Extra-03--Black Suit Saga By Green-Mamba Watch

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"Friendship ended with Peter Parker. Now Venom Symbiote is my best friend."



Anyway, I did a picture for Ock, I did one for the Green Goblin, so why not one for Venom? Haven't really gone over him in a while, might be an opportunity to better flesh out his role in the story. So here's a picture that hits the highlights of his origin.



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So let's start at the very beginning. Long before Peter was Spider-man, Peter's father Richard Parker was a biochemist working in conjunction with friend and colleague Edward Brock Sr on something they called the "Venom Project," a type of revolutionary protoplasmic suit that was intended to be a cure for cancer. Partway through its construction they brought it to a chemical corporation for funding, but when the chemical corporation saw potential in its use as a weapon, they corporation claimed the suit belonged to them, and a legal battle began. On a plane trip to a court hearing, Richard, Edward, and their wives all perished when the plane crashed under suspicious circumstances. Their sons, Peter and Eddie, were left as orphans. Peter was raised by his aunt and uncle, while Eddie went to live with his grandfather, and the two kids, who had played together while their parents were still alive, went their separate ways.



A work-in-progress version of the Venom Project was left with Eddie Brock. Eddie, who was a few years Peter's senior, eventually made it to Empire State University while Peter was still in high school. There, Eddie met the biochemistry professor Doctor Curtis Connors, and showed the Venom Project to him. Realizing the suit's potential, and the chemical corporation who had claimed ownership had seemingly long since disappeared, Connors took Eddie under his wing and they began studying and practicing applications for it. In particular, the suit's penchant for self replication, something that had been built into it to help it fight fast replicating cancer cells, seemed to possess the most potential.



Among their attempts at applications was seeing if they could harness the bioelectricity of electric eels. They modified the electric organs of these eels, fusing them with parts of the suit, and had them swim in a tank of highly conductive sludge like gel, hooked to a generator. When the resident mechanic, Max Dillon, was brought into do maintenance on the generator, an accident occurred, the tank broke, and Dillon was coated in the sludge (see the Sinister Six entry to see more of what becomes of Dillon).



This accident was highly publicized on the news, and this is where Peter (who at this point had been Spider-man for a couple months or so?) learns of Eddie Brock again. As Peter was so young when his parents died he had hardly remembered Eddie. When Aunt May and Peter saw the incident on the news, Aunt May reminded Peter of Eddie and their history together, and Peter decided to get in touch with him again. When they meet Eddie is genuinely excited and happy to meet his childhood friend, and Eddie introduces Peter to Dr. Connors--and the Venom Project.



Eddie and Peter start hanging out together. But soon Peter hears rumblings that other, less savory ears had heard of the Venom Project when the eel accident happened. So he starts staking out the ESU lab at night, and soon enough, he encounters the Black Cat--per Spectacular, this is where he first meets her. While normally working for the Kingpin (albeit undercover), she had been hired by someone else to steal the suit. Spider-man tussles with her, and in the fight the container for the main Venom Project batch breaks, and the suit envelopes Spider-man. Black Cat freaks out and thinks it has killed him and flees, but the suit instead bonds itself to Peter, devouring his original suit, and replacing it as a new spider-suit.



Peter flees the lab as well, in a vain attempt to force the suit off of himself, but realizes that the suit was actually greatly enhancing his abilities and strength, and, against better judgement, decides to keep it, becoming his main spider suit for a hot minute (he finds he can remove it when he isn't struggling so hard). Around this point is when Tombstone unleashes his gang war against Kingpin and Hammerhead, so the black suit is what Peter wears for the duration of that business.



On the other side, though, Eddie and Dr. Connors are devastated that the suit has gone missing, and Eddie shifts from nice guy the angry as hell really quick. He blames Peter for its disappearance (thinking Peter may have been the one to leak its location), and their relationship turns frigid. A few days later, things take a turn for the worse, and Connors loses a significant amount of his funding due to the suit's disappearance and is forced to let Eddie go as his paid assistant, the pay being the only thing keeping Eddie's head above water, which of course does not help his attitude or his relationship with Peter. The black suit, on the other hand, is having a negative effect on Peter's personality, and he unwittingly starts pushing Gwen Stacy, his girlfriend and confidant at this point, away. Eddie tries to get back at Peter through Gwen, but when Gwen rejects Eddie's unwanted affection, Gwen tries to warn Peter about him.



But Peter doesn't really listen, the black suit shifting his focus to the Tombstone gang war, which is near its zenith. During a heated final battle, Tombstone manages to take over one of the Kingpin's main facilities under Hammerhead's rule, and Peter leaps in to stop Tombstone from killing Hammerhead. Tombstone is fantastically strong, but not enough to combat the black suited Spider-man, and he flees to a nearby church tower. The black suited Spider-man beats Tombstone unconscious and comes within a hair's breadth of killing him when the sliver of humanity left in him rebels against the suit. He manages to free himself from the suit using the shockwaves of the nearby church bell, but the suit disappears into the night.



