After more than 60 years in circulation, Marvel doesn’t have too many fresh surprises up its sleeve, but one major revelation is changing how the world looks at one of Spider-Man’s greatest villains.
Venom has been around since 1988, and — for around 35 years — he’s been perhaps the biggest pain in Spider-Man’s perfectly toned backside. He’s destroyed entire city blocks, nearly killed Peter a few dozen times, and even tested his mettle against Superman. Through it all, the black-suited menace was substituting something truly ungodly for Peter’s lab-made webs.
After decades of watching Venom, and even Pete in his emo boy era, swing around the city on inky black “webs,” a recent Venom comic ruined our childhoods in one fell swoop. A quick conversation between Venom and Flexo revealed, mid-fight, that — for all these years — Venom wasn’t swinging around on web at all. He was slinging actual crap — not the figurative kind, but the real deal — each time he swung from one building to another or secured an enemy in a mass of sticky black substance.
That substance, in case I’m not being clear enough, is poop. Venom’s poop, to be specific — and, no, I’ll never recover from this big reveal. It came about in Venom #22, and didn’t sport nearly the drama it deserved. Instead, Dylan Brock (Eddie Brock’s son, and the current home to the symbiote) makes the benign observation while discussing sustenance with Venom.
Noting that they’ll soon need to eat “something Man-Sized” if they want to build up more web-fluid, Venom paves the way for the young Brock to make the big reveal. He then informs a confused Flexo that his web-fluid is made of “Symbiote waste,” which is stored within symbiote hosts, who then “shoot strands of it all over the city.”
Um… what? Those webs are made of actual alien waste?! Every fight between Spidey and Venom is suddenly taking on new implications, as I recall each and every time that black goo (gag) has coated every inch of my favorite superhero.
Not to mention when Pete used it for himself. Let’s not forget that he’s bonded with the Venom symbiote too, and enjoyed a stress-free swing around the city, without need for that synthetic web-fluid he’s always cooking up.
As it turns out, he should have been using some more… natural materials.
