By Larry Hama, Andrew Wildman, Art Nichols & Joe Rubinstein (Marvel)
ISBN: 978-0-7851-0199-4
There was a period in the mid 1990s where, to all intents and purposes, the corporate behemoth known as Marvel Comics had completely lost the plot. An awful lot of stories from that period will probably never be reprinted, but some of them weren’t completely beyond redemption.
Spider-Man spawned an enemy called Venom: a deranged and disgraced reporter named Eddie Brock who bonded with an alien parasite called the symbiote, to become a savage, shape-changing dark-side version of the Amazing Arachnid. Eventually the spidery foes reached a kind of détente, and Venom became a “Lethal Protectorâ€, dispensing a highly individualistic brand of justice everywhere but The Big Apple.
At one stage the symbiote went into breeding mode, creating a junior version of itself that merged with Cletus Kasady, a totally amoral and completely deranged psycho-killer. Calling him/itself Carnage, it tore a bloody swathe through New York before an army of superheroes caught him and his equally noisome “familyâ€.
There is no love lost between Venom and Carnage.
This collected four-issue miniseries (perhaps the best of a truly lackluster series of self-contained Venom stories released by Marvel) sees the Lethal Protector return to New York just as Kasady, who has sold the rights to his life to an online gaming company, uses a complimentary computer terminal to escape from the Ultra-High Security Ravencroft Hospital for the criminally insane.
That’s about it for plot. Larry Hama is an absolute master of hell-for-leather, gung-ho action, with a dry black wit and sharp ears for a good line, and the art is competent and frenetic, with inker Rubinstein mercifully blunting the worst excesses of the artists, who were fully immersed in the infernally annoying scratchy-line “Image style†penciling of the time.
Shallow and with no discernible lasting merit, this is nevertheless and full-on hoot of superheroic excess and could just be the solution to a dull, wet afternoon.
© 1996 Marvel Entertainment Group/Marvel Characters, Inc. All Rights Reserved.