I hate Venom: Dark Origin so much I wrote a long ranting blog in english yesterday on Tumblr, then wrote a long ranting blog in mandarin today on Plurk.
Venom: Dark Origin single-handedly put a curse onto my household for generations and the fact that it’s title as on origin story might mean people pick it up for their first Venom comic gives me headaches tbh.
It’s so wild that it’s been published in 2008, too. Like I could understand this take on Eddie appearing in like… 1990, before all his solo series happened. I would still not agree that it’s a reasonable interpretation of his character, but I could at least sort of see where it is coming from. But 2008 is like… someone looked back on the whole decade of the 90s which all gave us content of Eddie as a genuinely well-meaning but HUGELY misguided man and went ‘you know what? nah. fuck that guy’.
Dark Origin wants us to believe Eddie has been a compulsive liar from childhood on. Where’s the basis in previous comics for that? Since when has lying ever been a trait associated with his character???
It also wants us to believe that Eddie only had one big story in his journalism career and that this was the Sin-Eater one, which is bizarre when literally everything else establishes that he has had a stable career before. Hell, there even was the Krooba bonus comic set during his work for Daily Globe.
And then what on earth is up with this miserable depiction of Eddie and Anne’s marriage (pre Sin-Eater especially)??
We literally have Anne’s recounting of their happy marriage as one of the first bits of Venom backstory ever written…..
Point is, THANK YOU FOR AGREEING WITH ME THAT DARK ORIGIN SUCKS.
And thanks for your nice words too, I’m glad other people enjoy my Eddie reference writing!!
“sacred” was first used to describe symbiosis in general by eddie in planet of the symbiotes… even though, in that story, all the klyntar the venom symbiote knew were acting like parasites and it was the only one who cared for its host.
eddie’s reaction to finding this out is not “you lied to me” but “you never told me this”, which means that the symbiote likely avoided the topic of its home and species altogether. so it must have, at some point, described their specific bond and the way it feels about it as “sacred”.
it’s also possible that eddie came up with it entirely on his own. either way, it’s a pretty loaded word for someone with a catholic background, and it’s really something for eddie to draw the conclusion that the way he experiences their relationship is so profound that there must be something inherent about symbiosis that makes it so
It totally erased Eddie Brock’s more complex personality, and made him a complete jerk and downright creepy person. The most interesting thing about 90′s Venom is
the conflict of them being able to do something bad but also something good. He genuinly cared about the homeless underground people and went through great effort protecting them from coporation; but you can’t deny the fact that he killed several guards the few times he was put in The Vault because that’s a necesarry sacrifise to them, and how he blames Spiderman for his own down-fall, which is a character flaw they shold focus on.
But in Dark Origin, he was re-written into this cowardly manipulative hypocrite who fakes everything and never cares about other people, only their attention, which is simply not true if they payed attention to any of the older Venom story. It’s just “let’s make this villain terrible and unsympathetic” for the sake of making another “psychopath”.
Also, I simply don’t buy that Eddie is manupulative and a creep to women as written in Dark Origin (faking his living address to bring a girl to a shady ally and it’s hinted that he’s going to do something creepy but some thugs interrupt him). In Sinner Takes All and Along Came A Spider, he was protective to Ann but he was never being pushy or intimidating. He plead Ann to be back to him but when Ann understanbly refused because of the symbiote, he simply let her go because he knew he fucked up. Even in The Madness, and let me tell you, that miniseries is downright creepy and has some really uncomfortable scenes (because of other non-symbiote weird alien parasites that literally drives ppl crazy, ugh), but in the end, when the love interest said she doesn’t want to have an “intimate” relationship with Eddie, he accept it and they are still friends and acting normally in the other stories.
Why would Dark Origin completely missed all these and wrote an anti-hero with zero (0) previously well established good and bad character traits? Even the movie Venom, it basically retcon the whole comic background, but it still got Eddie Brock’s essential character: he cares, but he doesn’t think too deep about consequences, and he doesn’t like to admit mistakes.
TL;DR
Dark Origin is terrible retcon of Eddie Brock. Don’t touch it if you like the 90′s canon more.
A Force Sensitive Phasesixer 