Venomverse Reborn #1: Five Questions

Al Ewing, Christos Gage and Benjamin Percy join forces to bring forth three curious new tales from the ever-expansive venomverse, a web of parallel timelines that has developed into a reoccurring setting within the character’s mythos. Unlike What If..? or Marvel’s few other hypothetical anthologies, the venomverse has been more upfront with the connective threads stringing its stories together. Reborn #1 continues said tradition, keeping in-line with the continuity of the Edge of Venomverse event and its massive fallout. Salvaged from near-destruction, it is now a new and untamed multiverse that the three creative teams seek to explore.

First up to bat is the duo of Gage and artist Greg Land, who bring the Venom from Playstation’s hit Spider-Man game franchise into conflict with Knull, the King in Black. Knull has home turf advantage with the battleground being an alternate Earth on which his army of symbiote dragons has laid waste, leaving him unopposed in his rule. He has brought Venom into his domain with an offer of partnership, but, being the level-headed Harry Osborn instead of the aggressive, vengeful Eddie Brock, he has strong objections. Insomniac Venom, as misguided as his methods may be, only seeks to heal the world via assimilation and has no desire to sit upon a throne or bow down to some god. He may not be strong enough to take Knull in a fight, but he’s smart enough to know that the King cannot kill him without serious consequences to the timeline. The two part as philosophically-opposed enemies as Venom is returned home. It’s an engaging character study for both villains, and Land keeps Venom in a distinct art style that assists the fish-out-of-water narrative, making him look like a 3-dimensional character in a 2-D world.

Percy and Brian Level’s follow-up story is a classic “whodunnit?” in which Bruce Banner, Hawkeye, and Black Widow investigate who is picking off the Avengers one-by-one. Level’s pencils with colors by Ruth Redmond bring striking horror imagery to the issue, killing Earth’s mightiest heroes in the gruesomest way that only a symbiote could. Sequences like Tony Stark’s goopy remains sloshing out his armor will stick with the reader, but the saddest death is when Hawkeye is shot through the head by Natasha, the one killer he never suspected. As it turns out, the symbiote was attracted to Widow, her inner-darkness making her an efficient host. Yet it was only using her as a vessel to get to its final target: the Hulk. As a man best known for harboring a monster within him, Bruce Banner is the optimal body through which the Venom symbiote can become unstoppable.

Al Ewing’s Eventuality, a sage god-like version of Eddie from the far future, serves as the crypt-keeper delivering these cautionary tales, framing them to allow for further exploration of the symbiotes as a cosmic concept. This, coupled with hints of self-awareness towards the repetitiveness of multiverse stories, makes Venomverse Reborn a uniquely ambitious effort worth picking up.