#of andrew garfield's career defining turn on doctor who | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

theconservativebrief · 6 years

Link

It’s hard for a supervillain to shine when their greatest enemy, the superhero who defines them and vice-versa, has been recently vaporized by an Infinity Gauntlet-wearing mad titan. But if there’s any Spider-Man villain that can stand alone, it’s Venom, the squid-ink-colored inverse of Peter Parker.

Venom is hitting theaters this weekend without Parker, who was last seen getting dusted away, along with half of humanity, by Thanos in Avengers: Infinity War. It’s fans’ first opportunity to see the iconic character come to life since his ignominious debut in 2007’s Spider-Man 3, and it presents a chance for Sony to perhaps absolve itself of some of the grievances leveled at that film. It’s also an opportunity to get to know the beloved symbiote and its host, Eddie Brock (played by Tom Hardy), on their own terms and not defined by Peter Parker.

From his beginnings as an editorial solution to the puzzling logistics of superhero uniform maintenance, to his weird alien and vampiric associations, to what he says about the future of Sony’s Spider-Man universe, Venom as a character represents a lot more than just the opposite of his most famous adversary.

Given Venom’s current status as one of Spider-Man’s most iconic foes, the character’s origin story is, fittingly, a hilarious combination of chance and pragmatism.

In 1982, Marvel asked readers to send in ideas for its comics, and a fan named Randy Schueller wanted to give Spider-Man a new black costume made of unstable molecules. Marvel ended up paying Scheuller $220 for the basic idea, and one year later Spidey appeared in a black costume.

But according to artist John Byrne, the fledgling idea that would eventually become Venom began much earlier, as a solution to a simple problem concerning superhero costumes. It happens in movies, television shows, and in comic books: Superheroes have a huge fight and their precious uniforms emerge as torn up as the heroes wearing them. But in the next installment, those uniforms are back and good as new.

Byrne, who was working with writer Chris Claremont on Iron Fist at the time, noticed this illogical pattern.

“I didn’t much like the notion of Danny Rand [a.k.a. Iron Fist] sitting in a corner with a needle and thread,” Byrne writes on his official website. “So … I suggested that the outfit was made of some kind of biological material that ‘healed’ instead of having to be patched. We never got around to using that in Iron Fist, and years later, after Spider-Man got his alien costume in Secret Wars, Roger Stern asked if he could use the notion, and added the idea that the suit was some kind of symbiote.”

The idea of a symbiote comes from the symbiotic relationships we see in nature — when two organisms (e.g., clown fish and anemones) form a bond that benefits both. Venom being symbiote began with the kernel of an idea from Byrne that Stern then implemented; eventually, writer David Michelinie and artist Todd McFarlane took the reins and created Venom as a fully fleshed-out character, along with a proper, plural noun and alien race known as the Symbiotes.

Derived from the meaning of their name, the Symbiotes need a host to bond with and give that host superpowers (Venom has super strength, agility, and shape-shifting abilities) in exchange for life force, usually in the form of adrenaline. When people refer to Venom, they’re referring to the specific, villainous Symbiote that initially bonded with Spider-Man (who took on a black appearance as a result), as well as the character that is the result of the Venom Symbiote and its post-Spider-Man hosts, the most notable one being Eddie Brock.

Venom explains his moral code. Venom

While Venom has had multiple hosts in comics over the years, the one that we (and the Symbiote) keep coming back to is a man known as Eddie Brock.

Part of that is due to the similarities Brock shares with Peter Parker: Brock was a journalist, like Parker, and blames Spider-Man for his career failings. Brock thought he had cracked a big murder case, but it turns out his source (the murderer) was a false confessor. When Spider-Man revealed the real murderer, Brock lost his job and had to write for gossipy tabloids (which inspires the name “Venom”), and blamed Spider-Man for his downward spiral.

Brock’s story and his connection to Spider-Man are intriguing in that they doesn’t fit the typical supervillain/superhero mold. Spider-Man saving the day unintentionally ended up ruining Brock’s career, and Brock mistakenly sees this all (including his own oversight of being too trusting) as Spider-Man’s fault. It’s a sort of inverse symbiosis, a bond that’s mutually damaging to both adversaries who, at least in the beginning, ostensibly have the same sense of morality.

But the other major reason that Venom became such a phenomenon is that the character functions as something of an antihero — or perhaps an antivillain.

