At The Edge of Disappointment

A few years ago Marvel comics did a huge Spider-man event called Spiderverse. As a huge fan of Spider-Man I was excited for it and found it very enjoyable, loving all the ideas of alternate versions of Spider-man as well as making use of all the versions we had seen before in unique, creative ways. I wrote a few posts on it at the time.

As a follow up event, Marvel is right now doing Venomverse, which was being promoted to look a lot like Spiderverse. I started regularly reading and collecting Spider-Man right before Venom was introduced, so I have been there since the beginning with him. And while there were aspects I liked of the character, it took them a while to give him real growth, most of the time he was at his best when he was breaking away from the crazed killer mentality, fighting with his duel nature. In recent years they did some drastic changes with the character, curing the alien symbiote of its madness, creating a heroic version of the character called Venom Space Knight, with a real purpose for once.

With no explanation given, Marvel comics took Venom back to his original character on just about all levels, seeming to ignore the past decade of its history.

With the Spiderverse event, it all started with the Edge of Spiderverse, where we got to see various takes of Spider-man, each was unique and different, with Spider-Gwen (Where Gwen Stacy ended up getting bit instead of Peter Parker) taking off as and receiving her own regular comic. The regular Spider-Man comics also had extra stories introducing other new concepts, each one being its own character with a new take on Spider-Man (A young Aunt May as the Steam Punk Spider-man). And then they all came together with their uniqueness and each having their own place in the story. As some o the version were darker takes on the character, that created conflict and opened up the story to possibilities.

With Venomverse they did an Edge of Venomverse. With EoV they took two version of Wolverine, two versions of Deadpool and Ghost Rider and gave them an alien symbiote. So you now have already dark characters each becoming more like the generic Venom, with the basic madness. They all felt to me like almost the same character. All of them were Venom, just now with extra super powers. There really was nothing at all inspiring or interesting it these new versions of the character. Four of those stories ended with a Venom Captain America recruiting the new Venoms to fight a war.

Everything about Venomverse already comes off as lacking in all the areas that matter. I really have  no desire to read a story where they have half a dozen versions of the same character, at its least interesting, teaming up for some reason that I'm not sure I care about due to having no sympathy or interest in the characters. After reading Edge of Venomverse, I really don't care about the characters or their stories. I am a little beyond the sixth grade mentality that these characters seem to be trying to appeal to.

While the initial concept intrigued me and I had so hoped they would follow what worked with Spiderverse, while making it into its own story (Which was possible). It looks like I will be skipping this event and invest my efforts elsewhere.