Carnage is the latest character to get roped into ‘Superior Spider-Month’, but his story ends up failing in a way that’s just about exactly opposite to the way that “Superior Foes of Spider-Man” succeeded wildly.
Written by Kevin Shinick
Illustrated by Stephen SegoviaSUPERIOR SPIDER-MONTH GETS SINISTER WITH THE RETURN OF CARNAGE!
• LOCKED AWAY IN AN ASYLUM, IT LOOKS LIKE CARNAGE IS GONE FOR GOOD—BUT HIS FELLOW INMATES HAVE OTHER PLANS…
• WILL THEY SUCCESSFULLY WAKE THE MONSTER?
• OR WILL THIS HIDEOUS EXPERIMENT CREATE THE MOST POWERFUL, DANGEROUS, MANIACAL CARNAGE YET… A SUPERIOR CARNAGE?
• KEVIN SHINICK (Avenging Spider-Man, Robot Chicken) and STEPHEN SEGOVIA (Extreme X-men, Thor) come together to create a story so grotesquely gratifying you wont be able to look away!
We’ve seen this all before and you know what’s coming before it happens. Supervillains never stay in their supermax prison facilities for long. How long can you hold someone or something like Carnage? A lot of readers probably wish he’d have been held back in the 90’s, never to be heard from again. I can’t say that I necessarily feel that way, but he’s definitely better as the spicy side dish to a Spidey main course. His dramatic usefulness, or lack thereof, as a solo lead in “Superior Carnage” seems to support this idea.
You see, The Wizard is using him to execute a prison break and to put together a new Fearsome Four, but given Carnage’s erratic nature any “control” over him is up in the air. This could have factored in as either part of the fun or a clever play at tension, but it never really ends up being either. Carnage has no motivations of his own. That’s kind of the point, but it never makes for a villain who seems like he’s building toward something, even as he’s got the upper hand. Basically, kids, it’s good to have goals in life and Carnage has none. For the majority of the issue, he’s a missile darting around and causing chaos without any real escalation.
Throughout “The Amazing Spider-Man”, The Wizard had always been played as a C-list baddie. Maybe in some alternate dimension or elseworld he’s a real scary dude, but that’s not the case, traditionally. Here, it’s actually impressive the way that Shinick turns him into a menacing, violent person – set to go off at any moment. The problem is that he tries to have it both ways by having him commit some pretty serious and well-organized crimes while showing that he’s still an overly wacky, bumbling sort of Bond-villain type. In other words, the Wizard’s bite finally matches his bark, but his bark is still really pretty stupid. Shinick is a writer for Robot Chicken, so it was surprising (or maybe not, if you’ve actually watched the show) that the issue didn’t go for more laughs. In the handful of times that it did, it missed the mark pretty badly. An oddly placed Pussycat Dolls reference ends up being one Pussycat Dolls reference too many. We’ve seen the grim interpretations of Carnage so many times that he might benefit from having a little sense of humor injection. Then again, maybe pairing mass murder and humor would be tough to pull off. Can we just agree that it would be worth a try?
Stephen Segovia’s art has a real Harvey Dent situation going on here. There are pages where he clearly advanced his craft to places that I haven’t seen from him until now. There are 3-4 pages (usually full page spreads) where the staging and the detail – really the total package – is so good that you could hang these pages on your wall and they would look great. You’d have to be a big Carnage fan, but they do look really good. At other times, characters are awkwardly posed or seem to be reacting when no reaction is necessary. There are panels where detail is extruded where it feels like it’s required and there are other panels where things are covered up by shadows that look like they shouldn’t have been. Characters’ eyes are blacked out in shadow where they would have benefited dramatically from a more subtle, graded approach. Ill-placed shading is a particular pet peeve of mine, but it’s never more apparent than in the handful of pages that are really gorgeous that a more subtle approach to the technique makes for a better product. Segovia seems to revel in the carnage and bloodshed, so he seems like a good pick to draw the character. Where Erik Larsen and Mark Bagley favored Carnage as a tool for sci-fi horror, Segovia and Shinick use him more as a blunt instrument. That’s a totally valid approach, but perhaps a less interesting one. Future issues would do well to try to create a few new sides or situations to the character for Segovia to show off, but if all we get is a murderous rampage, at least the guy they got for this is more than capable of drawing Carnage’s bigger moments.
Perhaps Shinick has something up his sleeve to morph this into an approach to the character that we haven’t seen before. It certainly doesn’t feel that way, because Carnage never really seems like anything other than a pawn in his own book and the final few pages of the book do very little to tease us into coming back. Segovia has a handful of great moments among ordinary work with an ordinary character. Ultimately, “Superior Carnage” falls short of the other titles with the ‘Superior’ banner, even though it’s not a terrible comic. It’s just another Carnage comic. In a book with a high fictional murder count and a massive prison break, that ends up being its greatest crime.
Final Verdict: 4.5 – Pass, for extreme Carnage fans only.
