Pride comes before the fall, and Eddie Brock’s moment of bravery in last week’s King in Black is met with quite the fall indeed in Venom #31 Written by Donny Cates, penciled by Iban Coello, colored by Jesus Aburtov, and lettered by Clayton Cowles.
Forrest Hollingsworth: Justin, after our lukewarm reception to King in Black last week I have to say I was…apprehensive coming in to Venom #31 but I was pleasantly surprised by what we got here! Dragons, Dylan, and ego death, there’s a lot to discuss for our favorite bruised and battered goo boy.
Justin Partridge: Ah, yes, the classic “Story While Falling”. We’ve seen it in the Flash and a few other books and now we get the goopified version. And weirder still? I…liked it?! Will wonders never cease? Let’s get to the gimmickin’
“Who is Eddie Brock?”
FH: In a welcome change of pace for the title, Venom responds to the gothic pageantry of King in Black with a narrowly focused character study. A bottle issue of sorts, the narrative and visual structure follows Eddie as he falls both literally and figuratively from a skyscraper-high kind of grace, anchored by Rex Strickland’s thoughts on the nature of the man who we so frequently call “Venom”.
I will be upfront and say that I am very much endeared to what the issue is trying to achieve, and the narrative implications — a rebirth by death — that it alludes to. That being said, I also think there’s some fundamentally untrue things being forwarded about the character here that undermine those aspirations just a bit. What do you think Justin?
JP: I agree mostly!
I think the focusing in JUST on Eddie and his (apparently) 1,454 feet fall is a really novel way to inject some pep back into the event after the portentous and dour opening. I was also REALLY happy to see the return of Rex Strickland! Providing us another point of view on the opening issue, which I always really love in comics. The “new perspective” on an already established scene, I am kind of an easy mark for stuff like that.
BUT, all that said, you are absolutely right that Donny is…perhaps doth protesting a bit TOO much when it comes to Strickland’s “assessment” of Eddie throughout the narration. He is lampshading a LOT of, frankly, unestablished and unproven stuff about Eddie in these ongoing captions and it’s standing hilariously apart even from the characterization that he himself has been threading throughout the series.
A lotta dross about how Eddie is “always caring for the innocent” and how his time as a Daily Globe crime reporter “hardened him against violence” and the like. I wouldn’t have a problem with this stuff had there been more texture thus far in the series, outside of his newfound connection with his “Other” and Dylan, but I think as a sequence it is fun enough.
FH: It’s a surprisingly solid way to condense Eddie’s storyline and character development (which I tried to recap in our KiB column) and to prime him for a reinvention in one fell swoop. Eddie’s life has, for better and worse, changed a lot over the course of Cates’ run. He had to relearn everything he thought he knew about his life partner, he suffered no small amount of familial trauma, he found his son who has re-centered him and made him take stock of his situation, and in more ways than one, he’s kind of found that he wants to reconcile with, God too. Dissecting all of that, and especially to the end of ‘Has it fundamentally changed Eddie, or how he feels about himself?’ is a worthwhile pursuit I think, all of the other obfuscation, noise, and impracticality of a person falling from that height (and somehow past a helicopter) aside.
JP: NO ABSOLUTELY.
And again, during our first KiB essay, I talked about how I respond to and like when he starts to really dig into Eddie, mucking about with who he is as a person. But this stuff, at least for me, reads a bit more wooden than I would like (on top of him just kinda making stuff up about Eddie’s “soul” for a little bit). Plus, like you said, there is the sheer impracticability of the set piece and the WEIRD hard right turn into Eddie’s lapsed Catholicism.
You would think, being one of the two Daredevil people here, I would be into this but it seemed like it was one too many hats on the bigger hat of the larger set piece. Like when he started to pray I was genuinely like, “Man, he’s sure doing a LOT for a guy that has been thrown off a skyscraper”.
FH: I find Eddie’s crisis/revelation of faith especially rich, personally. From begging God for forgiveness before taking his life all of those years ago, to various intersections of faithfulness and faithlessness and all of its requisite signifiers of worthiness over his years with Venom, Eddie has developed a deeply dark and complex relationship with whatever maker he may or may not have to a degree that a lot of characters in Marvel (the obvious ones notwithstanding) haven’t.
That Eddie could do, and experience, all of the horrible things that his life have been characterized by to date and still attempt to find his way to God’s grace, if not for himself but for his son, is a believable and worthwhile character development. Will it stick? I’m not sure, but as a mirror to Knull’s tyrannical objectification of his creations, coming to and finding God of your own volition is a pretty good response. It’s not binary heroism/antiheroism, it’s plain faced humanity and Venom stories are uniquely positioned and better for investigating that. But I digress.
