Written by Zeb Wells
Illustrated by Clayton CrainWELCOME TO CARNAGE U.S.A. — THE ULTIMATE RED STATE!Carnage’s maniacal reign of terror continues, courtesy of the critically acclaimed creative team of Zeb Wells and Clayton Crain! Spider-Man and the Avengers must go on a brutal hunt to capture Cletus Kasaday before a small town in the American heartland falls under his mass-murdering spell! Buckle in and prepare for a violence packed adventure! Carnage U.S.A. wants YOU this December!
I made a Beach Boy’s joke during this week’s Comics Should Be Cheap! that nobody commented on, so I’m going to copy and paste it as my introduction to this review since I still think it’s a funny reference:
If everybody had a symbiote across the USA, then everybody’d be killin’ like Cletus Kasaday. You’d see ’em wearin’ their Others; huarachi sandals, too. A bloody, bloody red monster – Carnage USA!
Check after the cut, where I promise to actually make some amount of sense yet still editorialize all over the place.
If Multiversity were for some reason to be bought by Viacom tomorrow, and if I was informed that the site would have to integrate entirely with VH1, I would have only one request: “I want to be a commentator on I Love the 90’s.” I don’t want to be a commentator because I think I’m particularly funny (the older I get, the less hilarious I realize I am), but just because I actually do love the 90’s. Some of my earliest and sharpest memories are from that era, from the jean jackets that were totally cool to wear (that were, of course, bought from the WB store and had Looney Tunes characters in leather jackets and sunglasses on them) to the amount of cartoons I watched on Saturday morning on Kids WB and Fox Kids! (which I’m fairly sure rotted my brain). I can remember the comics I read a lot, and I can remember what I loved most: I loved symbiote stories.
I wrote a good deal about myself and my inexplicable love of all things symbiote yesterday, but the bullet points are this: stories like “Maximum Carnage” (1993) and “Planet of the Symbiotes” (1995), featuring one alien-possessed crazy person fighting another alien-possessed crazy person while Spider-Man yelled “Come on, you guys! Knock it off!” in the background, were awesome. They weren’t particularly great, and conceptually they’re very laughable, but they define a time period of comic book enjoyment for myself (and, given that the Carnage mini sold well enough to warrant a sequel, apparently others as well). Everything that generally permeates around in comics of today wasn’t present then, because books could get away with admittedly stupid stories. Who needs all this serious baloney and world-encompassing epics of universe-reshaping proportions when you have a 150-foot tall Carnage absorbing other symbiotes and stomping around all over the place? Or killing random people in Manhattan because he’s bored?
So if, for some reason, I were to turn on the television and find Zeb Wells and Clayton Crain as commentators for VH1’s I Love The 90’s, I wouldn’t be surprised at all. That is, in a nutshell, the underlying message of Carnage USA – Wells, Crain and friends love the 90’s. If not, why else tell a story like this? Why tell a story bringing back a villain who was so useless he was used as cannon fodder in 2005 and then left floating in space? Why save him? Because they love the 90’s.
Carnage USA, on a purely surface level, is very reminiscent of those 90’s stories like “Maximum Carnage.” Featuring an all-star Avengers line-up, the team goes out to Doverton, Colorado, where Carnage has taken up residency and used his symbiote to literally take control of all of the residents. Between infecting rotting carcasses of meat to crawling through drain pipes and drinking lemonade, Cletus Kasaday tears through the book in as non-sensical and violent a fashion as he always has. The thing about a character like Carnage that is entirely easy to exploit is that you only need one thing to make a story with him “work”: sheer chaos. We, as an entirely collective of consumers, have outgrown the Carnage’s of yesterday, which is why he was so easy to be thrown away as fodder. A Carnage story doesn’t need a meaningful plot, and it doesn’t have to end with character growth. Carnage’s inherent motif is that he is an agent of chaos, and as long as he is allowed free reign to be insane he “works.” Attempting to create a soverign nation on US soil so he can create more symbiote offspring? Yeah, I believe that counts as insanity, and it definitely works.
Continued belowEverything else is essentially just background noise, because you’re watching Carnage in the same way that the internet watched Charlie Sheen to such nauseating ends a few months ago: we want to see what he’s going to do next. The book has some great bits in it with Hawkeye’s apparent derision of the Thing as well as the Thing’s inability to understand that we’re beyond the age of catchphrases 24/7, but its ultimately just fluff. You’re not paying for the Thing to make dumb/funny remarks; it’s a nice side dish, sure, but you’re paying to see Carnage to do some crazy nonsense. Does Carnage to do some crazy nonsense? Absolutely! Is he going to do more? You bet your boots he is! Mission: accomplished.
Wells has more than proven himself on titles like Amazing Spider-Man and now Avenging Spider-Man, and he has always made for a good Spider-Man writer because he knows how to mix what is important about Spidey’s stories together: a story you can somewhat take seriously with a strong helping of humor and snark on the side. Yes, it is all a bit silly, but outside of my remarks about how Carnage equates to insanity, you still ultimately perceive him as a legitimate threat, albeit a ridiculous one. Carnage’s method and madness is a bit antiquated, but Wells makes it work regardless, kicking off the action right away and leaving Spider-Man in an impossible situation by the end. It’s all leading to symbiots galore, with future issues featuring even more ridiculous symbiotes like Toxin and Hybrid, and as far as first issues go, it delivers quite a full story for the beginning of a mini set to come out every other month.
Crain’s artwork, however, doesn’t work that well to Well’s writing. It was one thing when the two combined for a story about the return of Carnage, in which he only appeared a few issues in and wasn’t ostensibly the star (despite the name saying otherwise). The previous mini was fairly dark, and Crain’s work is beholden to a fairly dark pseudo-realism angle, with some oddly shaped figures (Spider-Man in particular looks particularly twiggy) and over reliance on blurred or jumbled details in his linework. Given the cartoonish nature of a character like Carnage and the overall comedic tone hanging over many of the sequences, you would imagine that someone with a more open style might have worked better overall for this book. However, Crain’s greatest strength in the book is his use of motion in his finishes, which in turn allows for the darker portions of the book to actually transform the ridiculous elements to frightening ones, so it all somewhat evens out in the end.
If you are in any way a product of the 90’s as much as I am, you’re bound to enjoy this comic. It’s not something you have to take seriously, because to treat this as a book with as serious ramifications as (insert event comic title here) would be foolish. This isn’t a serious comic book in any way, shape or form; it’s just Zeb Wells and Clayton Crain seeing how far we as fans are willing to let them take us down a road of insanity. For my money, I’m willing to go quite far.
Final Verdict: 8.0 – Buy