The ’90s era of comic books was punctuated by a fascination with “edgy” characters who weren’t all good or all evil. Venom’s co-creator McFarlane, who first gained acclaim working on Spider-Man, would go on to create Spawn, a comic book about a demonic vigilante that was wildly popular in the ’90s.

Characters that straddled the line between good and evil — heroes who had destructive urges or a history of killing (think: Wolverine and the Punisher) and conscientious villains (think: Magneto or even Deadpool) — became beloved. And Brock’s Venom fit this mold of moral ambiguity.

As Venom became one of Spider-Man’s most fearsome foes, writers also explored Brock’s line of morality. In 1993’s Venom: Lethal Protector, written by Michelinie and drawn by main artist Mark Bagley, Venom serves as a vigilante of sorts and protects the poor and homeless people in San Francisco. (The movie is loosely based on this comic.):

Venom saving the day in Venom: Lethal Protector. Marvel

The logic works: Brock was inspired by Watergate and wanted to use his journalism for good, fighting crime and weeding out corruption, before a series of unfortunate events took him down a path he couldn’t pull himself out of. But just because an alien symbiote has bonded with you, bestowed you with immense power, and tempts you with your darkest desires doesn’t mean that you should abandon everything you stand for — just some things.

Venom: Lethal Protector also pits Venom against other, more vicious symbiotes with less humanity, allowing writers to establish a moral spectrum that ends up casting Venom in a more positive light.

Perhaps the most important character in establishing Venom’s heroic baseline is called Carnage, the result of the offspring of the Venom Symbiote bonding with Brock’s jail cellmate, Cletus Kasady. Carnage is more violent, more murderous, and more sadistic than Venom (though Carnage gets to play a hero in the crossover event called Axis) and in existing, shows how human Venom can be.

In comic book history, Spider-Man and Venom have worked together to defeat Carnage to save humanity — the old “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” strategy. But while they do occasionally team up in instances like this, it usually isn’t very long before Venom returns to his usual terror-inducing self and he and Spider-Man are archenemies once again.

One of the big questions surrounding the most recently rebooted version of Spider-Man is whether — and how — Sony plans to make a universe around the character following the historic deal between Sony and Marvel to share his rights. While Sony and Marvel have a deal in place for Spider-Man, they haven’t, according to Variety, hammered out a deal for the other Spider-Man characters to which Sony owns the rights, though both studios are reportedly open to it.

Since the first appearance of Tom Holland’s Spider-Man in Captain America: Civil War, the character has been interacting with the Marvel Cinematic Universe, in both his solo venture Spider-Man: Homecoming and this year’s Avengers: Infinity War, which sealed onscreen Spidey’s fate — for the time being, at least.

Further, in the comic books, Spider-Man has usually appeared either alongside the Avengers or worked on his own, meaning that Sony doesn’t have a built-in superhero team it can pull from the way Marvel has. (Recall, if you will, that the Marvel Cinematic Universe as we know it is the result of Marvel having sold off its most recognizable characters and having to go all-in on the nascent Avengers, who were much less well-known a decade ago than Spider-Man, the X-Men, and the Fantastic Four.) And the more intriguing characters in Spidey’s world have — until recently with the rise of Silk and Spider-Gwen — usually been villains like Venom, Doctor Octopus, or the Green Goblin.

So if Venom does well, Sony can conceivably build out its Spider-Man universe with other solo movies about related characters, like Silk, or even an esoteric villain like Kraven the Hunter. We already know that a film starring Jared Leto as the vampire Morbius is on the way; there’s potentially a wealth of other Spider-Man-adjacent character movies in the Sony pipeline.

But a bad showing by Venom at the box office might give Sony executives pause. Sony has seen firsthand the effect of diminishing returns on Spider-Man, with the disappointment of Andrew Garfield’s Spider-Man, and implemented a change in installing Holland as its new web-slinger. Should Venom underwhelm, its not difficult to see Sony reacting in a similar way and going back to the drawing board once again.

But even if that turns out to be the case — and given the rough critical reception Venom has drawn so far, it might very well be — that won’t take away from the character’s rich and oft-amusing history.

Original Source -> Venom, Spider-Man’s symbiote supervillain, explained

via The Conservative Brief

#IFTTT #The Conservative Brief

1 note · View note