Venom by Ewing & Gronbekk vol. 7: Exsanguination

It was inevitable that Carnage and his human host, Cletus Kasaday, would cross over into the pages of this run of “Venom” at some point.  The two symbiotes do have a history, after all.  Things start off with Cletus trying to track down Dylan Brock in an effort to get to his dad, a process which involves killing a lot of people.  When they do finally meet, things don’t go the way they were expecting as Carnage is whisked off to the Garden, Cletus is left behind, and Dylan winds up dead.

The bulk of the crossover with “Carnage” is written by co-writer Torunn Gronbekk and it feels like it was meant to serve that series, which I’m not currently reading.  I don’t feel like this adds anything significant to the Venom/Carnage rivalry and the one satisfying bit from that writer’s issues – Cletus’ anxiety over Carnage’s disappearance – is quickly glossed over.  The really interesting stuff comes from the issue written by Al Ewing which follows up on Carnage’s emergence at the end of the previous volume.  There’s a lot of game-changing business there, to the point that I wish more of the crossover had focused on it so that it didn’t feel like it was all being crammed into such a small space with so little explanation.

I was expecting better from the two Ewing-written issues that followed, but they were a rare miss for the writer in this series.  While I don’t think the fact that they’re tie-ins to the “Blood Hunt” event hurts the whole thing, the fact that they’re dragging some old and obscure continuity into the main series doesn’t do it any favors.  Ewing did this kind of stuff regularly on “Immortal Hulk” and he did it well to the point where it didn’t feel like you needed to do an online search to find out what was going on.  That’s not the case here and the dual storylines suffer for it.

Toss in some competent-but-underwhelming art from Ken Lashley, Pere Perez, and Juan Ferreyra – who’ve all done better work elsewhere – and you’ve got a disappointing volume overall for this run.  I’d be interested to know how co-writing this series has worked over the course of this run as Ewing’s contributions have been consistently good while Ram V and now Torunn Gronbekk have struggled to deliver something that reaches the level of “decent.”  If nothing else, the end is in sight as the Ewing-written “Venom War” is next alongside tie-in issues of this series from Gronbekk.  No points guessing which one I’m looking forward to more at this point.