Today, discover how Thanos and the Infinity Gauntlet surprisingly had a major impact on the creation of Carnage by Venom!
This is “Foundationed Deep,” a feature where we look at particular odd/strange/interesting instances of retroactively connecting different comic book characters (for instance, Uncanny X-Men #268 retroactively established that Wolverine knew both Captain America and the Black Widow from World War II).
This whole thing started, as all great comic book stories do, with the involvement of a forgettable pun-themed supervillain duo. During the famed David Michelinie/Todd McFarlane run on Amazing Spider-Man, the creators introduced a new pun-themed supervillain team known as Styx and Stone, where one of the two was super strong (Stone) and the other could kill you by simply touching you (Styx). The two returned during a storyline where Spider-Man was once again fighting against Venom, the villain who had debuted early in the Michelinie/McFarlane run as the alien symbiote that had briefly bonded with Peter Parker being spurned by Peter and so it joined with Eddie Brock, a disgraced reporter who also hated Spider-Man.
In any event, in Amazing Spider-Man #333 (by this point, McFarlane had been succeeded as penciler on Amazing Spider-Man by another star artist, Erik Larsen. This issue was by Michelinie, Larsen and Mike Machlan), Styx uses his deadly powers on Venom and instead of killing both Eddie AND the symbiote, it only kills the symbiote…
Therefore, Eddie Brock was just a normal human being again and was arrested as such…
WHEN EDDIE BROCK MET CLETUS KASADAY
Back in those days, Marvel would go bi-weekly during the Summer, so you could cover a lot more issues in less time. As a result, what seems like long gaps in time are really not so long. This allowed Michelinie to play the long game, as it were. So it was not until Amazing Spider-Man #344 (by Michelinie, Larsen and Randy Emberlin) that we checked back in on Eddie Brock. As noted, he is now just a normal human and thus is no longer sent to superhuman prison. Instead, he’s at a normal prison, along with his cellmate, the insane serial killer, Cletus Kasady…
Obviously, it turned out that the alien symbiote was not actually dead, just badly wounded and needing time to regenerate itself. It then broke Eddie out of prison in Amazing Spider-Man #345 (by Michelinie, then guest artist Mark Baglkey and Emberlin)….
That seemed to just be a normal escape, except that things are never that simple and the symbiote left a little something behind for Cletus Kasady…
CARNAGE MAKES HIS DEBUT
As noted, Michelinie was able to continue to slow play this, with a six-part bi-weekly storyline in the middle of all of this that Michelinie didn’t even write. He returned to the book with fill-in artists Chris Marrinan and Keith Williams and in Amazing Spider-Man #359, we check back in with Cletus as he escapes in a mysterious fashion…
Things are a bit LESS mysterious in the following issue, where Cletus searches through the phone book looking for a goofy name and then he went out and murdered the guy with a funny name, but he is now calling himself Carnage…
In the following issue (with Bagley and Emberlin joining Michelinie), we see the full debut of Carnage, a new alien symbiote that has merged with Cletus…
So obviously, the Venom symbiote spawned another symbiote, which became Carnage (this is why Venom agreed to team up with Spider-Man to fight against their common enemy, because Venom considers himself responsible for Carnage’s creation).
WHAT WAS THANOS DOING DURING ALL OF THIS?
Right around the time that Eddie Brock’s alien friend was spawning a new symbiote in early 1990, Thanos had just returned to the pages of Jim Starlin, Ron Lim and Tom Christopher’s Silver Surfer after having briefly leaving the series for the 1990 miniseries, Thanos Quest, where Thanos had collected all of the Infinity Gems (now Infinity Stones) to create the Infinity Gauntlet…
After a few more prelude issues, the Infinity Gauntlet crossover officially launched in the Summer of 1991, as Thanos kills off half of the people in the universe with a snap of his fingers…
In the end, the superheroes (plus Thanos, in part, being willing to give up ultimate power) defeat Thanos and restore the people who had been killed to the universe (and not after a five year wait). So that seems all well and good and not really two storylines that had anything to do with each other, right? Well, this is comic books, and you never know what is going to be eventually connected to another down the road….
HOW THANOS PLAYED A ROLE IN CARNAGE’S DEBUT
Venom #20 (by Donny Cates, Iban Coello, Ze Carlos and Rain Beredo) came out during the 2019 crossover, Absolute Carnage, and in the story, it actually explains WHY Venom “spawned” Carnage way back when in early 1991.
As it turns out, the symbiotes can sense great cosmic danger and whenever that happens, they spawn to help make their odds greater and so Venom spawned Carnage out of fear over Thanos putting the Infinity Gems together to form the Infinity Gauntlet…
It’s a very clever idea by Cates, and what’s funny is the fact that in the world of superhero comic books, you can pretty much pick a year out of the hat and there will be SOMEthing notable enough to inspire a symbiote spawning, so it is fun to see how Cates decides which event is the one that caused the symbiotes to spawn out new ones.
It is also clever because before he was the writer on Venom, Cates had a very notable run on the Thanos regular series, so it’s also kind of a callback, as it were.
If anyone has a suggestion for a Foundationed Deep (retroactive connections between characters), feel free to drop me a line at [email protected].
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