Venom by Ewing & Gronbekk vol. 6: Infiltration

Last time, Eddie Brock went into the past with Doctor Doom and got an idea of what his future holds.  His son Dylan also found a potential partner in Bren Waters, current host to the Toxin symbiote, son of Alchemax employee Ozkhar Waters, and target of the Noname terrorist organization.  It’s that last bit which gets Bren in trouble and causes Dylan and Venom to bail him out, along with Natasha Romanov who has also found her own symbiote companion by the name of Widow (natch).  While they sort things out in the present day, Eddie uses Doom’s time machine to break the chains of fate and take Meridius on directly in his garden.  It’s a great plan on paper, save for the fact that it may unleash something even more calamitous in practice.

The good news here is that there are only three artists working on these five issues here.  Julius Ohta and Cafu handle the majority of their Dylan and Eddie issues, respectively, with Rafael Pimentel pitching in for support on them.  They all do solid work and provide artistic consistency between their issues, which makes the art a step up from the previous volume overall.

Unfortunately this volume continues the trend of Eddie’s adventures being more interesting than his son’s.  Previous Dylan writer Ram V gave us a pretty straightforward take of the character being pursued in the present day by bad corporate entities and new writer Torunn Gronbekk doesn’t do anything to distinguish herself here outside of bringing more symbiotes into the story.  Ewing, on the other hand, continues to up the complexity of his time travel story to good effect here as he offers up more payoff to his setup of Meridus’ character here.

The catch is that the volume ends with what should feel like a genuine raising of the stakes that doesn’t quite click.  It involves the return of a major character from Venom’s mythos that was also featured in Donny Cates’ run, but it lets him run his mouth for a bit too long and his big threat at the end of the volume doesn’t feel credible.  That could change with the couple of issues from his ongoing series that will be included with the next volume (Coming Soon!), but while I believe in the story Ewing alone is telling here, having to put my faith that he’ll deliver the goods in vol. 7 is just a little unsatisfying here.