{"id":17847,"date":"2023-07-28T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2023-07-28T04:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/?p=17847"},"modified":"2022-03-01T20:29:20","modified_gmt":"2022-03-02T00:29:20","slug":"venom-6","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/2023\/07\/28\/venom-6\/","title":{"rendered":"Venom 6"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Probably not! A big thing happened in ASM 375<\/a> that I don\u2019t think I talked about, but which I noted, maybe for the first time. Bagley was more or less drawing Todd McFarlane\u2019s Venom up to that point. His approach to the shading of his suit, his dumb maw, his eyes, Bags made them his own to some degree, but he took his cues from Todd. And then, in that page where Venom looks away from the reader and then spins around and says \u201cTalk to us\u201d in ASM 375, Bags debuted \u201chis\u201d Venom. Suddenly he was way more muscular, with way more muscle detail, with veins all over him. His teeth looked more jaggy and monstrous, his eyes looked different. I don\u2019t think I caught it as a kid, but it looked pretty deliberate to my adult eyes. So, comic book covers are done way in advance, and Venom #1 came out before ASM 375. If you compare this cover to #1\u2019s cover, you have Venom\u2019s head in more or less the same angle, but you can really see the difference between the Bags-a-la-McFarlane Venom and the Bags Venom. I just think that\u2019s really interesting. But inside, it\u2019s still Ron Lim to bring us home, on full pencils this time, with Sa De La Rosa inking. We open on Venom breaking into Treece\u2019s home, killing a bunch of guards, recapping at the head of security about the whole park situation, and having a gun pulled on him. And I know goons are goons, and dumb, but this guy has just seen via security footage that Venom killed all the guards, and also, Venom is a big monster, and he\u2019s like, \u201cmy pistol can probably handle this.\u201d Goons, man. Never worth what you\u2019re paying them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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A few moments of Venom goo preventing his breathing makes the guard lower the grid, and start telling Venom what he wants to know. Exposition!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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OK\u2026 but\u2026 hasn\u2019t Treece been saying he doesn\u2019t know where the underground city is for this entire series? This doesn\u2019t really add up. And why didn\u2019t Venom kill that guy? He\u2019s killed guys for less. At any rate, we cut to Spider-Man, staking out the park (And recapping the series), but still not sure what Treece is up to, when he spots Venom entering the area. Venom is hoping to sneak in, stop the bomb, and get out, but Spider-Man attacks him, not knowing the full story. Venom gets the better of him quickly so he can hurry up the team-up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Kind of a reversal of the moment in ASM 375 when Eddie listened to reason. So, we jump ahead, Treece is about to give the order to blow up the park, but Spidey and Venom arrive to stop him. His goons want to start shooting, but Treece says that would draw suspicion, and calls in his diggers instead. Venom explains them to Spider-Man, including their absurd \u201csonic shovels\u201d that can hurt him, so Spidey webs the one currently shooting at them and flings it away. And in the process\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Treece realizes it\u2019s all fallen apart and he\u2019s going to jail, and rushes to set off the bomb out of spite more than anything. Since it\u2019s Venom\u2019s book, Spider-Man says he\u2019ll hold off the diggers so Venom can go get Treece, but of course, the aforementioned oil leak goes up in flames between Venom and his prey. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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And so, they reach a kind of understanding\u2026 again. We jump 2 days ahead (Why so long?) to Peter calling MJ to say he\u2019ll be home tonight. He explains that Venom had plenty of chances to kill him, and didn\u2019t, and he has to believe Venom really will honor the deal they made in ASM 375. He also mentions it\u2019s not like he can just move to CA and keep looking for him. MJ says she coulda told him that. A whole bunch of nothing for Spider-Man in this story. But for Venom\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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And we\u2019re out. The battle promised to be the greatest ever between Venom and Spider-Man lasted a single page before ending in a team-up! Never trust cover copy! This is where I tapped out. I already wasn\u2019t much of a Venom fan. They could talk me into a miniseries by Michelinie ad Bagley featuring Spider-Man, but the revelation that Venom would be starring in an endless series of miniseries was more than I was in for. My money was better spent elsewhere. Venom continued to star in a chain of \u201cminiseries\u201d that happened to start the month after the previous one ended for the next 4 years, while appearing in a million other places, including the next Michelinie block, in a story already being published as this one was ending. No stopping him now. I always thought it was weird that Ron Lim didn\u2019t get poached by Image. After the founders created the company, they didn\u2019t waste much time snapping up talent from other companies, mostly Marvel. Superstar Hulk artist Dale Keown and Marvel Comics Presents artist Sam Keith were the first people to release books from Image after the founders in the form of Pitt and the Maxx (The latter adapted into an animated series at Mtv). Greg Capullo, who took over X-Force from Liefeld and did a far better job on it, got recruited to draw Spawn for over 100 issues when Todd decided he was too busy making action figures and buying famous baseballs to draw his own comic. People like Trevor Scott and the great Travis Charest got absorbed into Jim Lee\u2019s burgeoning Wildstorm Studios from Marvel and DC, respectively, and rising star Stephen Platt left Marvel for Liefeld\u2019s Extreme Studios, where his terrible art was a great fit. Erik Larsen apparently saw Chris Marinnan\u2019s impression of him and brought him over to draw some of his ancillary Savage Dragon titles. Joe Maduriera became the next big thing on X-Men in the mid-90s, causing a sea change in superhero art just like Jim Lee had, but eventually wound up doing Battle Chasers at Image before leaving comics for video games. And so on and so forth. Lim\u2019s stuff was pretty sympatico with the Image ethos. Maybe he just preferred to work on Marvel heroes. My understanding is Marvel kept the Kubert brothers in-house with a massive payout, maybe Ron got paid well, too. I hope so!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Probably not! A big thing happened in ASM 375 that I don\u2019t think I talked about, but which I noted, maybe for the first time. Bagley was more or less drawing Todd…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":17833,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[410],"tags":[408,259,1015,441,598,2,465,409],"class_list":["post-17847","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-1990s","tag-carlton-drake","tag-david-michelinie","tag-marie-javins","tag-ron-lim","tag-sam-de-la-rosa","tag-spider-man","tag-the-jury","tag-venom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17847","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17847"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17847\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17848,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17847\/revisions\/17848"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17833"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17847"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17847"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/comicsfromspace.com\/spiderman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17847"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}