#hes based off the .exe monster + various other shadowy evils

[crayonverse]

i did this little doodle of what smp michael would look like out of his containment

[hellzyeahthewebwieldingavenger]

The Vindication of Venom Part 3: Expectations

Part 2

Part 4

Now its time to get down to the real business of this essay and tackle the most vocal and frequent criticisms of Venom. Namely his original host Eddie Brock and his motives for hating Spider-Man. The first step to doing this though is to establish the expectations fans had for the character vs the actual intended concept behind him.

In part one I listed what I feel are the major criticisms of Venom and how I intended to address them one by one. In really thinking about it though I’ve realized that course of action would prove too difficult to properly dive into my points about Brock. Many of the criticisms surrounding him and many of my counterpoints to those criticisms are too interlinked with one another to be separated out like that.

As such I’m just going to talk about Brock more generally.

But as a reminder here are the points about him which I listed in Part 1:

·         Eddie Brock’s motivations for hating Spider-Man are weak and make no sense

·         Brock’s origin story involves rewriting events from the Sin Eater storyline to facilitate his fall from grace

·         Brock was a previously unknown character who is unconnected to Peter Parker’s life in or out of his costume.

·         The reveal of Brock as Venom, especially in light of previous two points, is a bad resolution to the mystery story seeded in issues leading to ASM #300

·         Other versions of the character (such as Spider-Man the Animated Series, Spider-Man 3 and the Spectacular Spider-Man Animated Series) all make Brock to be a much better dark reflection of Spider-Man than the original comic book version

In my introduction I stated that my thesis for defending Venom was that he was more poorly communicated and readers projected unwarranted expectations onto the character. Brock is really where those two aspects come to the forefront.

Venom visually looks like Spider-Man, or rather how Spider-Man had looked for a few year before ASM #300 given that he’d off and on been wearing the black costume. In ASM #300 Venom also displayed enhanced strength and speed as well as the ability to wall-crawl and generate webbing. Half of Venom came from the alien symbiote which had in the past granted other hosts abilities similar to Spider-Man.

And of course Venom’s primary colour was black, a colour commonly associated with evil in Western cultures. 

 It is my belief that all these things combined caused readers upon learning someone else had the symbiote and consequently in seeing Venom himself, to expect the character to be a kind of evil Spider-Man, a dark reflection of the character.

 This expectation coupled with his shadowy build up and debut in ASM #299-300 heightened fan anticipation for the character to be a big, big, big deal. Far bigger I think than if he had debuted in any given issue of Spider-Man that wasn’t a milestone of some kind, especially if it happened in Web of Spider-Man (the youngest Spider title) as originally intended.

 After all, an evil version of the hero is a time honoured tradition (especially in superhero comics) and one that for Spider-Man had never directly been instigated in his then 25+ years of publication. The lack of such an archetype in the series for such a long time might possibly have further enhanced fan anticipation to finally see such a character in the pages of Marvel’s flagship character. And for that type of character to debut in such a momentous issue as ASM #300 meant readers were hyped to say the least.

 Given these expectations it is no wonder that the character on the page proved disappointing to them.

 Furthermore, readers from later generations would have their own set of expectations for the Venom character.

 For many fans of Spider-Man of my generation (I was born in the early 1990s), we learned of Venom from the numerous merchandise he was featured on and more importantly from the 1994 Spider-Man animated series. Among the things the cartoon innovated when it came to Venom was the ideas that the costume brought out the darkside of its host, that Eddie Brock was an established member of Spider-Man’s supporting cast before he became Venom and that he blamed Spider-Man for ruining his life due to a series of misunderstandings.

 So impactful and definitive was this version of Venom that elements from it were featured in consequent adaptations (including Spider-Man 3 and the Spectacular Spider-Man TV show) and various comic renditions of the character (e.g. Ultimate Spider-Man).

 In fact the 1994 cartoon version made such a potent impression that there are long time Spider-Man fans who were around during the original debut of the black costume who believe that those original comics contained elements from the 90s cartoon’s take on the symbiote, chiefly the notion of the costume as a corrupting influence on Spider-Man.

For those fans and the ones of consequent generations Venom is on the Mount Rushmore of Spider-Man characters and villains, definitively standing alongside Green Goblin and Doc Ock as the A-listers of Spider-Man’s rogue’s gallery.

 Now something very important to note going forward is the fact that adaptations such as Ultimate Spider-Man, Spider-Man 3 and the Spectacular Spider-Man Animated Series all played Venom/Brock as something of a dark reflection of Spider-Man/Peter Parker.

