Warning: SPOILERS for Venom: The End
The symbiotic Venom has adopted many roles over the years, including a mysterious costume, a combat uniform, a spacesuit, and the hide of a mutated T. rex. With the help of Eddie Brock, the shapeshifting ooze has acted as a monstrous nemesis, a lethal protector, an Avenger, and even a father (to both human and symbiote children). In Venom: The End, Venom has taken on his last, greatest job title: savior of all biological life.
Venom: The End is part of Marvel’s The End series of one-shots, each of which tells the “final story” of its focal character. This year’s offerings illustrate the final struggles of Captain America, Spider-Man, and Deadpool, among others, but none of these stories offers the massive scope of Venom’s finale, which spans the entire length and breadth of the universe itself in a story about living beings that outlast the existence of what we consider existence.
As the opening scene shows us, the issue is framed around the ultimate battle between “Team Biolife” and “the Godminds”, and given that the issue’s timeline labels it a “mop-up operation” before “the final extinction of all biological life”, we can immediately tell that this is not a battle that Team Biolife will win. We can also see that, even though the team is purported to represent all biological life, the definition of “biological life” here seems to be strictly restricted to Venom symbiotes, symbiote hosts, and that massive Venomized planet in the background. Did Venom infect all life with itself as part of the battle against the Godminds? The answer is yes… technically.
As readers of the recent Absolute Carnage event know, whenever a symbiote bonds with a host, each is left with traces of the other: the host retains a “codex” of symbiotic genes that act as an archive of the symbiote hivemind, while the symbiote retains a genetic record of the organism it fed on. This meant that when biological life became a dwindling commodity, Venom acted as a preservationist by reconstituting those samples as human clones, not unlike the resurrection methods currently used by the X-Men. In making these clones, Venom began to splice in DNA from other mammals, microscopic life, and even bacteria to make them less fragile. The result is something like a human and like a mutant, but entirely unique, formed as a collage of millennia of evolution. These clones are perfectly suited both to be Venomized and to resist conversion into cosmic circuitry, all under the protection of Venom itself.
This issue, written by Adam Warren with art by Chamba, revels in how ludicrous and over-the-top the sci-fi action gets. Venom’s efforts to preserve both its favorite host, and then its favorite host species, top themselves every page, and both writer and artist impress in their ability to keep up with each other across trillion-year flashbacks and endless new characters. Warren slings his trademark breathless, alliterative narration (“petulantly psychopathic”, “tragically Tony-deprived”) and Chamba’s art plays with the subject matter, showing us memorable spectacles like Venomized neurons that transmit brain signals from one toothy grin to another.
It’s a testament to Venom’s evolution as a character that they’re remotely believable as a cosmic progenitor of humanity. At one point, Venom was just a murderous nemesis to Spider-Man, but after decades of stories, the toothy creature has become a distinct and sympathetic protagonist. The relationship between the symbiote and Eddie Brock has progressed from simple hatred of a common foe to a lifelong companionship, with each feeling incomplete without contact with the other. A trillion years in the future, Venom’s acts are partly self-preservation and partly a sense of guardianship, but ultimately are an effort to regain what it lost: a unique bond with a specific mortal that it would make or destroy the universe to be with again.
Venom: The End is on sale now at your local comics shop.
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