Thought we might get back to regular issues of ASM? You fool. There’s more filler to hock! I assume someone was clamoring for the return of Anti-Venom, but not me. Well, here he is, by Dan Slott, Chris Bachalo, and the surprisingly common flood of people behind him. 4 inkers (Tim Townsend, Jon Sibal, Jaime Mendoza and Bachalo himself) and 2 colorists (Antonio Fabela and Bachalo himself). Why does this seem to happen so often? Let’s get this show on the road…
Not sure why this girl has that football player makeup on her face. Or what that football player makeup is called. I’m sure football fans would be furious with that description, but it is what it is.
Ok, whatever. Eddie returns to the church where he became Venom, saying he lives there now, while furiously recapping his story for you. Slott manages to get from “disgraced reporter” to “Anti-Venom” in just 2 pages. He leaves out the “selling the symbiote to villains” part, presumably on account of it being immensely stupid. Eddie narrates that he owes everything to Martin Li…
What, a woman can’t be a security guard? Pish posh, as Aunt May apparently says now. Well, with that lil’ detour complete, we rejoin Anti-Venom tracking drug dealers, who’ve gone to buy some product from some of, you guessed it, Mr. Negative’s goons. This will prove more difficult than anticipated.
Eddie skewers a guy… I guess Anti-Venom’s new peace & love attitude only goes so far… and the guy drips acid on him or something. Eddie says it feels like when he fought Venom. He demands to know what that guy’s made of. We cut away to Mr. Negative mindcontrolling (or whatever he does) one of the immigrants he took in to become one of his goons, obviously. Then he’s informed of Anti-Venom’s antics and heads out to stop him.
The whole “Norman Osborn selling drugs” thing feels very weird to me. I know he wanted to be a crime lord back in the 60s, but that was when being a crime lord just meant telling guys it suits to ventilate the wise guys and such. And now he’s supposed to be this like Lex Luthor-type figure. Drugs seem beneath him. Anyway, Anti-Venom vanishes on them, like Bugs Bunny walking out of a cloud of fighting limbs, and impersonates one of them to steal the truck. In a move that defies all common sense, Eddie decides to take the truckload of stolen illegal street drugs made of the Freak to… the FEAST Center, “a place that could use it to help people who are sick and can’t afford expensive treatments.” Are you serious? Is Eddie so stupid he thinks “drugs” are all one drug, and you just take it? What about it being stolen merchandise? Are you serious? Then he discovers Martin Li is Mr. Negative.
Ok, man! He’s willing to kill pretty indiscriminately, why not go get Mr. Negative? I know he’s all emo or whatever, but… Well, who cares? Our 2nd feature arrives courtesy of Zeb Wells and Paolo Rivera. Hey, at least it will look good.
This gambit works, and they go sit down. Spider-Man is leery of Logan drinking a whole bottle of whiskey in front of him, but Wolverine says his healing factor will negate it almost as fast as he can drink it. Nobody tell Bendis!
Something about Spider-Man saying “oh, gosh” is so weirdly correct to me. He’s a dork. It would be so weird for basically anyone else to say “gosh” in 2009, and yet… it works. Logan proceeds to start a bar fight over Spider-Man’s strict objections, bashing all comers until he can sit back down. Spider-Man berates him for his un-superhero-like behavior, and demands to know what he needed help with. Logan says he needs Spider-Man to sit there and wait.
Wolverine’s analogy is pretty stupid, and seems to only exist to get us to the gag in panel 9, but the gag is pretty good. Rivera’s Spider-Man eyes are so fun to me. Well, anyway, the guy Wolverine insulted and embarrassed earlier has returned with a shotgun, walked up right behind Logan and shot him in the head point blank. And Spider-Man’s danger sense somehow didn’t go off til it was too late, and also, Spider-Man’s danger eyes somehow didn’t see a man walk up right in front of him with a gun.
Spider-Man has rarely looked creepy since the Ditko days, but look at that! Wow.
Our man manages to restrain Logan until his rarely-seen-by-2008 Berserker Rage subsides, saving the shotgun guy.
I don’t think that read of Wolverine really works by 2008. He has, if you’ll pardon the pun, been declawed, and that was before Bendis gave him all his memories back, and whatever of the mystique that made him so popular from the 70s to the 2000s was completely eradicated. But even by this point, he’d already long-since developed a rep as a guy who mentors teenage girls and whatnot, the savage with the heart of a samurai, etc., etc. The notion of the X-Men thinking of him a stone killer hasn’t been true since like 1978. Ah, well. Amusingly to me, as I write this (In November 2024), Wells has just done a sequel to this story, but I hadn’t read this before, so I was catching up as it went. Not his first sequel to something from this time in the 2020s. And certainly not his worst… Ok, next month, we get back to regular programming. With a surprise (to me) artist onboard…