I'm not as against big comic events as some people are. Done right, they're great. Seeing your favourite characters team up in a big, this-shit-matters kind of way is fun.
Done wrong though, they are enough to make people put comics down for good. I don't think it's a coincidence that comic sales are plummeting as fast as the publishers can pump out big universe-changing crossovers; they are supposed to be the big stories that count, not the 9-5. It's called fatigue, and readers have it. Oh boy, do they have it. DC I can forgive, their Rebirth event is working, and is backed up by good stories. The real offenders here are Marvel, which pains me to say as a died-in-the-wool Marvel fan. At the time of writing, they have, as best I can count, three crossover events happening at the same time. Three! There's Secret Empire (OK in parts, overall not really working), Weapons of Mutant Destruction (shows signs of early promise) and this, Venomverse.
So we have this first Edge of Venomverse, which was my first clue to what this crossover is supposed to be about (I struggle to keep up). Taking its lead from the previous Spiderverse event, which brought together several alternate versions of Spider-Man, this appears to be doing the same with alternate Venoms. OK, derivative maybe, but you have my attention. We start with a Venomised X-23, currently seen as the All-New Wolverine in the main universe. It starts with a very young Laura Kinney whom Roland Boschi and Adam Gorham have obviously modelled after the Laura we saw in the movie Logan. This isn't a bad idea, but personally I would have been more interested to see an adult Laura meeting the Venom symbiote for the first time, rather than having them bonded from the get-go. One of the main things that makes Venom interesting is how the symbiote changes people, and this is less obvious when it bonds with someone so young. But this is still an interesting angle. Some of the other things the symbiote can do in the rest of the story, however, are not things I recall it being able to do previously. I could be wrong but I thought the symbiote bonded with one person at a time only? If I am wrong someone can correct me, but multiple hosts for one symbiote are not something I have seen before.
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| When Marvel drop another big crossover event on you... |
This issue would work very well as a one-shot 'what-if' story, but unfortunately the need to tie it into a bigger event leaves us with an unsatisfying, open-ended conclusion. I thought the look of the Venomverine was very cool, but they could have done this as a storyline within All-New Wolverine without needing to make this book.
I am trying to fight my prejudice against Marvel's constant production line of events when reviewing this, but it hangs over the book like a shadow. It feels like one of those movies that spends half the runtime setting up sequels rather than concentrating on telling its own story. Attention spans are shorter than ever now; people will stick with you if you hook them into a good interesting idea, but you still have to give them something along the way. Hopefully Venomverse will start to do that after this book. And if it doesn't, there's still WMD, or Secret Empire, or the upcoming Legacy storyline...
3 / 5
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