Amazing Spider-Man/Venom: Death Spiral #1 – The Webs That Bind

Things have been weird for Peter Parker, Mary Jane Watson, and Eddie Brock over the last few years. We’ve drifted pretty far away from their core appeals, with each one now finding themselves in places of such radical experimentation that it has been difficult for some readers to recognize the characters they love beneath all the gimmicks and attention-grabbing changes. That being said, the potential that has been laid out throughout all three of these characters’ new status quos is finally being mined in the pages of Amazing Spider-Man/Venom: Death Spiral #1, a slow yet methodical beginning to a crossover arc that promises to spin gold out of recent continuity upsets.

Getting into things, this is a purposefully slow start to a crossover that, on premise alone, promises something full of schlock, violence, and ’90s nostalgia goodness. We spend most of our page count simply exploring and fleshing out the current mindsets and character arcs going into a story that promises to shake up the relationships between our main trio. This may not seem like a necessity to folks who have been following each of these characters’ recent exploits, but it is important in setting a unified, serious tone across three books that couldn’t be more different. Eddie Brock: Carnage was a bloody, dark, serial killer-focused tale of need and restraint. All-New Venom and its subsequent relaunch have been running with a lighthearted yet still character-focused tone that throws back to the days of David Michelinie. The Amazing Spider-Man has been nothing short of epic. In order for folks to take this crossover seriously, you need to take those three tones and blend them into something digestible for every reader on the spectrum.

Thus, it gives room to the bit of this story that folks are most interested in: the rectification of MJ becoming Venom, and how that shifts her relationship with Peter, and the symbiote’s relationship to Eddie Brock and his son Dylan. None of that comes to fruition here, but the emotional and character stakes set by the slow building of their intersection held my focus the entire way through. As a voracious Spider-Man reader, a lot of Peter’s emotional reconciliation with his time in space shows up more here than it did in The Amazing Spider-Man #22. As someone who enjoyed, but was let down by, Eddie’s time as Carnage, the time spent with Eddie here returned more of his fatherly desperation that I have grown to love about his character in recent years. As one of those people who gave it a chance but has mostly disliked its execution, there were some really great beats with MJ/Venom that hooked me into this story beyond what it promises on paper.

Tying it all up is Jesus Saiz’s art, which feels a bit plain during all the slow character setup, but excels with a specific throughline for the antagonist of this story that kept its pace moving. At the end of almost every page, we’re treated to a panel of someone sharing naming conventions of Parker, Brock, or Reilly, which evokes the same grisly tone of his work on Carnage and left me somewhat nervous with tension as we grew closer to the reveal of our yet-to-be-explained villain, Torment. A good amount of the tonal unification of this crossover comes from Saiz’s art as well, which evens the playing field by keeping things noticeably de-stylized, competently framed, and paced to perfection. The colors from Matt Hollingsworth helped in this regard too.