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Background
It all started with a simple mistake. While participating in the first
Secret Wars, Spider-Man really trashed his costume. He came across two other
heroes who earlier had similar problems and told him there was a wondrous
machine capable of making any article of clothing you can think of.
Unfortunately
for poor Spidey, they neglected to tell him where to find it. Spider-Man did
find a device that he thought looked like "it wants to make a costume". It
produced a small, black ball that initially set off his spider-sense as he
picked it up. The ball oozed over the confused hero and became a black
costume. Spider-Man wore the costume for a few months, enjoying the fact that
it produced its own webbing and could change to mimic his civilian clothes.
This all came to an end when Spider-Man discovered his nifty new threads
were actually an alien symbiote trying to bond to him permanently. Mr.
Fantastic separated the two with his "sonic blaster" and captured the symbiote
for study. It should be noted that during the period that Spider-Man wore the
alien costume, there was evidence that the symbiote somehow fed on his
adrenaline. The costume escaped and rejoined Spider-Man briefly, but the hero
tried to kill the symbiote using the noise from a church's bell tower. The
plan worked
too well, and the symbiote saved Spidey's life before hiding itself in the
church.
The other half of this future combo, Eddie Brock, was the star
investigative reporter for the Daily Globe. Eddie was a particularly driven
man driven to seek the approval of his stone-hearted father. It stands to
reason that when his biggest score--a man confessing to be the then-active
Sin-Eater--was exposed as a fraud when the real Sin-Eater was captured by
Spider-Man, Brock went a little over the edge. The paper fired him, his
father disowned him, and his marriage ended. Brock's mind locked onto
Spider-Man as the source of all his woes and thus began Brock's burning hatred
of the Wall-Crawler. But life continued to deal harshly with Brock, and soon he
decided to commit suicide. Stopping by a church to pray before he did the
fateful deed, Brock's intense hatred of Spider-Man was noticed by the symbiote
who had been hidden there since its last confrontation with Spider-Man. The
two bonded and became Venom.
Venom has battled Spider-Man, and anyone else who gets in his way, numerous
times since then. Brock sees himself as a hero, protecting innocents from the
"evil" Spider-Man. Venom desperately hates his "son", Carnage, who he sees
as
a perversion of all that he is. In truth Venom has acted as a hero on several
occasions, but he believes anyone he sees as "evil" should die, and this puts
him in the same dubious category as the Punisher. He still hates Spider-
Man,
but for a while regarded him as a necessary evil since the Wall-Crawler also
protects the "innocent". He came to this conclusion after "saving" Peter's
robotic "parents" (a scheme put together by Harry Osborn) from Peter's
supposed corrupting influence. Spider-Man consulted Brock's ex-wife, Anne
Weying, on how to approach him during his "parents" kidnapping and she
helped Eddie realize that Spider-Man should be left alone.
Venom served a homeless community of people living in the buried ruins of old
in San Francisco. He acted as thier protector for a while but make no mistake:
that Venom was insane. Brock was soon captured by the Jury, a high tech band
of mercenaries hired by the father of a guard that Brock had killed while
escaping from prison. He was also targeted by the Life Foundation, who wanted
to harvest his remaining symbiotic offspring. This resulted in the creation of
five new symbiotes: Scream, Lasher, Agony, Phage and Riot. (Four of these
symbiotes later bonded to Scott Washington, who became Hybrid.) Shortly
after that, Venom had an epic struggle with the returned Ben Reilly, who
managed to separate Brock and the symbiote.
After being rejoined, Venom's killer instincts surfaced once again, and little
by little he became a threat to innocent people as well. He acquired selective
amnesia (Brock no longer remembers Peter is Spider-Man, and the symbiote
doesn't
seem to make any effort to remind him of that). Brock absorbed Cletus Kasady's
symbiote (who then found another one) and joined the Sinister Six shortly
after
the reboot. But he soon regretted it and then tried to kill his former
teammates.
He left Sandman near death, after biting a great chunk out of him, and
attacked
Electro, leaving him also for dead. He made some sort of peace with Spidey
(again),
only to foolishly blame him for something as farfetched as his wife's suicide.
When the powerful human/alien hybrid known as Senator Ward, Venom lost his
chance
for revenge, since Ward split Brock and the symbiote apart (again).
A secret agency created their own symbiote using a piece of Venom's tongue that
bonded with a woman named Robertson in an Alaskan lab. Eventually,
Venom
would absorb this symbiote into himself. Unfortunately, he wasnt unable to
remove
that entire 18 issues run from existence, since it was a story that never quite
found its way.
Venom returned later on to reveal that Eddie Brock had cancer, and he could not
survive without a permananent merge with the symbiote. In the end, Spider-Man
forces the symbiote to go through with this "permanent merge." Eddie and the
symbiote have one last row with Carnage, when they find out the red maniac is
about to spawn. Kassady wants to kill the young symbiote, while Venom wants to
protect it. The new creature bonds to Pat Mulligan and becomes Toxin. He
quickly beats "dad" and "grandpa."
Meanwhile, Eddie's cancer has continued to spread and in one last attempt at
redemption he sells the symbiote to an auction. He goes through an awakening
and auctions off the symbiote to Don
Fortunato who gives it to his son, Angelo Fortunato. The money will go to
charity, but even Mysterio (Daniel Berkhart, present at the auction) says
that selling a killer monster doesnt seem very Christ-like.
The last we see of Venom, Eddie had slit his wrists in an alley and the
symbiote
is running free looking for a host. I'm not sure how this permananent merge
was
undone, or why the cancer that had just about killed Eddie before didn't kill
him
the minute he gave away the symbiote. However, I have a funny feeling that the
symbiote will find Eddie Brock and remerge before he dies of his self inflicted
wounds.
Brock did indeed survive his latest suicide attempt, but was waiting for the
end in the terminal ward of a hospital. He stayed there for months, quietly
waiting for death, going about his daily exercizes without much enthusiasm. He
was a broken man without much reason to live, until he realized that Peter's
comatose Aunt May was in the same hospital after being shot by the
Kingpin's sniper. Eddie was unsure what to do, but his psychosis, taking
the form of a mocking symbiote, goaded him into a murder attempt on the
catatonic old woman. He wore a black Spider-Man costume that he had bought
online and murdered his nurse, to see if he still had it in him to be a
killer.
The nurse was no problem (she kept missing his veins when she took blood
samples, so he rationalized that she deserved to die) so he made his way to
May Parker's room. Peter, Mary Jane, Madame Web and Felicia Hardy
were busy taking part in a seance to contact Aunt May psychically, so May was
alone and helpless. Alone with Peter's aunt, Eddie couldnt bring himself to
kill. He still saw May as an innocent, no matter what his hallucenation told
him. Sensing that May was in danger, Peter rushed to her room, just in time to
see a deranged Eddie Brock standing in the hospital window, his wrists
bleeding from multiple cuts. Telling Pete that he finally managed to cut the
symbiote out of himself, Eddie jumped. Naturally, Peter saved him.
Thanks To:
Some of the above information is extracted from the various
versions of the Official Handbook to the Marvel Universe and the more recent
Marvel Encyclopaedias.
The assistance of the
Marvel Chronology Project is gratefully acknowledged.
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