Waiting for the Trade - Spider-man vs. Venom !

Waiting for the Trade

 

by Bill Miller

 

Spider-man: Venom Returns

by David Micheline & Erik Larsen
collects material from Amazing Spider-man 330-333, 345-347 and Annual 25

 

Why I Bought This: When I first got into buying trades five years ago this was among the first few books I picked up (the first one incidentally was Spider-man: Birth of Venom) as I love the classic early Venom stories and this one in particular includes my all time single favorite issue of Spider-man when he and Venom battle on the island. With me now reviewing Venom’s monthly series, I thought it would be a good time to revisit this.

The Plot: Venom hates Spider-man a lot, knows Peter’s secret identity, doesn’t trigger his spider sense and will stop at nothing to kill him.

 
Chapter 0 – Guards at the Vault discover Eddie Brock is dead after hanging himself, with the symbiote nowhere to be found. They attempt an autopsy and the symbiote oozes out of the incision and kills everyone in the room. Eddie reveals the symbiote mimicked his skin thus hiding his vital signs. From there he takes the doctor’s security card and the symbiote morphs into a lab coat and Venom makes his escape.

Chapter 1 – Venom is the sewers of New York eating spiders. They pseudo-separate so Eddie Brock can work out and explain the stronger his human form gets, the more the symbiote can amplify his strength when they combine. Meanwhile Spidey is fighting Styx (rot touch) and Stone (typical 90s big guns, not the same character from the Daredevil review last week) in the park for a few pages until the villains escape on a hovercraft. Spidey and MJ go on a date, while Aunt May sees Eddie Brock has escaped on the news. May goes to call Peter but Eddie is at the front door. Meanwhile Styx and Stone are working for Jonathan Caesar, a rich creep who became obsessed with Mary Jane when she was on a soap opera in this era. May calls Peter to let him know Eddie is looking for him and she sent Eddie to Central Park and called the cops. Pete knows the cops have no chance and heads over there to face him. Spidey arrives and finds a cop on the scene, but the cop is again Venom as the symbiote had again changed its appearance. Spidey is desperately on the defensive and Venom corners him and webs him up for the kill when a baby falls into the lake due to collateral damage from their fight. Venom surprisingly chooses to save the baby. The real police arrive and Venom decides to depart as he wants his revenge on Spidey in private and away from innocents.

Chapter 2 – Pete is at May’s worrying about Venom, and sure enough Venom arrives there again. This time he morphs into a utility repair man so May is unaware of who he really is, and gets Peter to agree to face him in an abandoned sewer lest May be endangered. Pete considers leaving town with MJ but then bumps into Flash, who gives Pete an inadvertent pep talk that convinces Spidey to fight it out. As Spidey heads into the sewers he is spotted by Styx and Stone. In the sewer Venom gives what seems to be a standard super villain monologue, but in fact is sending symbiote tendrils through the floor to grab Spidey while they talk. Spidey dodges and counterstrikes prompting Venom to fly into a rage and threaten brain eating for the first time in an absolutely iconic panel. Just then Styx and Stone arrive and attack both Spidey and Venom. Stone’s guns are pretty useless against Venom. Just as Venom is about to eat Stone, Styx rot touches him and kills the symbiote. Spidey subdues the remaining villains as police take the now human and bereft Eddie away.

Chapter 2.5 – We meet up with Eddie a few months later, now imprisoned on Ryker’s Island instead of the Vault since he is no longer a super-villain. He’s still a physical fitness nut, and has a cellmate in multi-time serial killer Cletus Kassidy. Kassidy plans to literally knife Eddie in the back when the symbiote returns through the bars and Venom is reborn. They escape with ease, although the symbiote leaves something behind (but that’s a tale for a different trade).

