A review by loop
Venom by Rick Remender: The Complete Collection Vol. 1 by Rick Remender

5.0

This lives up to the hype. I do love Remender and Venom, so I expected to enjoy this, but it really did impress me. Remender always writes soldiers extremely well, and he got deep into Flash's head and made me really empathize with him; some stuff really hit home for me. The threat of Venom taking over was always present and always kept me at the edge of my seat. It really captured that Venom horror feel in a book that otherwise feels like a departure from classic Venom themes. Remender has Flash really go through the ringer, as he usually does with any character he writes. A lot of really crappy stuff happens to him in the span of 12 issues, but it all humanizes him extremely well. I expected the Spider-Island tie-ins to be lame, but they ended up feeling really natural, continuing Flash's arcs smoothly. I also loved the way Remender writes Spider Queen and Jack O'Lantern. Jack specifically got a lot of character development.

As for the art: I love Tony Moore's art, but holy shit Tom Fowler came out of nowhere and really impressed me. Very clean line work and good panel pacing; and his Spider-Queen is really hot, and tastefully so. Medina was also quite a treat.

The "What If" issue was neat; it had some funny concepts and clever pop culture references, poked fun at the Marvel universe, but overall felt more like a Deadpool story where Venom and Carnage were just there. Still a lot of fun.

Looking forward to the rest of this series. 9/10 so far.