Venom #21 // Review
90% of storytelling is in its delivery. So much of successfully telling a story relies so heavily on carefully modulating expectations. It takes a hell of a lot of guts to call your shot as a writer. The title of Venom #21 is “Pages 2-19: They Fight.” The title is accurate. Writer Al Ewing has a lot of guts and a rather clever sense of humor that makes its way onto the page courtesy of artists Cafu and Pere Pérez. Color comes to the fight courtesy of colorist Frank D’Armata. It’s pretty rare when an issue is so purely a single scene. There’s not a whole lot going on in the issue, but it IS fun.
Eddie Brock has had some difficulty carving out a place for himself in the Marvel Universe. It was bound to happen eventually--he was bound to run into the worst part of himself sooner or later. That worst part of himself is a massive, red mesomorphic monster known as Bedlam. Brock and Bedlam are on a rooftop. They’ve got a few things to work out. They’re going to work those things out the only way they know how at this stage. They’re going to fight.
Ewing could be said to be taking a breather from this issue. Sometimes the lead singer needs a breather, so he lets the guitarist do a ten-minute solo. That sort of thing...but that’s not what this is. This is an opportunity to show the brutality that Brock has been living with for so long. And it’s an opportunity to see what’s going on inside his mind with a very long, very aggressive, issue-length fight scene. It takes a lot of guts to call your shot with a title like the one this issue has, but it also takes a lot of trust in the artist.
There aren’t many artists that would excel in the space of an issue-length fight scene between two characters. As cool as it might sound, it could get really boring really quickly. There's no questioning that. Cafu and Pérez handle the challenge with a cold brutality. There might be a tendency to want to over render the drama. There might be a tendency to want to throw a whole bunch of different angles in. But ultimately, what needs to happen with this issue is there needs to be some sense of progression in character development. And the artists do a good job of delivering the full emotional spectrum in the course of this fight.
It's not like this sort of thing hasn't been tried before. And sometimes dramatic departures from traditional conventions of the plot structure of a comic book work really, really well. In the context of the larger run of this particular series, Venom #21 might not actually be nearly as clever as it seems to think it is. However, it's just really fun to see something like this attempted.
