6th Sense’s 4a.m. Instrumental brings us in as we discuss our three favorite Batman and Spider-Man villains, and just what makes them so great. Esther’s got Bane, Catwoman, and the Riddler, I’ve got Norman Osborn, Black Cat, and Doc Ock. There’s a surprised amount of similarities in our picks, even though we surprised each other.

After that is the Continuity Off to end all Continuity Offs, as Esther explains Hawkman, Hawkgirl, Hawkwoman, and Hawkworld, and I… well, give it a listen.

Grab the Fourcast! via RSS or iTunes.

Venom was certainly making himself known in late 2004. Not only did he have his ongoing series and his role in Marvel Knights Spider-Man, but Marvel decided to give him top billing in yet another miniseries! This time, we got Venom/Carnage, or Venom vs. Carnage. At least, the latter is how it appeared in the solicits, but the former is how it shows up in the book. I mean, I guess the slashed one makes it easier to type, but adding “versus” makes anything sound cool. Would people be that interested in “Freddy/Jason” or “Aliens/Predator”? No. Not at all.

Venom/Carnage came out in September, 2004, only weeks before the Venomous storyline, which would seemingly kill off Eddie Brock and make Mac Gargan the new Venom. A couple months later, Carnage would be flown into space and torn in half by the Sentry in the pages of New Avengers. So why would they be making a miniseries about these two characters who are about to be changed so radically? Why, it would be for an introduction!

The series is written by Peter Milligan with the art by Clayton Crain. Crain’s style is very unique, looking like an ultra-glossy wax museum made of CGI. His human characters can look very off at times, but when someone’s face is covered and they’re in costume, they look pretty rocking. This goes double for the symbiote characters, such as Venom and Carnage on that above cover. The symbiotes get by on being made to look cool and this guy makes them look cooler, so give them a minseries, why not.

From writing up these articles and having to reread these stories, I think I’ve noticed a hiccup in the storytelling process. In the Spider-Man story The Hunger, it ends with the Venom symbiote saying that it’s pregnant. Daniel Way’s Venom series ends with Venom becoming a huge monster that’s meant to unleash some kind of world-ending output that can’t be described. My own educated guess would be that Toxin, the character this installment is about, was meant to be that offspring. Only, Peter Milligan was plotting Venom/Carnage and thought, “Eh… fuck it, we’ll make it Carnage’s kid.”

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Recently, I took a splendid little trip to Orlando to partake in Disney World and the Universal parks. How can I sum up my trip in one image?

Sheesh.

I guess I should go in this day-by-day.

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Recently, Street Fighter 4 came out for the PC. Because of that, people have been able to hack into the game and change the character appearances. For some it means giving Akuma a pink gi and Dan’s moveset. For some it means nuding up the female cast. For one awesome guy, it means making Zangief into Mr. T. But for now, check these out.

I also saw Sagat as John Stewart GL (when we all know Sagat would be a Red Lantern) and Cammy as Psylocke, Arachne and Harley Quinn.

On a similar note, hopefully sometime tonight I should have a new article up that’s also about comics and videogames. No, not Street Fighter or any of its ilk. Rather, it’s something more mainstream and yet far more out of left field.

Plus Ultimatum #5 comes out this week. We all know what that leads to.

Last time on We Care a Lot, I discussed Eddie Brock’s cancer retcon. Before that, I was talking about Daniel Way’s Venom on-going series. To refresh your memory, the Venom symbiote is on the loose up in Canada. It killed off all of army girl Patricia Robertson’s friends and is on its way to a more populated area. Robertson is allied with an alien life form named the Suit, who fights with a cell phone gun. They are being antagonized by a pair of spy chicks who want Venom for themselves. Although they have already been killed, another couple of them have popped up. Venom has finally settled on a host that he can live off of forever.

And that’s where we left off. Venom #10 begins with the Venom-controlled Wolverine attacking Vic and Frankie’s ship and forcing it to crash. The two suit up in their armor and reveal to the reader that they’re probably into each other sexually. Of course they are.

They don’t last a minute. Frankie is stabbed to death by Venom-Wolverine and Vic stumbles upon her doppelganger’s corpse from earlier. She realizes that she’s nothing more than a clone, puts her gun to her head and pulls the trigger.

The torso remains of the Suit give Patricia a new cell phone he has created. He says that he placed the original in a special place and that the new phone acts as a detonator. Venom-Wolverine busts in after her and she presses the button to activate the first phone. As we see, after Wolverine was knocked out by that nuke, the Suit tore open his chest and shoved his phone in there. Now the cell phone goes off, electrocuting Wolverine from the inside and forcing off the symbiote.

BOOOO!