 In USM and the Spec cartoon Peter and Eddie were childhood friends who’s fathers worked together and died in the same plane accident, both later following in their fathers’ footsteps becoming science students themselves.

 In USM whilst Peter was presented as a pretty nice kid still very much in love with his recent ex-girlfriend Mary Jane Watson, Brock was presented as a college aged creep who tried to take advantage of the underage high schooler Gwen Stacy (who’d recently lost her father) and derided her as a ‘tease’. 

In this version of the story, the alien costume is actually a lab created ‘suit’ Peter and Eddie’s fathers were working on, based upon Richard Parker’s DNA. When Peter wears the suit it mostly works fine but affects his emotions and transforms him into a monster resembling Venom. When Brock wears the suit, partially due to it not being based upon his DNA and partially due to his own mind and emotions, he becomes an even worse monster with even less control than Peter had.

Meanwhile in the Spec cartoon a stark difference is drawn between Peter and Eddie by virtue of, following the deaths of their parents, Eddie being raised alone whilst Peter had Uncle Ben and Aunt May and by extension Eddie becoming somewhat ‘in love’ with death whilst Peter came to appreciate life.

 In Spider-Man 3 Eddie Brock was a Bugle photographer like Peter Parker (who was around a similar age), interested in Spider-Man pictures and also loved a beautiful woman from afar (Gwen Stacy), which was not dissimilar to Peter’s feelings for Mary Jane in the previous two films.

 What must be remembered going forward was that the 1994 cartoon despite having Brock work at the Bugle (as a writer, not a photographer, although in one episode he did take a few photos) did not play Brock in any of the ways described above as far as being a dark reflection of Peter/Spider-Man is concerned. He wasn’t particularly concerned with chasing stories about Spider-Man, his attitude towards women was not compared or contrasted to Peter’s, he and Peter did not have any personal history, his parentage was never mentioned and he was most definitely not involved with science.

 With these portrayals in mind and his impact/legacy within the franchise as a whole many fans going back to check out the character’s true beginnings have been unpleasantly surprised to find Venom and his origin a far cry from what they knew or expected.

 I think this plays a very major role in the derision Venom’s origin story has within the fandom as essentially many fans hold Venom in contempt for not being like their wider pop cultural understanding of the character. Or at least not like the version(s) they like and/or are familiar with from adaptations.

 In the comics the symbiote never acted as a corrupting force upon Spider-Man, Eddie Brock was not established ahead of his debut as Venom, was not someone Peter had a friendship with, there was no established animosity between the two characters, the symbiote did not act as a corrupting force on Brock turning an already bad person monstrous and Brock was never someone who operated as a dark reflection in the ways outlined above. The absence of all these things results in disappointment from readers who come to ASM #300 expecting to see them in some capacity.

 Whilst I feel a lot of these ‘unfulfilled expectations’ are not intentional on the part of fans it is nevertheless very unfair as a point of criticism. After all why should a character or story be regarded as bad because adaptations based upon it went in different directions? If anything, wouldn’t it be at least equally valid to lambast those adaptations of Venom from deviating so significantly from the source material?

 Regardless, my point is that Venom in ASM #300 fails to meet the expectations of fans from before and after the issue’s release for different reasons and that disappointment from both camps contributed to the dominant narrative of his origin being simply inherently bad.

 My proposal however is that those expectations projected onto Venom’s debut were misplaced and as such not fair criteria to evaluate the character against.

 That is to say I not believe Venom was ever conceived to be:

a genuine traditional mystery character

a dark reflection of Spider-Man (not in the way adaptations play him anyway)

someone who’d make a massive impact upon Spider-Man’s life

someone who’d hold an inherent connection to him.

 Think of it like this.

 When an audience member believes the piece of media they are consuming is (or is trying to be) one particular concept or genre they then (knowingly or otherwise) evaluate it based upon what they feel are the common tropes and ‘rules’ of that concept/genre.

  For example someone watching a romance movie will be judging it based upon how believable the romance at the centre of the story is, the chemistry between the actors, etc. But if someone walks into an action movie expecting it to be a romance film and continues to believe it is trying  to be a romance movie, the movie is going to seem bad to them. All because they missed the fact that it was never a romance movie to begin with. 

  This is what I believe is what happened with Venom.

 Through some unclear writing and quirks of fate a lot of people just missed what the intrinsic ideas behind the character were and in doing so used the wrong set of criteria to judge him by.

  Which raises the question of what exactly were the concepts underpinning the character then? For that you’ll have to read Part 4.

Part 2

Part 4