Chapter 3 – Eddie returns to the Globe (where he worked as a reporter before he was Venom) and after killing the one dude he finds there, uses the computers to conduct some research. Pete meanwhile learns about Venom’s return and immediately puts MJ on a flight to parts unknown to keep her safe. That night Pete is eating at a diner and sure enough Eddie finds him again. They step into an alley (both still looking like civilians) where a mugger tries to rob them. Eddie reacts violently and Pete uses the opportunity to run away. Pete spends the night at a seedy hotel. In the morning he checks his phone messages and has a message asking him to consult on cryogenic science experiment (as well as threatening messages from Eddie). Pete thinks he may be able to cryogenically freeze Venom and heads over there, although after keeping a low profile he now webs across town so that Venom again ambushes him. We get a pretty fantastic fight scene with both characters battling above the city on their web-lines for five pages. Spidey creates enough separation to get to the cryogenics lab but when he asks an orderly to point him to the control room, the orderly ends up being Venom is disguise. Spidey winds up in the cryogenic chamber and Venom puts the deep freeze on him.

 

Chapter 4 – Spider-man wakes up on the beach. Venom reveals he has transported them to a deserted island so they can have their final battle uninterrupted. The entire issue is just an insanely awesome fight scene as the symbiote pulls off a series of creepy cool tricks: Spidey tries to blind him with webbing and his face explodes, Spidey tries to get a drink of water and Venom is lurking at the bottom of the lake since he doesn’t need to breathe, Pete tries to run into the jungle and Venom goes all Predator and turns translucent as he stalks him from the trees. Pete meanwhile is in full on Dangerous Game mode as Venom hunts him across the island, and begins setting snare traps and looking for ways to use the terrain. The battle/hunt goes a full day and into the night, with Pete eventually finding an abandoned gas mine filled with human remains. He tricks Venom into igniting the gas, and when the symbiote retreats from the fire Pete dresses one of the dead bodies in his costume so that once the flames die down Venom thinks he has killed Spider-man. Pete manages to swim to a passing boat and escape; while Venom, thinking his revenge is complete, decides to stay on the island.

Chapter 0.5 – A back-up story from one of the annuals that shows Eddie hitchhiking his way across the country after his escape from the Vault in chapter 0. (The Vault is in Colorado, Spidey is in NY). Anyway he’s at a truck stop when three guys with guns attempt a robbery. Venom reveals himself and kills them criminals in order to protect the family that gave him a ride when he was hitchhiking as Marvel editorial starts transitioning Venom into the Lethal Protector.

 

Critical Thoughts: This still completely holds up as one of the absolute very best Spider-man stories ever told. You want to understand how Venom became phenomenally popular then read this trade. In every issue he keeps upping the stakes both in how relentlessly he stalks Peter and how he comes up with new and cooler things to do with his costume. That escape from the Vault is some classic flat out horror movie style goodness, and every issue thereafter the symbiote has at least one new trick.

Plus in this trade we see Venom evolve a little from his first two appearances so that Eddie Brock is just as important as the symbiote. In Venom’s first appearance when his identity is revealed we were told two things about Eddie Brock: he’s a devout Catholic and he used to be a reporter. In this story we see both those factors come into play. He may be a dangerous psychopathic serial killer but his Catholicism won’t let him sacrifice a baby to get his revenge. And once he decides he wants to get Spidey alone for their final battle, he uses his reporter background to research both a trap to get Spidey where he wants him and to find a suitable location for that battle; hence the cryogenics lab and the island.

The true key to understanding why so many people found these early Venom stories to be mind-blowing is how novel they were for their time period. When these stories were written Norman Osborn had been dead for two decades, (and trade collections were a lot less common) so for entire generations of Spidey fans these stories were the first they’d ever read that were this high stakes and personal. When Electro or Scorpion break out of jail they don’t go looking for Spider-man, they try to rob a bank or kidnap Jonah or whatever the plot of the month is and Spider-man finds them and foils their plans. And even in the rare story where his other villains primarily want revenge on Spidey, they don’t know his secret. They have to go to Times Square and call Spidey out by blowing sh*t up on TV. But Venom, he doesn’t want to rob a bank or become a crime boss or rule the world or any other motivation that we’ve seen in literally 1,000 other Spidey stories. Venom just wants to kill Spider-man and eat his brains when he’s done; and that’s just a whole different level of hardcore. And worst of all he knows who Spidey is and he has no qualms of stopping by Aunt May or Mary Jane’s house to get to him if he needs to, which is why in my view Venom is far and away the greatest Spider-man villain of all (and possibly the best villain in all of comics period). And yes, he also looks pretty damn cool too.

 

Grade A+. That island story is still the greatest issue of Spider-man I’ve ever read.