Venom: Original Sin #1: The Butterfly Effect

From writer Steve Orlando and artists Matt Horak and Scott Koblish comes the double-sized prelude to Marvel’s upcoming event Spider-verse vs. Venomverse. In what is essentially an elongated excerpt of What If…?, the creative team explores what would happen if Eddie Brock had been more selfish with the King in Black powers bestowed upon him. Hoping to correct his biggest mistake, the scorned former-reporter travels back in time to his first shady dealing with the supervillain Jack O’Lantern, the choice which tied his destiny to Spider-Man forever.

The catch is that future Eddie can only traverse time by inhabiting symbiotes, meaning that he must seize control of black-suit Spider-Man’s body in order to change the past. He only meant to talk his younger self onto a better path, but in the process accidentally gets Peter Parker killed, setting up a snowballing sequence of events. Without Spider-Man or his symbiote, Brock never becomes Venom and his wife never dies. His career as a journalist doesn’t crash and burn but rather skyrockets, giving him and his wife the life they never could have dreamed of. But without its web-swinging protector, New York city runs rampant with criminals causing more and more chaos. It’s up to two god-like Eddies from the distant future to put a stop to this madness.

The comic’s biggest shortcoming is that there is not much beyond the basic plot overview. Yes, Orlando’s grasp on every character’s voice is solid and consistent. There is even a splendidly good-spirited cameo by Avengers-era Beast and his best friend Wonder Man, whose banter feels torn right from the 1980s in the best possible way. But the bulk of dialogue occurs between the two future Eddies as the ponder over just how wrong tampering with the past is. It feels unnecessarily thorough in its examination of the comic’s themes, given that it already does a decent job of showing the negative impact a small alteration can have.

The final third of the comic serves to undo the changes which kickstarted this hypothetical in a lengthy action sequence looping everything everything back to where it started. And while it provides the obligatory action sequence some might say was needed, it feels as if the narrative could have been moved forward in less time. While admittedly many of these gripes may stem from subjective multiverse fatigue, Venom: Original Sin’s substance-to length ratio just doesn’t feel at balance.