All-New Venom Kicks Off in December with High-Stakes Marvel Mystery

Famous comic book writer Al Ewing is just like us. He loves the Knives Out movies. He currently has Chappell Roan on the rotation. And he’s constantly thinking about “cosmic entities battling in each other’s minds.” Recognizable.

But unlike us mere mortals, Ewing also spins epic comic stories with a deep psychological core, as seen in Immortal Hulkhis stories set in the Krakoan era of X-Men, and his recent mind-bending run on Poison. The latter is almost coming to an end with the recently launched series Venom Warin which Eddie Brock takes on his son Dylan to prevent what both former Venom hosts see as a potential apocalypse.

But there’s good news for Ewing fans: He won’t be saying goodbye to Eddie and Dylan once the (Venom) war is won. Polygon can reveal that Ewing and artist Carlos Gómez will team up for a scaled-down, Earth-bound continuation of the Venom story in Marvel’s new ongoing series Brand New VenomThe book will be released in comic book stores in December.

Minor spoilers ahead Venom War Moving On: When the dust settles on Eddie and Dylan’s symbiote-heavy battle, the Venom symbiote will have a new human to call its own. Who’s under the gunk is a mystery that Dylan, in all his gumshoe mode, will have to solve. The book introduces four suspects — Robbie Robertson, Madame Masque, Rick Jones, and Luke Cage. And as Ewing put it in an interview with Polygon, there’s plenty of reasons why one of them could be the one swinging through New York City.

In anticipation of Brand New VenomPolygon spoke with Ewing about the new direction, the potential of all four suspects and why there are still plenty of ways to rewrite the rules (and look) of Venom.

Polygon: This will be your third iteration on Venom since picking up the character. What have you learned about Venom? What’s the core that makes you want to keep playing?

Al Ewing: Brand New Venom is where I transition from a writing team to solo writing, and I bring what I’ve learned. I’ve come to embrace a lot of the fun of Venom, in the sense that Venom is just a really fun character. There’s a certain amount of chaos that comes with the character. When I came out of Donny Cates’ run, Ram V and I had this clear idea of ​​epic scale, an epic time-travel story with elements of (Michael) Moorcock in it, The dancers at the end of timethat kind of thing.

But the more I wrote about Venom, the more that wild fun of the character started to creep in. And as I got to know the character more, and got to know Eddie and Dylan and the symbiote as characters, I started to enjoy it more and more.

Not that I didn’t like it in number 1, but in another way I really started to enjoy it, to the extent that Venom Warwhich was originally going to be a great father-son story when Ram and I were planning it. And it still is, but it’s set in a wrestling ring, because Venom requires a certain amount of craziness and wildness and fun. And I think Brand New Venom will embrace that even more.

You’ve written some epic, cosmic stories, including PoisonBut Venom War begins a process of scaling down, and the new book sounds even more down to (literally) Earth. Brand New Venom Does this feel like a welcome change in scope?

If people really want something different than I do, this is it. It’s almost more of a Spider-Man story. It’s set on Earth, very much in a regular New York City. Everywhere we go in the story is a place you could go, or at least the kind of place you could go. Obviously, if we go to a warehouse… well, I tend to find real warehouses and change them just enough to be legal. So yeah, everywhere we go in this story is a natural place you could go in New York City.

So we’re taking a swing away from the big cosmic thing. The pendulum swings away from that and back to a much more intimate, character-driven story, but also has a lot of that ground-level superhero action, where it’s less about cosmic entities battling in each other’s mindscapes, or mysterious zones outside of time, and much more on the streets – web-slinging, chains-slinging, doing the Venom thing. It’s almost like my return to an old-school kind of superhero comic, but with a few twists that we’re going to have fun throwing in.

On paper, it sounds like we’re getting the Venom version of a detective novel. Are there any genre touchstones that were at the top of your mind when you were writing the series?

A little bit. I’ve read my share of (Arthur) Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, and more recent stuff. I’m a big fan of the Knives Out movies — I really like what they do, how they tell the story, how they set things up. They never lie to the viewer of those movies. That’s important. They don’t reveal everything to begin with, but they never lie. (…) I think it’s important not to lie to the reader at any point. And I’m trying to do that right now, in this interview! But I’m a human speaking with my human mouth, so forgive me if I accidentally lie to you.

Let’s talk about the suspects. You have a soft spot for Rick Jansen.

I like Rick Jones! Has the sidekick been promoted to main hero now? That is the question. (The suspects) have to work well together as a group that pushes against each other, even if they don’t always meet. Each of them has to be a fun possibility, a group where the reader can’t point to one of them and say, Oh, that’s the oneHopefully we have achieved that.

It’s good to write a version of Rick who’s been through a lot of stuff and come out the other side. This is a much more laid-back, jokey, witty Rick than we’re used to from me. He’s not going through it anymore… unless he’s going through something else. Who knows…

Mrs. Mask is also in the party, perhaps the one most willing to use a symbiote in her daily life.

Madame Masque is another big suspect. She comes straight from the Gang warfarewhere we last saw her in a Spidey context. She has plans. Do those plans include taking a symbiote? Do they include taking revenge on other gangs in an identity no one would ever suspect? The ultimate mask for Madame Masque? I can’t possibly comment on it…

Robbie Robertson is probably one of the nicest gentlemen in the Marvel continuity.

Robbie Robertson is another one who was touched by the great Gang War and Spidey. He was never tempted by power or superpowers. Did that change after his son got so involved in the criminal underworld of New York and fell in love with the Beetle? Does Robbie want to find a way to control things in a way that you know he can’t as a newspaperman? Is this one of those great secret identities, like Clark Kent, a newspaper reporter – or newspaper editor, in Robbie’s case – who hears about problems and then goes and deals with them?

The last suspect is Lucas Kooibut he is in a precarious position: he is now mayor of New York.

We’ve seen heroes get symbiotes to get a little bit more done. And we’ve seen Luke Cage struggle to get out on the streets and do what he loves while sitting behind the mayor’s desk. Could this be a way to do that? Could this be a way to don another identity, kick the ass he knows needs kicking, but in a capacity where he’s not officially doing it? He doesn’t have to answer questions that he would if he were out on the streets in his mayoral garb and doing what he used to do for the community. Maybe a symbiote is the perfect cover for him. Again, who knows? I’m just saying. These are all possibilities…

Does sticky old Venom still feel elastic as you write this new book? Does the mysterious premise push you and Carlos to play with the character’s shape in crazy new ways?

Carlos is absolutely amazing. He’s the perfect old-school superhero artist for this project. Every page that comes into the inbox looks amazing. And I’m throwing out a bunch of new Venom setups. Some of the “all new” of this Brand New Venom is that Venom doesn’t fight like we’ve seen Venom do before. I’m just writing a few pages right now where Venom does some extremely wild shapeshifting using the symbiote’s stickiness.

One way the Brand New Venom is different is that it has a more heroic looking Venom. I won’t go into the visuals, I will just mention in passing that there’s a new look to Venom. But before, there was a lot of goo, a lot of tendrils, a lot of, like, slime and goo and slime and fangs and teeth. This is maybe a little bit more of a solid Venom. It gives us the benefit of being able to do all sorts of exciting new tricks and fun new things right from issue 1.