Carnage was initially presented as so scary Spidey and Venom could barely beat him. Then they tried to make him even more scary in Maximum Carnage, though they mostly had the opposite effect. Now they let Spidey fight him alone. Inevitably. Web of Spider-Man is a little behind the other titles at the moment, but the month this is published, Alex Saviuk only has 4 more issues on Web. And here we have a full-length Spidey story drawn by Steven Butler. It’s not his first time on a Spider-Title, but this is a bigger deal. Is this his audition? Who knows? This annual contains 4 stories, and the first is by David Michelinie, Butler, Bud LaRosa and Tom Smith. After a surprising text page explaining Carnage’s deal, we begin.
Right-o. He’s being transported to Seattle, where, a science guy tells him/us, an experimental process designed to “purify space environments” may get rid of Kasaday’s monster blood. At this point, Carnage is still very much just Kasaday’s evil blood and not a symbiote. I’d be interested to pinpoint just when they changed that. Looking at a timeline of his appearances, it seems like it might’ve been Michelinie himself who did it, when Carnage absorbed a bunch of other symbiotes briefly in Web of Spider-Man Super Special. Huh. Anyway, this science guy’s being a real jerk to Kasaday, taunting him and such, and anyone who’s seen a movie should know better. Kasaday bites his lip, and his Carnage blood gets loose, and it’s game over for that guy. Carnage dispatches everyone in his transport and then smashes outside, where he finds…
It’s the 90s, even Spider-Man needs a giant gun. As a committed Bagley follower, Butler actually handles Carnage better than most people, myself surely included. Good thing Spidey has that gun, we should be wrapping this up pretty quickly.
Oh, my bad. This is worse than the Spider-Armor. Our man is infuriated by the death of those cops (Don’t tell him about the 6 or 8 people inside the truck, I guess) and chucks a big piece of concrete at Carnage, smashing him. Kasady starts moaning about how he’s broken up inside, but that’s just a trick, as usual. Spider-Man’s kinda dumb. The Carnage shoots a javelin of his not-symbiote at Spidey, who jumps over it, making it strike a gas truck and cause a big explosion. Then Carnage steals a cop car and takes off, and Spider-Man has to hang around to try save dying cops, so he just settles for getting a tracer on the car. Later, somewhere in the Rocky Mountains, some guy called Bill Benten has some kinda thingie on his desk, and says he never thought it would come to this, when Carnage appears in his office.
Carnage flashes back to how they met at a summer camp as kids, when Cletus and a bunch of other orphans were sent there, and when Billy was blamed for Cletus putting smoke bombs and fireworks in the girls’ dorm, he didn’t rat Cletus out, and that led to them being friends. Weird guy, this Bill Benten. Thus, Carnage explains that in a world of chaos, he doesn’t have to be nice to a friend. When Benten goes for something in his desk, Carnage throws the whole thing out a window, which catches the eye of a passing Spider-Man.
Benten says he got addicted to gambling and lost his wife and so on, and had this very night stolen everything in the company safe and was planning to flee to Mexico. Carnage is upset that he doesn’t get to kill a “righteous citizen,” but not upset enough to change his mind.
This comic is still quite a bit less Bagley-esque than Butler’s eventual run on Web. His Spider-Man in particular owes more to Ron Lim. The fight spills out of Bill’s office and into the lumber mill itself. Benten tells himself he’s got to go, but halts when he sees the money all over the floor. Spidey gets caught as Benten flees, but then stops and looks back. Spider-Man webs a 2×4 and causes a pile of them to collapse on Carnage, and then winds up on a conveyor belt headed for a wood chipper, and Carnage’s tendrils quickly appear to hold him down. A classic gag. But Spidey webs a buzz saw and rather preposterously swings it in a such a way that it cuts Carnage’s symbiote off him without also cutting open his chest.
Come on, man, you’ve already shown us Cletus was basically killing people as soon as he could walk.
Pretty easy defeat for Carnage. He’s officially just another supervillain now. And, one assumes, Butler got the job. And good for him. I know I haven’t always been the most complimentary toward his work, but seeing so much of the sub-amateur hour crap that came after him has made me appreciate simple competence, and there’s no denying he’s a clear storyteller and knows how to draw human beings. This is followed by a Cloak & Dagger story with nothing to do with Spider-Man that I don’t feel like talking about, and then, in one of those amusing twists of fate that sometimes happen on this blog, a story detailing what happened to Joe Smith since ASM 38. Back in 1980, there was a one-off in Captain America that featured Joe, who got back in the “monster” suit to go on a rampage after the tragic death of his special needs son, and then he wasn’t in anything else until this. Writer Tom Brevoort & Mike Kanterovich, penciler Mark Tenny, inker Joe Rubenstein, and colorist Erika Moran catch us up with him as he’s riding the subway to his job at the Hames Coleman Memorial Institute for the Learning Impaired.
The cops tell Joe this sort of thing happens at least once a week in this part of town, and they’ll probably never get their stuff back. And Julie cries about how it’s not fair, that little girl says Spider-Man wouldn’t let the bad guys get away. Joe goes home and flashes back to his run-ins with Spider-Man and Captain America, rampages that both ended with him being offered a 2nd chance, and then gets his “monster” suit out of the closet.
I am never gonna get over people in comics bare knuckle punching metal armor and hurting its occupant instead of themselves. They coulda given that guy a pipe or something, come on.
Not much to it without many pages to work with, but not bad. Good for Joe. Joe appears in 6 more comics, and surprisingly, I own 4 of them. I wouldn’t have told you I do, but that’s getting old for you. Finally, we have a short about The Rhino in which he has FINALLY brought his family to the US after that being his motivation every time he’s appeared in a comic for years, only to find their apartment has been robbed. So Rhino goes on a Daredevil-style rampage through seedy locales til he finds out where the locket his niece lost went, but he also stole a bunch of money, which upsets his grandma when he brings it all back, and she kicks him out of their apartment. The end. Harsh. Then there’s some designs for Peter & Mary Jane’s new home by Bagley, who is intimated to have been a technical artist before a comic book artist. Looks at this floor plan!
A 3-story, 3-bedroom brownstone in Manhattan!! It seemed ludicrous that MJ said they could afford it in TAC 20, but it’s WAY more absurd seeing what they got! With what money??? There’s also a page of design work for Bagley’s new look for The Vulture, which had already debuted when this was published, but is still in our future.