One of the themes of We Care a Lot has been that Venom has been written so differently over the years, including stories coming out at the same time. A good deal of the frustration comes from how all of his stories are one shared continuity. People disagree, but I love continuity. I think, when done right, it adds a special dimension to stories and empowers them.

But what of other continuities? The alternate realities and all that? Hell, you can do all the damage you want and it won’t have any affect. Have Gambit as the third Summers brother? Sounds stupid, but go ahead. Have Batman kill the Joker? Go for it! Have Richard Fisk become Daredevil? Sure, why not? Because at the end of the day, Gambit isn’t a Summers brother, Joker’s still kicking and Matt Murdock is still wearing crimson. If you can make a good story out of it, even better!

So let’s look at Venom in the other worlds. This will be a two-parter, followed by a similar look at alternate futures. What better way to start than Marvel’s go-to series for alternate storylines and one of my personal favorites: What If!

I’ve covered What If issues like wildfire before – and I do plan to reprise my Top 100 list a bit after the new batch or releases are finished – so I won’t go too in-depth. The first alternate story for Venom is What If the Alien Costume Had Possessed Spider-Man (#4 in the second series) by Danny Fingeroth and Mark Bagley.

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“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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Follow-up #1
Follow-up #2
Follow-up #3
Follow-up #4
Follow-up #5

(Don’t read #4 if you intend on seeing that Orphan movie any time soon)

Last time on We Care a Lot, I talked about Daniel Way’s Venom on-going. Hitting the halfway point, I decided to stop and give myself a break to recuperate. It’s good to know that while that series was going on, Venom started to appear elsewhere. And why wouldn’t he? The reason he was turned into a full-blown bad guy again was so he could go back to being Spider-Man’s threat of the day.

Venom would make his return to Spider-Man’s world in Spectacular Spider-Man #1 for a five-issue story called The Hunger. This isn’t to be confused with the super-awesome four-issue story from years earlier called Venom: The Hunger, but it usually is. It’s kind of funny how although it’s obvious Paul Jenkins probably didn’t read that Len Kaminski story, he more or less wrote the same story, only with Spider-Man and without the happy ending.

As Paul Jenkins writes the story, we get Humberto Ramos on art. This is rather interesting, considering Francisco Herrera is doing the art on Venom at the same time. A little research shows that Ramos mentored Herrera and that really shouldn’t come to a surprise of anyone. Case in point:

Which came out a month apart.

Though there are parts that annoyed me, The Hunger isn’t so bad. If anything, it’s easily the most important Venom story in the past 15 years, so you have to give them that. Really. While it introduces some ideas that don’t go anywhere, it still gets the ball rolling and leads us to where we are today.

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It’s been an interesting week for Dr. Doom. Wait, let me rephrase that: Dr. Doom has been a total jerk this week! Yes, I know being a jerk is his thing, but he’s gone the extra mile lately. In Dark Avengers, he’s rude to Osborn and his henchmen for saving his life. In Dr. Doom and the Masters of Evil, not only does he double-cross Magneto, but the entire miniseries is reasoning to make Doom even more of an asshole. Then you have Dark Reign: The Cabal. In one segment, he burns alive two of his servants just to make sure Loki is who she says she is.

Plus there’s the first segment, written by Jonathan Hickman and Adi Granov. I thought it was a cool segment (I love Granov-drawn Venom), but… I just didn’t think they went far enough. So I went back and fixed it up. The first page is untouched, but I’d like to think that the rest of it is an improvement.

Interesting that Doom thinks that Noh-Varr and Ares won’t stand for Osborn’s shit for too long. Plus I guess we’re getting the Spider-Man movie Goblin armor in comic form once Osborn gets tired of being Iron Patriot.

It’s no secret that I’m a guy who loves the fighting genre of videogames, especially when you consider the kind of awful comics I’ve forced myself to read. With all the Street Fighters and Tekkens and Mortal Kombats out there, the one game I find unfortunate for never getting its own comic series is Fatal Fury. And I’m counting American comics here. None of that ridiculous Hong Kong shit.

The reason Street Fighter fails as a comic is because the main hero and the main villain have little to do with each other. Think of it like this. Marvel’s main hero is Spider-Man. Their main villain is Doctor Doom. Have they met and fought? Sure. But if you were to do a 12-issue comic that sums up Marvel’s history through the eyes of Spider-Man vs. Dr. Doom, it would be a major stretch, watered down by all the other important characters.

Fatal Fury had two things going for it that would keep it a readable comic book. One is that it’s a very simple story. It’s about one man (and his less important brother) trying to get revenge on the crime boss that murdered his father with his bare hands in broad daylight and was so well-protected due to police bribery that nobody could do anything about it. So he enters a fighting tournament held by this crime boss in an attempt to get close enough so he can finally get that revenge. Everyone other than those two characters is ultimately a supporting character. Like I said, it’s simple. You can write the whole thing in three to twelve issues depending on how you want to go about it, not to mention sequels and spin-offs.

The other thing that would make it readable is the villain in question: Geese Howard.

Geese Howard is a slick bad guy who’s both untouchable in the criminal sense and the physical sense. Much of his fighting style is based on him casually catching his opponent’s attacks and tossing them around like a rag doll. Geese has a unique aura of badass that never truly appeared in a comic book counterpart. The character closest to him would likely be the Kingpin, especially the Bendis version, and even then the similarities don’t match up completely.

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