All-New Venom: Who is All-New Venom?

It’s hard not to look at this collection and think that something has gone wrong with the next stage of Al Ewing’s “Venom” run.  After bringing the business with Meridius to a close in “Venom War” we were set up for a new era with Eddie Brock bonded to Carnage, the Venom symbiote in the wind, and Dylan Brock left to the mercy of the system.  There’s nothing inherently wrong with all that setup, but the fact that this volume collects the entirety of the “All-New Venom” series implies that things didn’t go as well as Marvel was hoping they would.

To be fair, this isn’t the only series to have received this treatment, and there’s the general feeling that Marvel has been struggling on the whole as of late.  It’s just that Venom has proved in the past that he can carry a series, this title was being written by one of Marvel’s best writers, and it had a big mystery driving it from the jump.  You’d have expected “All-New Venom” to easily last more than ten issues.  I guess a better question now is, should it have?

This volume is clearly split into two parts with the first half being concerned with the title mystery.  It’s even kind enough to give us plenty of suspects.  Is it unrepentant supervillain Madame Masque? Bulletproof mayor of New York Luke Cage?  Editor in Chief of the Daily Bugle Robbie Robertson?  Or everyman sidekick to the Marvel Universe Rick Jones, who hasn’t actually been bonded to a symbiote yet?  Dylan isn’t sure, but he’s going to find out no matter what his current foster parents, Mary Jane Watson and Paul Rabin, have to say about it.

The bad part about this mystery is that it was spoiled pretty thoroughly even if you check comic news sites regularly and don’t click on headlines advertising spoilers regarding it within.  I will say that Venom’s new host feels appropriate after all these years and given their relative history together.  There’s a definite tension between them because of that and it gives their relationship a different vibe than what we’ve seen between Eddie and Dylan.  I did appreciate seeing them hash out their issues over the course of this volume and this new partnership is still in place at the end of the volume.  Which is a good thing as it feels that there’s more to develop here.

I also tell myself that I should’ve been able to guess who the host was had I gone into this volume completely blind.  Not because Ewing plays fair with the mystery, but because of genre rules that I’m very well aware of.  If you’re looking for a hint, all I’ll say is this:  Don’t ever take Ewing up on a game of three-card-monte – he knows how the game is meant to be played.

As for everything else in this volume, it serves up some relatively low-stakes superheroing as Venom mixes it up with the likes of A.I.M., M.O.D.O.K., and S.C.A.R.  That last one being Symbiote Containment And Research, who have a pretty clear investment in seeing the title character brought in and provide an ongoing threat for this volume.  Fortunately Venom isn’t alone in this as he’s got the likes of Flash “Anti-Venom” Thompson willing to help Mary Jane out, a couple more symbiote friends looking to make good, and at least one former suspect who has been ready to help him all along (even if they didn’t know it yet).

All of this is perfectly fine, and that’s the problem.  Ewing’s previous run may have been very high concept with its multiple timelines and iterations of the characters going back on themselves, but you couldn’t fault its ambition.  Nor the fact that he clearly had a plan with what he was doing and was trying something definitely new with the character.  Whether or not it was a proper story for “Venom” is debatable, and there’s the fact that all of the stuff involving Dylan from other writers just wasn’t as good as what Ewing was doing.

Now, it feels like Ewing has retreated back to straightforward superheroics with the character and that wouldn’t necessarily feel like a bad thing if it felt like there was something new being done here.  There’s the new host, but that doesn’t make all the fighting and superhero posturing any more interesting.  What’s more is that Ewing doesn’t appear to have created any new characters for this series.  All of the major players here are familiar inhabitants of the Marvel Universe with their own continuity that tends to feel more like baggage than outright entertainment here.  Yeah, Ewing is able to make some of it fun, but the constant feeling of, “Hey, it’s that guy/thing!” definitely wears off by the end of the volume.

I’ll say that one thing I wasn’t expecting from this volume was to feel genuine sympathy for Paul Rabin by its end.  Created by Zeb Wells as Mary Jane’s new boyfriend at the start of his run, he initially came off like a character that was meant to be hated simply because he was put in that role.  Not that I can really blame fans for feeling that way as anyone in that role was destined to be disliked for however long they were shoved into it.

Here, I just felt bad for seeing Ewing throw him under the bus.  He’s not only a step behind everyone, constantly dunked on by Dylan, and has a girlfriend who does just about everything she can to not be a good one even with the reasons she has.  By the time she finally breaks up with him, it’s more of a relief than anything else.  Now Paul can finally get the hell out of this superhero madhouse and find a girl who doesn’t have a superhero ex-boyfriend.

Oddly, the big breakup moment is done as a brightly-lit full-page splash which gives every indication that this is something the reader should be happy about.  Whether or not they are is up to the reader, but artist Carlos Gomez does get a solid visual out of it.  Which is what he does for the majority of this volume’s length as the standard superheroics are drawn in a conventionally pleasing house style.  Gomez does get to show off a bit in the mindscape sequences in the final issue, but it’s not really enough to make me excited for the fact that he’s going to continue being this artist for “Venom’s” ongoing adventures for the future.

Of which there will be more as the final page sets up the return of a recently established Big Bad for the character.  Their return is apparently going to be the big thing driving this series going forward and it’s nice that “Venom” will be having one now.  I do feel a little disappointed that we’re going back to the well so soon with this particular villain, even if there is the chance to flesh them out a bit more this time around.  Like this volume as a whole, it feels like in the face of apparent commercial failure Ewing is retreating to what has worked before rather than trying something new.