It took me a long time to warm up to Venom. I'm not referring to the movie starring Tom Hardy--now in theaters. Rather, I mean the character itself.I was a kid when Marvel did the unthinkable and changed the look of their most iconic superhero for the first time by swapping out his traditional red-and-blue duds for a solid black costume with a white spider logo. Spider-Man has changed costumes several times since then and has even been re-imagined as part of an expanding Spider-verse of additional web-slingers. Nevertheless, this first redesign will always be among the most memorable--especially given the then-shocking revelation that the costume was sentient, an alien Klyntar symbiote intent on taking control of its host.
When the costume passed to another wearer, I didn't think much of it--or of that character--at the time. It did seem like a natural progression within the story they were telling, but I was a bit underwhelmed by Venom in his initial appearance in ASM #300. And the fact is, I really just viewed Spidey's rogues gallery as set. You need to remember that, even back in the mid-80's, Spider-Man had been around as a character for more than 20 years. As the comic line's most popular character, he'd been featured in multiple ongoing titles and had been opposed by a seemingly endless list of villains--many of which simply weren't A-listers.
It occurs to me that the rogues gallery supporting any given pop culture franchise is often an interesting ecosystem. While a rogues gallery need not have a finite number of slots, there are effectively only so many villains that you're likely to recall when considering the foes of a particular hero. And I believe there are usually predictable rules governing which characters stick and which characters quickly fall out of mind.
If you're interested in becoming someone's arch-enemy and achieving a place of honor in their rogues gallery, I suggest you do the following:
- Get There Early
- Be There Often
- Make It Personal
Of course, that doesn't mean that all of the most significant villains in a hero's roster are the oldest. As I note in my second observation, a newer foe can climb the ranks by posing an ongoing threat to the hero--though I suppose that involves an element of displacement. So a newer villain effectively needs to make up ground on older foes--as heavy emphasis on a new villain typically means that some number of older characters are receiving less exposure. Not exactly a zero sum game--but close.
The third imperative I imagine is easy enough to defend. The greater the impact to the hero's personal life out of costume, the greater the likelihood that an arch-nemesis will be born. We've even seen that factor into reboots--such as in Oscorp having bred the spider that bit Peter Parker in recent re-tellings of Spider-Man's origin. And so while I might not have had a defined checklist in mind back then when considering the place of Venom in Spider-Man canon, I'm sure I intuitively weighed several of these factors at the time--and found the character wanting.
Eddie Brock's obsession with Peter/Spider-Man had some clear Cape Fear overtones to it. Brock viewed Spider-Man and Peter Parker independently and collectively having ruined his life--and he found a kindred spirit in the rejected symbiote. So that did give him somewhat unique motivations among the wall-crawler's coterie of villains. But he still seemed at first like a one-note villain operating under a now familiar handicap--he was just a dark reflection of the hero.
One of the most common complaints about the MCU (Marvel Cinematic Universe) is that its most prominent villains are always just what I described above--a dark mirror version of the franchise's most popular heroes. (Abomination = bigger Hulk. Iron Monger = bigger Iron Man. Etc., etc., etc.) So Venom wasn't there at the beginning with Doctor Octopus, Green Goblin, Vulture and the like. His shtick was that he was a bigger, meaner wall-crawler. And he was being inserted into an almost literal menagerie of foes that had more than two decades of a head start on him. I wouldn't have put money on the character being a keeper--let alone one of the top two or three villains who come to mind when you think of the Spider-Man mythos.
If I'd have considered a character more likely to become a stand-out in Spidey's rogues gallery, it would have been the Hobgoblin. Having been introduced a few years beforehand, Hobgoblin had taken up the mantle of the seemingly deceased Norman Osborne (Green Goblin). It was hinted that this mysterious villain was someone with ties--either close or casual--to Peter Parker, and that the thief had stumbled across Osborne's costumes and weapon cache, using them to generate a similar but distinct persona for himself. While many found the resolution of the mystery unsatisfying--as well as later attempts to retcon that resolution--the way it unfolded was entertaining at the time. (Basically the same way that I view the first few seasons of Lost.) The (ultimately multiple) Hobgoblins seemed to have a much better chance of being the memorable rogues gallery addition of the 80s.
Then Venom got teeth...
And I don't mean that the character got traction. I mean he literally got a big jagged mouthful of teeth.
In his first appearance, Venom generally looked like a larger, more muscular version of the black-suited Spider-Man. One notable difference was that his mask revealed a disconcerting smile--presumably Eddie Brock's smile. In retrospect, as I look back on the artwork from that first issue, it occurs to me that the teeth were a bit big--but that didn't really strike me as odd in the context of Todd McFarlane's art style. They were still human-looking teeth. Within a few years however--as part of a transformation that you can view either as progressive creative license or an in-universe adaptation--Venom can be found sporting huge razor-sharp fangs.
That was the trump card, as the aesthetic and attitude of Venom ideally suited the grim and gritty direction of comics for more than a decade to come. In some ways, he was the poster child for comics in the '90s--a savage villain popular enough to be recast as a "lethal protector" alongside the likes of Wolverine, Ghost Rider, and the Punisher. Amazingly, Marvel was even able to straddle the line of moral ambiguity such that Venom could throw down with Spider-Man at any given moment while still being portrayed as a more-or-less sympathetic anti-hero in his own title(s).
So I suppose that's the fourth and final element to whether a new villain can break his or her way into the upper echelons of fandom--capturing the zeitgeist. Venom was the right creation at the right time--clawing and elbowing his way past older characters like Tarantula and Hammerhead to achieve parity with mainstays like the members of the Sinister Six.
Whether the character is strong enough to be the tent pole in an MCU-adjacent cinematic universe remains to be seen. The fact that the character has made it this far--has developed an identity that can survive independent from Spider-Man given these beginnings--is, in and of itself, rather remarkable. Seeing previews of the Venom symbiote minus the now-iconic white spider logo is a bit jarring, though it could be viewed as the capstone of an evolution that started shortly after the character's introduction.
I know this much--I won't bet against this wall-crawler a second time.
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