Ever since Spider-Man brought Venom back from Battleworld in the form of a stylish new costume, we’ve seen the symbiote passed from host to host like a blunt at a Snoop Dogg concert. Though the concept has its fair share of naysayers, Venom was one of the Marvel’s best in the ’80s, specifically because it’s an idea that maintains a consistent flexibility. In short, Venom is a horror movie. It’s a Cronenbergian body-horror mixed with a John Carpenter boogieman, and it’s always interesting seeing how this idea mutates depending on the host itself.
Peter Parker’s time spent with the costume saw him turn into a more aggressive version of himself. Spider-Man is an innately decent person, so the costume could only magnify his frustration at a world and his rage at the criminals that he fought. It didn’t take long before he shed himself of the costume, and it found a like-minded host in Eddie Brock. Brock was a failed journalist with a limited imagination, so his Venom was a ‘roided-out version of Spider-Man himself. Over time Venom grew more and more monstrous, and Brock lost the costume, where it passed to others, including the Scorpion, who turned Venom into a dark version of his own Scorpionic self, and then to Flash Thompson, who had been reworked into a war hero. Here Venom became the ultimate tactical armor, like Robocop if instead of a suit of cybernetic metal, OCP had grafted an alien to Murphy.
The version represented by this figure is an interesting one, and I think the reason I dig it so much is that it’s as close to a schizophrenic mess than an alien symbiote as you can get. This was the time when Otto Octavius, Dr. Octopus himself, was walking around wearing Peter Parker’s life like a meat suit. Otto was trying to be a good boy, and trying to be a Superior Spider-Man than Parker was, but Otto was still Otto, so his notions of good tended to sway towards totalitarianism a little more than Pete. Take an unbalanced man in a super-powerful body and add in an alien symbiote, and you get the Superior Venom. An OctoVenom, as it were. You can see the identity crisis in the design of the costume. There’s the general “black-costume Spidey” look that follows through on the various iterations of the symbiote. But then there’s the tentacles, a trope that Otto can’t stop himself from going back to. Even as Spider-Man, Otto rigged up a backpack that allowed him four extra arms. And yet, nobody put two and two together.
The mask deviates from the standard Venom mask in that it has the slightly warped weblines of Otto’s time as Superior Spider-Man. Again we see a schizophrenic war going on between what is essentially three distinct personalities. But despite the attempts at normalcy, the mask is a fanged nightmare, suggesting that the malevolence of both the symbiote and Otto’s true nature are still in charge.
If all that is way overthinking everything, then let’s take it back to basics. What was one of the coolest action figures made in the past 15 years that was based on a single story? Hopefully the first thing that popped into your head was Spider-Hulk, because it was the correct answer. It’s a Hulk wearing Spider-Man’s clothes. That’s just nuts. Now, what’s one of the coolest variants of a superhero coming up, also based on a single story? Cap-Wolf. Captain America as a Wolf.
To me Dr. Spider-Venom here follows along that trend beautifully, while also giving us a nice-looking figure. I am a sucker for the aesthetic of both the Black Costume Spider-Man and Venom himself, so I’m predisposed to digging this look, even though at the same time a lot of collectors (the vast majority, it seems) were referring to him as a waste of space. Couple that with my having a massive dude-crush on Dan Slott’s Spider-stories, and this figure hits all the right buttons for me.
Superior Venom used the new Pizza Spidey body, with a brand new head, feet, and backpack/tentacles. The body, of course, has that weird limitation in his hips that doesn’t allow him to do the splits, but everything else about this body is as fluid and poseable as it gets, which allows for a lot of those horror movie poses that a figure like this is calling out for.
The tentacles each plug into the backpack in a specific way, to the point where the peg holes and pegs are all shape-coded. If you were the kind of kid that had trouble with the round blocks and the square holes, you may have an issue, but the rest of us should be fine. I do wish the tentacles had a little bit more poseability to them, maybe an extra joint or even if they had been bendable, but something like that would probably have blown the budget. You’ll definitely want to glue them in, though, because those pegs don’t really hold under extreme playtime.
I am a little convinced that Superior Venom was a way of pumping out every version of Venom except for the classic Venom — you can almost hear the derisive laughter from the Wizards behind the curtain — but since the original Venom himself is due in an upcoming wave, then the wait will soon be over.
It’s not often we get a genuinely creepy action figure out of the Marvel Universe, so when a strange Spider-monster comes along, I feel a certain amount of appreciation for it. I may be completely alone on this, but I dig him.
Pick one up today at Amazon.com. Or order a full set of his wave at Big Bad Toy Store.