Venom is one of my all-time favorite characters, and when it was announced that Rick Remender and Tony Moore would be helming a new ongoing my heart jumped out of my chest. But Moore left some time ago and Remender just left an issue ago, so now it’s time for the new creative team of Cullen Bunn and Thony Silas to take over and keep this train running on time.
Can they pull it off? You bet your buttons they can.
Written by Cullen Bunn
Illustrated by Thony SilasThe Avengers task Venom with bringing in Damion Hellstrom – but who are The Monsters of Evil? A new dawn in the life of Flash Thompson!
Venom, like so many anti-heroes in comics, is a very cool character. He’s always had a great edge to him; when he was Eddie Brock, he was the Lethal Protector, fighting robots in an underground city beneath San Francisco and trying not to eat the brains of those around him. Following this, Venom was Mac Gargan for a while, and folks like Warren Ellis and Brian Bendis got to play around with Gargan’s mentality as a C-List villain being bumped up to an A-List superhero. It was fun to see this character go from blatant villain to an anti-hero bordering on a psychopath before devolving back into a villain with a false antihero front while keeping the psychopathic edge. No matter who was under the symbiote, it seemed that it was a mainstay for Venom to never just be the good guy.
Then Venom became Flash Thompson, and things changed. Gone are the days of a villain, either former or current, trying to figure out what to do with fantastic power. It’s a completely new game as the hero is a self-loathing and unsure of himself, yet his background as a soldier and a bully matched with his family history push him to be the next Spider-Man. The catch is that no matter how hard he tries, he can’t, and so we are endeared to him. That’s what Remender’s story accomplished, anyway. When the book began, Flash was a soldier used to taking order now given the ultimate opportunity, but it ended with him drawing a personal line in the sand between how he could balance his own moral code with the ethical one of a hero. This is, in so many words, what Remender does when he comes to new books: he focuses on the characters, pushes them to their absolute limits to the point that their sanity should break, and then he helps them get passed it.
Cullen Bunn is completely different however. What Bunn has been seen to do on books is similar to Remender in style, but completely different in execution. However, just as Bunn followed Aaron on “Wolverine” made sense, Bunn following Remender on “Venom” makes perfect sense as well, and you can easily assume that everything Remender did in the past will be in good hands with a guy like Bunn.
Ultimately there are two things that work in this book’s favor. The first is that, despite this being issue #23, the story acts as an entry point for new readers who happen to hop in now that Bunn is driving the car. Bunn and Remender worked very well together during Remender’s final arc, but that wasn’t exactly a “jumping on point”; certainly not compared to this issue. And so, with that in mind (and for those who didn’t read the recap page), the story picks off with a quick two-page spread tremendously illustrated by Thony Silas that recaps all of the major events both in Thompson’s life and in the book so far, from his feud with Jack O’ Lantern through “Circle of Four,” Venom’s joining of the Secret Avengers and the Crime Master stuff. Nothing is too heavy handed, all of it is succinct and it’s a great way to bring those up to speed who haven’t been playing along.
The second element that works in the book’s favor is that, despite acting as a “new reader friendly” book, it continues the ongoing saga of Flash Thompson as Venom without missing a beat. Bunn makes for a great follow-up to Remender because the two have a similar taste for character-based stories with dark tints, and so Bunn continues a previously abandoned thread of the book — the one from “Circle of Four.” Not only that, but for those who have read Bunn’s other Marvel work, he offers up a connection between this and “The Fearless,” the “Fear Itself” follow-up he wrote which greatly affected the attitude of a certain character which, at the time, seemed like a fairly odd change. Bunn brings these two threads together for one new one, and it works like a charm.
Continued belowSilas adds a lot to the book in his own rights as well. He manages to jam pack a lot into the book, that previously mentioned flashback sequence aside, and between the giant shoot out and Venom’s stand-off with the issue’s antagonist there’s a lot of sharp looking storytelling in here. Silas’s main strength is with the main character though, as his take on the Agent Venom costume is more detail oriented than we’ve seen in the past. Playing heavily with shadows, Silas treats the symbiotie like any costume of thread or spandex, allowing us to see Flash’s facial features a bit more keenly than before, and when Flash begins to let loose and the symbiotie itself is freed up Silas uses that to it’s full extent. We haven’t seen too much of this version of Venom, but all of the new elements are more than welcome.
Suffice it to say, the book makes for a good read. Bunn and Silas are introducing a new look and feel into the book, and while Remender’s overall run on Venom was a story about Flash Thompson’s growth from near zero to almost hero this one seems to want to play a bit more in the genre. It’s clear genre-based superheroics, and the 14-page fight sequence leading up to the final reveal (note: that’s 70% of the comic, folks) says that more than anything else. It makes for an interesting change of pace and it certainly puts a foot down in terms of what the new regime has in store.
Of course, this change is a double-edged sword. The only real detriment to the book is that, for all intents and purposes, this is a style over substance issue. It’s a fast-paced read that introduces a new villain and re-utilizes an old one, but whereas every previous issue of the book was loaded to the brim with character moments, this one is rather lacking in that. It’s more action-packed now, focusing on Venom’s talent as an agent, a hero and a fighter. This isn’t intrinsically a bad thing by any means; comics, especially ones that star superheroes, are meant to be action-packed. However, the only major or glaring change visible between the creative transition is this one, for better or for worse, and depending on how much of the character aspect is avoided in future issues could determine how these two runs ultimately compare.
So it’s with these things in mind that we can very easily give the first issue of Bunn and Silas’ run a thumbs up. While it does find it’s footing in what came before, it’s clear that the new creative team is here to do something different. With a different focus and new villains for Venom to go up against, this first arc of the all-new “Venom” should end up just as strong as the one that came before it. Let’s just hope that Bunn can at least infuse the book’s hero with as much heart as he does in his other work, namely “the Sixth Gun.”
Final Verdict: 8.0 – Buy
