Eddie Brock: Carnage #7: Food For The Soul

Eddie Brock looks awfully sick in the pages Eddie Brock: Carnage #7, and the little red devil on his shoulder is reveling in every potentially-exploitable moment of weakness. Crashing the unsuspecting ambulance that picked him up at the end of issue #6, Brock wakes up in the nick of time to stop his body’s carnivorous instinct from killing two innocent paramedics. He falls limp in the surrounding woods, in desperate need of a life-saving act of murder. Too weak to scout out targets himself, he must send Carnage into the nearby small town to find a worthy victim.

Writer Charles Soule and artist Jesus Saiz continue to expand upon the potential of Eddie and Carnage’s bond, finding new elements of body horror to throw into the narrative. Carnage takes on the form of an organic remote-controlled drone, crawling like a spider throughout people’s homes, tethered to its host by a leash/umbilical cord that can stretching for miles. Along with the generally macabre atmosphere, Saiz injects elements of comedy that lighten the mood without disturbing it. There’s something deceptively cute about Carnage’s little crab legs, especially when it shrugs like a cartoon character at Eddie’s quandaries. As penciled by him and colored by Matt Hollingsworth, Eddie Brock truly does look on the verge of death with ghostly white skin and a perpetually pained expression.

If the story has one fault worth mentioning, its that the severity of Eddie’s condition is not sold as well through the writing as it is through the visuals. He may be in urgent need of blood, but he’s been in urgent need for several issues now. Issues that presumably take place over at least a couple weeks judging by how much of the country he has traversed. While the comic insists that the man has one foot in the grave, his own body seems to be giving him a tremendous amount of leeway, only ever giving out to provide convenient moments of suspense.

While Eddie and Carnage are killing a crooked drug peddler to buy themselves time, the serial killer Muse is tracking them step-by-step across the country, hoping to either get revenge or inspiration from the pair. It’s still a complete mystery as to what Muse plans to do once he comes face-to-face with them, but the current pitiful state of the pair ensures that their inevitable brawl will be on equal-footing.