Realizing what a shit person he had been, and assuming the suit had been destroyed Peter makes his way to the lab to confess what had happened to Eddie, if he was still there. Peter catches Eddie just as he was clearing the last of his things out of the lab and decides it was his duty to tell his old friend what had really happened, including his own identity as Spider-man. Peter apologizes, and leaves as Eddie is reeling from what he had learned. He feigns forgiveness, but in reality the situation just makes him angrier. And lo and behold, the suit had not perished in the church, and had in fact followed Peter back to the college, where it finds Eddie...



Fast forward a little while, and Peter has a new suit he and Gwen constructed, and is getting back into the swing of things as Spider-man. In the midst of attempting to break up a fight between the Shocker and the Rhino (both being Kingpin cronies using stolen tech, but Rhino was attempting to betray the Kingpin and go his own way, and Shocker was attempting to stop them), Peter finds unexpected help from a black suited figure. He helps Peter dispatch the two crooks, but the black suited figure then viciously attacks him. When the fighting leads to a rooftop, the black suited figure reveals his true nature--he was Eddie Brock, wearing the black suit, augmented in strength by its time with Spider-man and Eddie's own natural hatred. Eddie states his purpose is to be the venom that poisons Peter's life in the way Peter had done to Eddie. They fight, and in the end Peter tosses the Shocker's shockwave generator at Eddie, which causes a huge explosion, and Eddie disappears in the fireball, leaving Peter to wonder if he had killed him.



Of course Eddie was still around, but he decided to stick to the shadows for a while. To retain the strength level its time with Spider-man had granted to it Eddie found he had to regularly feed the suit genetic material from people he killed, and made his way for a few months doing that. Peter and Eddie don't meet again until the Carnage incident. While Peter thought Eddie had perished, Miles Warren, the new head of ESU's laboratory after the Man-Wolf incident, knew better, and hired the mercenary Silver Sable to track, find, and capture Eddie. Sable catches Eddie off guard and delivers him to Warren. The good doctor, who was secretly working for Norman Osborn and was obsessed with the black suit (and was the man who had hired the Black Cat to steal it), extracts a portion of the suit and combines it with a sample of Peter's blood supplied to him by Osborn. The sample transforms into a red, supercharged version of the Venom Project, and leaves to find a subject to bond it to, not trusting to bond it to Eddie.



You might want to read the Carnage entry to see what happens next, but the short of it is that Warren bonds the supercharged suit sample with a murderer on death row named Cletus Kasady, and the sample eats Kasady's body alive. Kasady escapes and starts killing like crazy, using the genetic material he absorbs to sustain himself, and causes a mass jailbreak (as the experiment was held in the basement of the local prison), in an attempt to inflict a maximum level of carnage for as much time as he had left. Peter of course arrives at the scene as Spider-man, but to his surprise, he encounters Eddie there as well, still with his suit (having managed to escape confinement at the ESU labs). Eddie was aiming to reclaim the lost portion of his suit, and he and Peter form a temporary truce to corral the escaped convicts and defeat Kasady, which they of course do.



Before Eddie can reabsorb the red suit though, Silver Sable and her Wild Pack arrive at the scene and capture Kasady. Eddie attempts to fight them, but the combined might of the Wild Pack and Spider-man bring him down, and the Wild Pack escapes with Kasady, kept in a casket keeping him in suspended animation. Before too long the government arrives at the scene, and while Peter escapes, they take Eddie Brock into custody. The government agency that takes Eddie in is the same as the one that would later put Peter under surveillance, and upon realizing what Eddie Brock was bonded to, work to have Curt Connors freed from prison (serving time after the Man-Wolf incident) and put into their custody to see if he can find a way to stabilize the suit--they see potential in using it on an agent.



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Whew, that was a lot to go over. Basically, I wanted to tell, in detail, how it all happened originally, and let you know what Venom was up to until this point. He's kind of a tricky one, as he's not a schemer like Ock and Goblin.



Anyway, picture time. I was originally trying to conceptualize a single frame that would encapsulate the Venom story but instead decided to display it as a series of panels, which are more or less symbolic and not a statement of how these things really happened. So we got Peter meeting Eddie at the top, which was just my own creation as a framing mechanism for the rest of it. The panels at the bottom are all deliberately designed after covers and panels from the actual comics. The first panel at the left, where Peter gets the black suit, is based on Spider-man's pose on the cover of Secret Wars #8, which is the comic that told the origin of the black suit for the first time. The second panel of Peter attempting to tear off the suit is based on Spider-man's pose on the cover of Ultimate Spider-Man #125, one of the issues of the War of the Symbiotes story arc. It's just the first thing that popped into my head regarding a pose for Peter tearing off the symbiote. The third panel, the close up of Eddie Brock in the suit, is based on a panel from The Amazing Spider-Man #300, the first full appearance of Venom, where Eddie is explaining his origin to Peter for the first time. I thought it was pretty recognizable looking and explained who Eddie was, words not even necessary. And the final panel is based on the cover of The Amazing Spider-Man #316, Venom's first cover appearance and one of the most iconic covers in Spider-man's history.



(I want to thank CrazyMan54 for some of the ideas in this story, particularly the Tombstone episode)

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