I understand that the layout of this site kind of sucks when you’re looking to read through a series of something. Sure, you can click one of the tags, but then you have to sort through it all backwards. That’s no fun. That, and it takes me forever to update the Contents page.

If you notice on the right side, under “Pages”, there are two new links: 4th Letter Masterworks: Ultimate Edit (includes Ultimatum Edit) and We Care a Lot: A Venom Retrospective. These are links to both article series in their entirety, with paragraph descriptions for the Venom stuff. Hopefully this will make things easier for fans of the respective articles. Plus it’s better for those of you who like to spread the links around. Hint hint.

You may notice the title of the latest We Care a Lot article as “The Sammy Hagar of Cannibalism”. I feel the need to expand on this.

Venom symbiote = Van Halen
Eddie Brock = David Lee Roth
Mac Gargan = Sammy Hagar
Angelo Fortunato = Gary Cherone

See? Fits like a glove.

And just a reminder, if you have the Facebook, check us out!

“Oh, no. No no no. That’s—that’s Venom. That’s Venom as me. That’s—and it’s not even the good one. It’s Mac Gargan.”

— Spider-Man, New Avengers #50

Due to popular demand, I guess I have to dedicate one of these installments towards Mac Gargan, the current Venom. First, a quick refresher on who Mac Gargan is and what he was up to before donning the hungry goo spandex.

Mac Gargan used to be a greedy private investigator, doing just about any job as long as the price was right. Jonah Jameson hired him to figure out the link between Spider-Man and Peter Parker. Mac wasn’t getting anywhere due to Peter’s spider-sense indicating when to slip away, so Jameson pulled out the big bucks for more desperate measures. Using an experimental serum and a cybernetic suit, he transformed Mac into the Scorpion. On the plus side, he was granted strength and agility to counter Spider-Man, along with a cool tail that shoots stuff. On the minus side, it drove him completely mad.

I think we need more villains who are only evil because whatever gave them powers also made them fucking crazy. A lot of the early Spider-Man villains had that going for them.

Scorpion existed for decades as a B-list Spider-Man villain. He was one of the many, many villains who in some way existed as the dark shadow of Spider-Man. Due to his insanity and his insatiable hatred for Jameson, Gargan tended to fail as a team player. Also, some of his insanity came from his inability to remove his costume.

Mark Millar reinvented Gargan for the better during his run in Marvel Knights Spider-Man, which I covered earlier in this series. At some point, Gargan had become a top henchman for Norman Osborn. His armor was gone, though with many operational scars left behind, and his sanity had been more or less restored. Sure, he was still a bad guy, but he was a coherent bad guy. Under Osborn’s orders, he orchestrated the kidnapping of Aunt May as a way to mess with Spider-Man and get Osborn out of prison.

As we know, the Venom symbiote – having skipped on its latest host – decided that Gargan was ideal. Perhaps it was how Gargan’s Scorpion powers are notably comparable to Spider-Man’s. Perhaps it was Gargan’s hatred of Spider-Man, spiked with his lack of Eddie Brock’s morals. But by the end of the day, Mac Gargan had become Venom.

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Next time you read an issue of Batman & Robin, make sure to do so with this cranking in the background.

Thanks to Yannick_B for bringing this kickass theme to my attention.

Also, stay tuned for later tonight. I should have another We Care a Lot up. This time it’s about Spider-Shemp.

This week begins with a lack of Amazing Spider-Man. That’s odd.

Batman and Robin #5
Grant Morrison and Phillip Tan

The Boys #35
Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson

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Back for another week of panels that give you a vague essence of the comics we have read this week without any real context. Let the non-reviews begin!

Amazing Spider-Man #607
Joe Kelly, Mike McKone and Adriana Melo

The Boys: Herogasm #5
Garth Ennis, John McCrea and Keith Burns

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A few weeks ago, I looked over Dell’s Dracula. Due to the pressure to be a more wimpy, G-rated company back in the 60’s, Dell had to take its classic monster properties and reinvent them into a more superhero fare. Another one of these properties was The Wolfman, which received its own movie-to-comic adaptation in 1964.

When Dell made their attempt at superhero comics, they took the concept and made a series called Werewolf, which lasted for three issues. If it wasn’t for the name and the fact that it came out around the time of Dracula and Frankenstein, it would have fallen into even more obscurity. See, the Dell take on Dracula was still a guy from a European country who lived in a dark castle and could turn into a bat. Frankenstein was still a big, strong guy with a green face and flattop. Werewolf, meanwhile, has absolutely nothing to link him to being a werewolf.

