Reading List: Venom Volume 1

Well, it has been a while since I’ve written a Reading List post, so I guess it’s about time. Today, we’re going to take a quick look at the first on-going Venom series, which began in 2003 and ran for 18 issues. It wasn’t particularly long, and only lasted for two years, but it, like a lot of things marvel was doing at the time (see my post on the Captain Marvel book of that era) was completely and very entertainingly insane. The series starts somewhere in the arctic, in a a lonely, frozen outpost which is staffed by a handful of stalwart roughnecks and is largely cut off from the rest of the world. If this is starting to sound a little bit like the film The Thing, well, just wait. An army lieutenant named Patrica Robertson, who is stationed there, travels to a research lab a few miles away to return and borrow some VHS tapes, but when she gets there, all hell has seemingly broken loose and nearly all of the scientists have been brutally murdered. There is one survivor, and he is incoherent, so Pat brings him with her back to the military outpost. The survivor is, of course, carrying the Venom symbiote, but this is a somewhat different version of Venom than we’ve seen before.