even more exposure than he's already had over the years, flooding the market with everything from Venom variant covers to storylines in which popular Marvel characters ranging from the Hulk to Spider-Gwen are "venomized." This clunker of a story is the latest such attempt to help spread awareness of the character in time for the movie, and it's really quite a forgettable one. Crime boss stories, even in Spidey's corner of the Marvel Universe, are old hat and this one really has nothing to distinguish it from its forbears except for an abundance of symbiotes, which don't make it particularly interesting. Lee Price is also a pretty lame bad guy, especially when compared to the likes of Kingpin (originally a Spidey baddie) and even the much more recent Mr. Negative.
About the only thing the story has going for it is some pretty, if somewhat generic art by Ryan Stegman, but because he only illustrates about half the story the quality is compromised by the scratchy, mostly unattractive artwork of Joe Madureira wannabe Gerardo Sandoval.
This is hardly the way to promote a character with an upcoming solo film, but then, given how utterly generic the recently-released trailer looks, maybe it's entirely appropriate.
5/10
No comments:
Post a Comment