Venom by Al Ewing (and Torunn Gronbekk) vol. 5: Predestination
Vol. 4 of this series was a pleasant surprise as it showed Eddie Brock actually coming out ahead for once as he realized his place in the grand scheme of things and gained control over his violently crazed future self, Bedlam. He also found out that while his mind can travel through time, it was locked to inhabiting versions of himself up and down the timeline, meaning that he couldn’t actually change his future or past. Unless, he had access to a time machine that allowed his mind and body to travel the timestream at will. Lucky for Eddie there’s one person in the Marvel Universe who has his own time machine ready to be used whenever he wants. Unlucky for Eddie is the fact that this person is Doctor Doom.
Seeing Ewing write the good Doctor is just about worth the price of admission for this volume itself. He captures Doom’s gloating arrogance incredibly well, showing us that this is a man who will cause one of his Doombots to self-destruct just to prove a point about his own infallibility. His interactions with Eddie are also fun as initial pleasantries give way to a full-on brawl through the timestream which impart guilt and hope to the latter, and a means to destroy this meddlesome troublemaker (by way of an upcoming event story) for the former.
This is all to say that vol. 5 is a lot of setup for future stories and while a lot of it is fun, some of it is weighed down by its very nature, in addition to wrapping your head around the time-travel rules of the Marvel Universe. This volume also marks Torunn Gronbekk’s debut as the new writer who’s chronicling Dylan Brock’s adventures in the present day, and even though she only gets one issue here I can’t say that it’s a marked improvement over what Ram V was doing previously. We also get five different artists illustrating the four issues and a “Free Comic Book Day” special in this volume and the lack of artistic consistency hampers vol. 5’s momentum as well. This is all to say that there’s a lot of stuff dragging down the good work done in this volume, and I really hope that it can shake some of it off in vol. 6 so that “Venom” can live up to the potential it shows here.