Working for the Man's Like Venom in Your System

Best Behind the Music voice: 'In an effort to curb his hunger for brains and get his career on track, Venom turned to pills. But what he couldn't see was that in the rollercoaster of his life, those drugs would carry him to new heights, before plunging him to the pits of Big Event despair.'

Back in March I wrote about the idea of having the Black Cat and Flash Thompson run across each other during that stretch where Flash had the Venom symbiote. Probably because of that, I picked up the first volume of his series, written by Rick Remender, with a whole mess of different artist (Tony Moore, Tom Fowler, Karl Kesel, and Sandu Florea for a grand total of one random page in the first issue).

The gist is that Flash wears the symbiote as part of some government agency, and goes on missions to serve America. He's not supposed to wear it for more than 48 hours straight, or it'll bond permanently with him. He carries sedatives to make it more compliant, which doesn't necessarily help if it can take control whenever he starts losing his temper. And there's supposed to be a bomb inside Flash that will kill him if the symbiote gets out of control. The benefit for Flash is that he gets to serve, he gets to be active, and the symbiote acts as legs for him (since he lost his serving in the Middle East during the Brand New Day era).

The first five issues establish the set-up, and put Flash up against a new Crime-Master, who seems like more of an arms trader than a would-be Kingpin. The guy figures out who's wearing the symbiote after they get separated during a clusterfuck of a mission in the Savage Land, and he gets Flash over a barrel with that. 

 

He's got himself a souped-up Jack O'Lantern as a henchguy, in what's a much more Halloween-themed design. Darker colors, ragged cape, ditches the Pogo Platform for a witches' broom looking thing. It's probably a better design overall than the original, but especially so for fighting gun-toting, sentient goo-wearing Spider-Man wannabe.

Flash wants to be like Spider-Man, so Remender gives him that, complete with Flash lying to his girlfriend Betty Brant about why he forgets important dates and goes silent for days at a time. Crime-Master threatens her at one point, which gets Spider-Man involved, leading to a misunderstanding battle. It is amusing afterward, when Betty is sure she was abducted because of her recent expose on organized crime, Peter's sure it has something to do with Spider-Man, while Flash knows it's about Venom.

The design for Agent Venom is essentially the symbiote making itself look like a combat outfit. It retains the color scheme and the symbol, but it makes itself look like Flash is wearing shoulder pads and boots and the whole magilla. I think that's supposed to be Flash imposing some kind of order on that, probably to help himself feel like a soldier again. Because as his control starts to slip, Moore and the others will draw it as reverting back to its classic look. The teeth start to show up, the musculature begins to swell and the symbiote forms those little tendrils (which I always associate as a Carnage thing, but whatever). The more the symbiote is running things, the more it assumes that form.

 

I'm not sure whether I want to hunt down the rest of the series. The issues immediately after this trade are a Spider-Island tie-in, and before too long, Remender's gonna leave and be replaced by Cullen Bunn. I have a mixed track record with Remender's work (hated his Captain America run, but Franken-Castle was fun), but I have never read anything of Bunn's that did anything for me.