“Eddie Brock is No One”
FH: As positive as I feel about this issue overall, I do think it’s a bit self defeating. Eddie feeling like a disenfranchised nobody is essential to his journey — he’s found solace and comfort in being close to few, those who see him and can accept him despite his numerous crimes and flaws, namely his Symbiote. However, there is not a lot of reason for other people to feel that way. Given his rigorous military training, his familiarity with the Symbiotes, even his general impression of him, Rex may look down on Eddie but I don’t believe that he thinks Eddie is a “no one”.
Venom has, as we discussed last week, been integral to such a high number of line-spanning events, crossovers, takeovers, and character deaths and rebirths that it is plainly ficticious to say others in the Marvel universe don’t regard him, if not highly, at least importantly. There is weight to the idea that Eddie sees or values himself worthless but establishing his perception as such externally is narratively incongruent. He is not a no one, and while his struggle to overcome those feelings is important to his journey, accepting and recognizing his place within the pantheon of heroes that he frequents is equally so. Devaluing that ascension, however complete or not, may fit the overarching intent here, but it doesn’t do so with exaction. Peter’s warranted feelings about Eddie aside, if that were true, why would Rex have ever asked for his help in the first place?
JP: Big, big time. And this stuff kinda further adds credence to my theory that Donny, as a creative on a “longer-running” title such as this, trying to make it “important again”, kind of never really picks a lane.
Take Venom #1 for instance, since we were reminded a bunch about it this time around. Rex explicitly states that Eddie isn’t the “right Venom” for the job, but he would do anyway to fight this “war that no one will see coming”. And there is all this text about how even his Symbiote is a small fry compared to the larger tapestry of the cosmic landscape (one of the movie’s more fun and interesting feints as well) and how Eddie is just this castoff C-lister character.
But also at the same time, Donny is breaking his back to make sure Eddie is smack in the middle of this HUGE, universe-spanning narrative with Knull and dropping hints about he’s the “most important Symbiote wearer ever” I guess due to his relation with Dylan? It is VERY jumbled and he can’t help but try to make BOTH true. I think his summary “death” in the scheme of this issue is just another example of that. In that, yeah he’s been pretty effectively shuffled off panel now BUT DON’T WORRY, even though there is all this text about how he sucks and is just this human trash in the right place at the right time, he’s ACTUALLY SUPER IMPORTANT and SPECIAL (because I suspect he is super important and special to Donny). It is very odd to try and parse through every issue.
It is as if he is trying to make Eddie both over AND underrated, I cannot wrap my brain around it just yet.
FH: I do agree there’s just a little bit too much going on despite that being the kind of essential mess of Eddie as a character. And with a lot more event to go, it’s hard to tell if anything here is the concrete new direction for the book they’ve been talking about and not just…posturing.
That being said, I also want to call out that while I hesitate to call Coello, a member of Marvel’s new class of ‘Stormbreakers’, a fill-in artist, he’s a surprisingly solid backup to Stegman who I have no doubt is hard at work on the rest of KiB and helps solidify what could be a very visually boring issue. There’s multiple two page spreads here that really capture the grand gothic ridiculousness of everything, and there’s a degree of experimentation with panel layouts that serve the more focused narrative elements well. For as much as I was frustrated with the elasticity of Dylan’s age (He looks 9 at best here after being a teenager last issue) I was enamored with the depictions of Symbiote laden cities, crisis of faith, and the like. That final scene of Eddie’s already broken body cascading down fire escapes to the uninviting cold hard ground is wince inducing.
JP: I DID really enjoy the artwork for this one, I will say.
I really, especially enjoyed the way he was breaking down some of those splash pages to set them apart from the more splashy, cinematic stuff from the event opener. There is also a fun bit of style that they bring to the way they break up the pages that I liked a lot.
You see it with the most clear example during the start of Eddie’s “prayer”. The panels are set into the center of the page, but raised slightly, accounting for the constant narration bracketed into the negative space above and below each “widescreen” panel. I really, really enjoyed that.
FH: Yeah! Even in the midst of all of this, it’s fun to experiment. All in all, a surprisingly rich and rewarding issue! I’m worried we’ll find the story here and the one in King in Black a little incongruous as they continue, but hey only more issues, and more columns can tell!
(I sound like I’m getting paid by the word here, I can assure you I am not – I just really like Venom).
(Ed. note: I would pay these boys all the money in the world)
Marvelous Musings
- Not much to Dylan’s inclusion, but keeping him in the periphery emulates the increased presence of his life in Eddie’s thoughts well enough.
- Eddie is wearing some kind of weird middle ground between boxers and Hulk shorts that couldn’t go unmentioned.
- I prefer the weird gargoyle/dog-faced Symbiote dragons Stegman does to the more conventional dragons here. Knull is an immortal deep space evil! Make it weird.
Forrest is an experimental AI that writes and podcasts about comic books and wrestling coming to your area soon.
