Venom’s latest transformation is everything good about superhero comics

The superhero genre holds many moods, but as I’ve written at length before, one of its greatest delights is the subconscious juxtaposition of the sublimely meaningful and the utterly ludicrous. Like the phrase “With great power comes great responsibility” and a teenager who doesn’t dress like a spider in any way to fight crime.

Or an in-depth conversation about personal growth, doubt, the nature of good and evil, the pitfalls of detachment and attachment – concluded with a character growling, “I’m going to go back in… and I’m going to kick my own ass!” followed by the caption “TO BE PUNCHTINUED!”

What else is happening in the pages of our favorite comics? We’ll tell you. Welcome to Monday Funnies, Polygon’s weekly list of the books our comics editor liked last week. It’s part society pages about superhero lives, part reading advice, part “check out this cool art.” There may be some spoilers. There may not be enough context. But there will be great comics. (And if you missed the latest edition, read this.)

In this week venomEddie Brock had a conversation with a cosmic being – in the form of a severed floating hand that could answer one question for each of his fingers – about who he is. venomco-written by Al Ewing and Ram V, with this song drawn by Cafu, has made that a central theme for Eddie, who is on a dark Everything Everywhere Everything at once-esque time travel adventure in which he meets his future self, realizes he’s already become a few, and deserves the wrath of the implacable Meridus, who claims to be his own ultimate incarnation.

As it turns out, Meridus isn’t the ultimate incarnation of Eddie – this floating hand is. And the King in Black, a cosmic role Eddie stepped into shortly before the series began, is actually the polar opposite of one of Marvel’s most aloof and powerful group of cosmic muckety muck, the Beyonders. The Beyonders are beyond matter, beyond physical existence, beyond the body, while the King in Black is nothing but embodiment at its most fundamental level, matter at its most simple and multifaceted – a vast psychic web of goo that can become.

This is all pretty far from the character’s Lethal Protector days on the streets of San Francisco, but not That far. After all, the Venom symbiote was originally found in a Beyonder device. And Ewing takes it back to the core idea of ​​Venom as Spider-Man’s counterpart. Instead of a guy who always does good despite being a regular asshole, he’s a guy whose usual assholes are usually insurmountable. What does that man do when he gains power on a cosmic level? Is he ruining the universe, or is he just screwing up his life?

Or does he reshape his body with his superhero symbol on his own chest and growl that he’s going to fight his future self, as even the comic’s narration declares “To be punchtinued”? What a beautiful page.

I’m running out of ways to say it: poison ivy is one of the best books on the shelves today. It’s easy to recommend graphic novels like Ducks and long-running superhero stories like Immortal Hulk – But poison ivywritten by G. Willow Wilson and drawn by Marcio Takara and various guest artists, is the best of the serialized, monthly comics, weaving between short and long fiction, main plot and digression, but with a consistent character and theme.

The character is clear, and the theme is fuck capitalism, make human connections, eat the richdelivered as soft and penetrating as the growth of a kudzu vine.

I don’t need a long explanation for this. In this week I’m Iron Man, Iron Man gets stuck at the bottom of the ocean and encounters a sardine that has been irradiated into a huge beast, Godzilla style. I love Iron Man’s pouty little pose. I like this sardine.