You know, I make it a point in general to not write in this blog. Mostly just to annoy Janelle, but largely I don't have anything of value to say to the world. And when I do, I'm lazy.
But today I have something very important to say. I stumbled upon a gem of a book at Strand the other day (Strand being the world famous used book store here in NYC). Like a glorious time capsule from 1996, there it stood, a steal for like $7 bucks... Venom: Carnage Unleashed!
This book has everything, EVERYTHING detestable and worthy of scorn from the mid-to-late 90's comic book derth, just before (possibly during) Marvel's big bankruptcy. Before all the good comics started coming out after X-Men and Spider-Man movies, this was the stuff that pushed the Marvel machine.
Venom: Carnage Unleashed! contains no less than 200 things that are awesome and cheesy and absolutely terrible in a way that makes you feel great. It is a story ludicrously tied in to the video game "Spider-Man: Maximum Carnage" that came out for Genesis and SNES in 1996 in an absurd meta-story where, in the Marvel Universe, Carnage sold the rights to his story to video game producers and the money made goes to the insane asylum that houses him.
A quick aside for the non-comic readers... Everyone knows Spider-Man, and Venom is pretty well known after Spider-Man 3 (though they fucked it up), but Carnage is basically the spawn of Venom. A monsterous alien attached to a ridiculously over-the-top serial killer resulting in a character that has no motive and simply exists to laugh like a maniac and kill. This is completely iconic of what was happening in mainstream superhero comics in the mid-90s. Nonsensical villains that exist simply to be villains. It bears noting that Carnage is my favorite villain ever, partially because I love Mark Bagley's design for the character and partially because of this over-the-top ridiculousness.
Anyway, this is nominally a Venom story and Venom's entire reason d'etre is "evil Spider-Man." But when the character took off in the late 80's/early 90's, Marvel decided to pimp him out in a billion books, all like this one, where he is suddenly a distubred anti-hero who is actually the good guy. He just happens to hate Spider-Man and eat brains sometimes. It's completely ridiculous in every way and the beginning of this story has Eddie Brock, the alter ego of Venom, riding on a bus. That's what you pay good money to see; villains in plain clothes riding the bus. He's sitting next to a character that is almost equally laughable as a non-character that Carnage is... green-haired punk girl! With a guitar!
And he actually tells her that his name is Freddy Block, which is shocking only because Larry Hama, the writer, would have the balls to write something so terrible. (Hama was notoriously prolific and terrible during this period of Marvel).
Even better are the scenes of Carnage - literally, a mass murdering villain of immense power, convicted of murdering dozens of people in cold blood - sitting in his prison cell PLAYING HIS OWN VIDEO GAME ON A COMPUTER THAT IS NETWORKED. I didn't even have a networked computer that could play a game like that in 1996, yet a murderer is allowed to have one in a maximum security mental institution. Sense was not the selling point for this book.
I stopped reading it when Carnage reached through the Internet with his symbiotic alien suit (yes, you are reading this correctly) to murder the CEO of the video game company, who, pages earlier had been cackling in his office about how much money he was making and how much more money he was going to make off of Carnage. His underling even says something to effect of "I love working for you because you are so evil."
Some people go to the bookstore and get like Shakespeare or Dostoevsky or the complete works of Walt Whitman. I bought this and I don't regret it for a second. It is terrible in every great way. And I have only read the first 15 pages.
Also, I started law school and stuff and blah blah blah...