When you hear “Werewolf”, you think of Warren Zevon songs, Michael J. Fox movies, Jon Talbain, superheroes by night, Jason Bateman sequels to Michael J. Fox movies, furries, Joe Estevez movies, nards, Rahne Sinclair, Sabrewulf, John Jameson, Adam Sandler covers of Warren Zevon songs, and that episode of Real Ghostbusters where vampires and werewolves started biting each other and becoming hybrids. That episode ruled. What you don’t think about is Noob Saibot punching out enemy soldiers alongside a wolf.

Again, there are no credits listed, but it’s assumed that the creative team was Don Segall and Tony Tallarico. At first I was disappointed in finding out that Werewolf is in no way monster related like its brother comics. Then I delved deeper into the title and discovered that it is balls-out insane. As you see on the cover, the guy is a super spy, which means we’re going to be getting all sorts of James Bond shit, only because it’s a comic book from the 60’s, it’s going to be absolutely ridiculous!

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This is a new idea I decided to play around with. Rather than write up reviews of every little thing we read every week, we would simply try to get our point across via This Week in Panels. Each week, the collective of 4th Letter would post panels from various comics that have come out that we’ve read. Good or bad, we’ll try to portray them through one panel and let you draw your own conclusions. No gigantic spoilers or anything like that. Just an attempt to show you the essence of what the comic is all about.

Hopefully Esther starts responding to my emails so we can have more DC representation.

Amazing Spider-Man #606
Joe Kelly and Mike McKone

Blackest Night: Superman #2
James Robinson and Eddy Barrows

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About a year and a half ago, I got into a comic called Awakening, written by Nick Tapalansky and drawn by Alex Eckman-Lawn. Released by Archaia, the dark zombie mystery of a title had me interested for the first three issues, but then… nothing. The series went on hiatus for the longest time, only for it to finally resurface.

Did it resurface as #4? No, even better. Recently, a hardcover collection has been released, featuring the first half of the planned ten-issue series. It’s good stuff and is a good read for the upcoming October mood.

I invited writer Nick Tapalansky to an interview. He was gracious enough to both answer my questions and not hit me.

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The status quo for Venom had been changed, perhaps forever. The Venom symbiote had moved away from Eddie Brock, leaving a cancer-filled husk of a human being. While Mac Gargan found success as the new Venom, Eddie would be nearly forgotten about, suffering in a hospital bed. Eddie Brock himself was never a match for Spider-Man from the start. What hope would he have as an antagonist when he’s weakened by a disease?

Around that time, directly after Civil War, Marvel was making a big deal out of Spider-Man’s new look. Or old look. Whatever. The third Spider-Man movie – which featured the black costume – was on its way to theaters and Marvel chose to capitalize it in a way that really didn’t work. Spider-Man would start wearing a black costume again. The whole thing was a list of letdowns.

Was it the Venom symbiote? No. It was just a spandex costume he wore because he wanted to kill the Kingpin. Wearing black means he’s totally hardcore now.

So he’s going to kill the Kingpin? Ha! Come on, this is Spider-Man. The only people he’s killed are Gwen Stacy and Wolverine’s spy girlfriend, both unintentional. Spider-Man’s too much of a pussy to even kill Darkseid with a god-killing gun if he had the chance.

Okay, but the black costume will have some kind of storyline blow-off, right? No, not really. He wears it for an arc or so of his different comics, confusing people who will pick up and read World War Hulk for years to come. Then he simply stops wearing it. Like, at the beginning of One More Day, where it would make sense for him to still have it on, he’s back to his regular tights. Everyone was too distracted by the, “Jesus Christ! Really?!” aspect of that story to give a damn.

But what does that have to do with Eddie Brock outside of cosmetics? The reason Spider-Man was so cheesed off at the Kingpin in the first place was because a hitman accidentally shot Aunt May when going for Peter. Now she’s in the hospital in critical condition.

Aunt May in a hospital bed? Huh. I guess that’s one thing cancer-ridden Eddie Brock could take in a fight.

It’s a nice reference to the famous Kraven’s Last Hunt cover of black costume Spider-Man rising from beneath the earth in front of his own tombstone.

The Last Temptation of Eddie Brock takes place in Sensational Spider-Man #38-39. It’s written by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa and drawn by Lee Weeks.

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Thor is always saying shit out of line. Like when he accused Iron Man of not caring about black people other than Rhodey as he hammered him into the distance. I bet he likes having Namor’s fish stick in his mouth.