By [ad_1]
Today, we look at why, exactly, Venom isn’t in jail despite murdering multiple innocent people over the years.
This is “Provide Some Answers,” which is a feature where long unresolved plot points are eventually resolved.
He is not the only one, of course, as at least this WAS eventually resolved, while a similar problem for Emma Frost has never been resolved, but Venom is one of the stranger examples of a character introduced as a villain where the people who introduced him as a villain later had to awkwardly walk back the character when he became so popular that he was made into a hero, of sorts, only because he was too popular to not give his own series and not because he suddenly became a hero.
WHY SHOULD VENOM BE IN JAIL?
In Venom’s first full appearance in Amazing Spider-Man #300 (by David Michelinie and Todd McFarlane), after terrorizing Mary Jane so much that she insisted that she and Peter could never go back to their original apartment because she will think any creak or sound is Venom around the corner (but don’t worry, folks, by mid-issue, she will be so chill that she will decide to ditch her clothes while they take “Before” photos at their new condo to take PETER’S mind off of Venom! That was…quite a shift…
he then murders a police officer that just happened to run into him at the church where he plans on murdering Spider-Man (the same church that Eddie Brock found the symbiote after it was permanently separated from Peter Parker back in Web of Spider-Man #1)…
Venom is then arrested and sent to the superhuman prison known as The Vault (The Vault was crated by Danny Fingeroth, but what’s interesting is that Fingeorth was not yet the editor on Amazing Spider-Man, Jim Salicrup was, and yet the Vault was still featured heavily in the Spider-books at the time. That was very nice of Salicrup. Well, I mean, the concept of the Vault was a good idea period by Fingeroth, but obviously, as we have seen, later writers just create NEW superhuman prisons, so it was nice that the Vault lasted as long as it did. I always prefer it when writers just use existing examples of something instead of creating their own duplicate versions of an idea. Which is something that is going to be the subject of a Drawing Crazy Patterns pretty soon that amuses me a lot).
In Amazing Spider-Man #315 (by Michelinie and McFarlane), Venom escapes by murdering a Vault prison guard…
It’s funny, as Michelinie has Venom clearly a SUPER psycho at the time, as the dude even kisses the forehead of the guy he just MURDERED because he is an “innocent” that simply “had” to be sacrificed…
The problem, of course, as I have noted is that Venom soon became really REALLY popular and so Michelinie introduced Carnage, the spawn of Venom, who was a super DUPER killer, and thus someone who Spider-Man and Venom could be forced to team-up to fight. This led to Amazing Spider-Man #375 (by Michelinie, Mark Bagley and Randy Emberlin), where Spider-Man and Venom cut a deal where Spidey will let Venom leave New York (ultimately moving to San Francisco) and Spider-Man won’t hunt him down so long as he promises not to try to kill Spider-Man or his family.
This was the start of Venom as the star of his own series of miniseries.
WHY ISN’T VENOM IN JAIL?
In 1997, four years into a series of miniseries, Venom finally was put on trial in the miniseries Venom on Trial by Larry Hama (the then-regular writer on the series of miniseries) and artists Josh Hood and Derek Fisher…
Early on, after retuning from an interdimensional team-up with Wolverine where Venom helped save a mysterious government agent, Venom is captured and he is visited by a district attorney who says that she will prosecute him for the murders of the prison guard and the cop…
Daredevil returns to his apartment to find that he is being requested to represent Eddie Brock and he agrees to take the case…
The trial was a pig circus, of course. Carnage was brought in to testify against Brock (since he was his cellmate, he claimed that Brock bragged about murdering the officer in the church without the symbiote even helping) but then the device keeping the symbiote in check faltered and Carnage went crazy. Brock’s device also broke and he at fist tried to escape while Spider-Man (who was, amazingly enough, brought in by Murdock as a character witness) and Daredevil and the guards at the courthouse tried to corral Carnage, but he ultimately decided to return to help save the day.
Then, just as the trial was about to begin again, the mysterious agent Smith showed up and showed enough federal clearances to state that he needed to take Venom into custody as a matter of national emergency…
This set up a brief period where Venom worked as an agent for the government…
Venom continued to have his own “series” for another year or so and then he returned to villainy and eventually, Eddie Brock gave up the symbiote.
In Amazing Spider-Man #568 (by Dan Slott, John Romita Jr., Klaus Janson and Dean White), we learn that once they were separated, Matt Murdock was able to get Eddie exonerated under the claim that the symbiote was to blame for the murders…
And that is why Eddie Brock doesn’t have murder charges hanging over him.
If anyone else has a suggestion for a comic book plot that got resolved after a few years (I tend to use two years as the minimum, as otherwise, you’re probably just in the middle of the actual initial reveal of the storyline, ya know? But I’ll allow exceptions where a new writer takes over a storyline and has to resolve the previous writer’s unresolved plots), drop me a line at brianc@cbr.com!
About The Author
[ad_2]
