Author: Various
Artist: Various
First published:2024 (tpb)
Contains spoilers
The Blurb: Venom vs. Carnage in their bloodiest battle yet! Carnage is back! Born anew in symbiote goo and blood, Cletus Kasady is more dangerous and violent than ever before - and he has his sights dead set on an unsuspecting Venom! Untested against the might of his symbiotic sibling without his father by his side, can Dylan Brock hold the sadistic serial killer at bay? Will Carnage live up to its namesake and leave another brutalized symbiote host in its wake? Or is Dylan just bait for Eddie Brock, the King in Black himself? In the greatest depths of space and at the end of existence, some carnivorous new species has blossomed. Something blood-red, with thorns - and an appetite! Plus: There's one thing that can still kill Carnage: Anti-Venom! And if things weren't wild enough, the BLOOD HUNT begins, and Venom must unleash lethal justice on hordes of vampires!
The Mention: I have looked through the Marvel Blood Hunt event extensively where it comes to volumes that were directly part of the event and where the volume majority tied in with the event. I have also looked at post-event vampiric consequences. In the case of this Venom volume, however, I have made it an Honourable Mention as it is a minor aspect within a storyline, events happening during Blood Hunt rather than impacting it/impacted by it.
I also have to be honest and admit that seven volumes in, the primary storyline confused me. Issues around Eddie Brock, his son Dylan being Venom’s host and Carnage trying to destroy Venom. All of this probably demands a wider knowledge of the previous volumes and therefore reading this for the Blood Hunt side (of which there are two storylines) is probably for completists only.
In one storyline we get Dylan, abandoned by Venom, approached by a priest who had been turned. The important part of this story is that when the priest bites Dylan his blood is poisonous to vampires as it has been altered by his half-symbiote physiology. He is also immune to the bite. The priest, in pain due to the blood, is then staked by Dylan. This means that Dylan/Venom could have played a pivotal role in the wider event had the writers desired it.
The second vampire storyline concerns the alien Threkker aka The Captive. He absorbs life force and was imprisoned on Earth, and subsequently captured in a high tech coffin that was found by Dracula and released during the Blood Hunt to hunt symbiotes. It reanimated a previous symbiote host (Lee Price) as a sort of zombie symbiote to lure in Venom (who at this point is host-less and dying). The Captive’s plan is to feed on Venom’s life energy but natural protections come into play, causing the Captive’s bite to begin a feedback loop that makes him feed on himself and desiccate. Not one of the undead vampires, a full back-history being presented (rather than touched on) could have embedded this in the event but this is more a throwaway and more significant to the Venom storyline, I feel.
In Paperback @ Amazon US
In Paperback @ Amazon UK
No comments:
Post a Comment