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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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A while back, there was that story about Gwen Stacy’s clone children. Originally, they were meant to be Peter’s, but it was overturned because Peter Parker having children of any kind would age him.

Joe Quesada decided that Peter Parker and Mary Jane should not be married anymore and that Peter should be single. One of his wafer-thin reasons was that Peter Parker being married would age him.

The whole idea about Mephisto retconning away their marriage was partially because Quesada definitely did not want the two of them to get a divorce. Why no divorce? You guessed it. It would age him.

My personal opinion is that no, none of these things would truly age the character. I mean, hell, Scarlet Witch has a father who survived the Holocaust, a brother with white hair and a full-grown daughter from another reality and she still seems plenty young. All that Spider-Man stuff mentioned above doesn’t totally age Peter. But you know what does?

Having an 8-year-old Danny Rand play with a Spider-Man action figure!

Let’s see… Danny is 8 in that sequence. The last year of his comic has made a big deal out of him being 33 now. Spider-Man started fighting crime at 15…

So there you have it. Spider-Man is at least 40-years-old! Looking pretty good for a guy that age. Soon he’ll be getting hair plugs and a shiny, new Spider-Mobile to deal with his spectacular middle age crisis. I wish him well.

Speaking of Iron Fist, that issue has a preview for Fat Cobra’s upcoming one-shot. It’s great already and I’m sure the final product will be brilliant. Fat Cobra is easily one of the best new characters from either of the big two in a long time.

I managed to pull myself away from Final Fantasy VII long enough on Saturday to record another Fourcast! with Esther. Of course, the looming specter of technical issues ended up eating about twenty minutes of what we recorded, if not more, but we pulled it out in the end. You can tell that there were issues because my headset suddenly changes sounds with five minutes to go. Whoo!

Here’s the breakdown:
-We open with a brief chat about the unnamed Secret Six, courtesy of Gail Simone and Nicola Scott, and beefcake. Did I call beefcake gross? No, but I did call Bane’s chest gross. Look at it.

-Look at that chest.
-Next up is Grant Morrison & Frank Quitely’s Batman and Robin, where we praise the book, namecheck frequent commenter ACK (holla!), and critique Quitely’s art.
-Thomas Wayne can beat up your dad.
-Dumb comics, like Spider-Man: The Short Halloween, are fun comics!
-No, wait, dumb comics are bad comics as we discover in a new segment that is as-yet unnamed. Esther explains the history of Dinah Drake, later known as Dinah Lance, while I go into a brief overview of the Clone Saga.
-Neither of us escapes unscathed.
-At the end of the show is a surprise for you, listener! And also one for you, Esther!

Kapow! We’ll see you in… seven days?! What new development is this?!

(boilerplate stuff: subscribe to the podcast-specific RSS feed, or grab us on iTunes. feel free to drop a review on us!)

I’m sure you remember yesterday… or maybe not. I mean, nothing really happened due to it being just a cover, a recap and a page of Hulk breaking stuff. At least here we’ll get somewhere.

Blame ManiacClown for the Yo Gabba Gabba thing. The dude’s a dad, so I guess that’s his excuse. Still, he showed me clips from that show of Biz Markie talking to children while being stoned out of his mind, so I can’t hate on it.

If you want some actual context on how we got from point A to point B, in the pages of Ultimate Spider-Man, Spider-Man and Hulk stumbled upon Strange’s house, where demons and stuff were being released due to the place’s structural damage. Strange was taken over by Nightmare, who attacked the heroes, only for Hulk to pound on Nightmare until that big explosion happened. I explain this because Ultimate Spider-Man is the only comic that makes the Ultimatum situation not suck.

We’ll be back tomorrow for more from Strange and the Great Pumpkin.

Day Three!
Day Four!
Day Five!
Day Six!
Day Seven!

Hey, buddy! Welcome to another week of Ultimatum Edit! It’s been a while, so I’m sure you’re a little fuzzy on what’s been going on. Let me recap for you.

Issue 1: Nightcrawler died, Dazzler died, Beast died.

Issue 2: Wasp died, Xavier died.

Issue 3: Thor died, Yellowjacked died, Cannonball died, Emma Frost died, Polaris died, Sunspot died, Blob died, Detonator (who?) died, Forge died, Longshot died.

And other characters died in other comics. That’s what’s important. Who cares about telling a story? It’s all about being SHOCKING! Whoa, did you see how bloody that one scene was? Who’s going to go next?! Whoo! Hope died a little too, by the way.

ManiacClown and I will be back tomorrow to deal with Dr. Strange. Oh, and Kitty Pryde gets a page too.

Day Two!
Day Three!
Day Four!
Day Five!
Day Six!
Day Seven!