It was a rough week, which is to be expected after returning home from spending a week with my daughter. On top of my usual post-Marley depression, my girlfriend's mom had a very serious surgery, and I am loaded with client work.
Of course, the show must go on, and so as I decided to pull a working weekend to try to get back on track.
Here's a sketch I did last night of the Spider-Man archvillain turned Marvel anti-hero turned Sony movie monster-hero VENOM. |
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| I drew this with crayola markers and sharpies in my Big Black Sketchbook Saturday night while I watched the Sony flick Venom on demand. |
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The world has enough superheroes.
One of Marvel's most enigmatic, complex and badass characters comes to the big screen, starring Academy Award® nominated actor Tom Hardy as the lethal protector Venom. |
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If you were reading my blog GhettoManga at the time this movie was getting ready to come out, you will remember how ambivalent I was about it. As I implied above, the character Venom has his roots as an antagonist to Spider-Man and his alter-ego Peter Parker.
When the symbiote bonded to Peter Parker in the original Secret Wars limited series, it seemed like a harmless piece of alien tech: a dope super suit that could replicate Spidey's webs and other gadgets, change into any outfit, and enhance his powers at will.
Plus, the sleek white on black design was the first change to Spidey's iconic suit design since he burst onto the comicbook scene in the sixties. All good, right?
Wrong.
Soon, the suit was revealed to be a living parasite that sought to bond with Peter permanently. Eventually, Peter was forced to kill the symbiote to get it off by bombarding it with the deafening sound of a giant cathedral bell. |
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But nerds know no one ever really dies, right? The Symbiote eventually returned by bonding with Eddie Brock, a photojournalist rival of Peter Parker whose hatred of Spider-Man drew the symbiote to him.
Armed with spider-powers leeched from its former host, greater strength and speed from the superior physique of Brock, and a homicidal cocktail of hate and twisted alien unrequited love, Venom was the greatest Spidey villain Marvel had cooked up in decades. |
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Conceived by longtime Spider-Man writer David Michelinie and red-hot artist Todd McFarlane, Venom became one of the most horrific super-villains imaginable.
Venom worked because he was the Jungian shadow of Peter Parker's tortured, guilt-driven hero. He knew Peter's secrets, his weaknesses, and his loved ones better than any other Spider-Man villain ever could.
And fans couldn't get enough. The character refused to die, returning again and again, each time more violent and demented than before, rhoutinely expressing the desire to eat Spidey's brains.
He was so popular that the character eventually got a chance to follow former villains like Doctor Doom and the Punisher into the grey area of anti-hero (cannibalism and all) with the 1993 limited series Venom: Lethal Protector by Michelinie and Mark Bagley. |
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Venom went on to become a popular character in many incarnations, with the symbiote passing on to a wide variety of hosts (from Matt Gargan bka the Scorpion, to Peter's high school frenemy Flash Thompson). Newer and more murderous symbiotes have appeared over the years, leading to tons of series and cameos.
Venom is the most unexpected of cash cows for Marvel, and he continues to be popular source material for new comics, cartoons and movies.
Which leads us, of course, to the Sony Pictures production VENOM, which is available on-demand courtesy of Starz. |
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I had a lot of reservations about the character being introduced into the movie world as a stand-alone character with no connection to Spider-Man. As far as I was concerned, everything awesome about the character was tied directly to his relationship to Spidey, which is completely wiped from the plot of this film.
In VENOM, a corporate space mission brings the symbiote back to Earth, where visionary young billionaire Carlton Drake seeks to use them to aid in his ambition to take the human race to other planets. When habitual envelope pusher and investigative journalist Eddie Brock uncovers Drake's experimentation on poor people, the thin ice under his career and relationship breaks.
Of course, poor disgraced Eddie Brock cannot leave well enough alone, and eventually his digging ends him up bonded with the symbiote.
My fears that Sony would leave Spider-Man fully and completely out of Venom were realized. Even though they certainly could have somehow tied the symbiote to Peter Parker (by having him encounter the friendly neighborhood hero in a flashback to Spidey's Infinity War space adventures, for example), they chose to simply ignore Spidey. A couple lines of dialogue refer to Brock's "incident in New York," but I don't have much hope that they'll be revealed as a connection to Spidey in a future movie. |
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Sony, which currently shares the Spidey movie rights (including associated characters like Venom) with Marvel, fully committed to a Spidey- free Venom.
There is no spider logo on his chest. No webs. He does climb walls and stuff, but it doesn't remind you of Spidey at all.
Scrubbed of any Spider-Manliness, Venom still works okay. They attribute his powers more to symbiote shape-shifting than anything having to do with spider-powers. I found the movie more or less a fun ride. It isn't nearly as sophisticated as the average Marvel movie, and the supposedly more mature tone definitely feels more childish than the high school- themed Spider-Man: Homecoming. |
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Like a lot of these superhero movies, Venom struggles to hold my interest when two CGI creatures meet to fight each other. I don't typically complain about CGI, but it can get boring if overdone. And if gets tiresome in parts of this movie.
Sony could have committed to the dark tone better, even shot for R-rated gold like Deadpool. Instead Venom plays it safe with a PG-13 offering.
Still, I enjoyed Venom. It's definitely worth checking out on- demand. If won't necessarily blow your mind, but it won't waste your time either. |
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| In other news, here's another episode of FREELANCER LIFE. Click the comic to find out what you should do if no one seems to want what you're selling. |
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Also, I spent Saturday morning hanging out with my buddy Marshall of Donkey Jaw Projects talking about the importance of art, and business strategies for freelance artists.
Click the pic to listen to this interview when you have some time. |
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So that's all for now, fam. Thanks again for reading!
If you wanna chat, need artwork, or if there's anything I can do for you, get at me!
Have a GREAT week!
-Samax ("some AX") |
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