(This symbiote lecture was originally on Tumblr and was deleted in 2018 after tumblr started randomly deleting users and content on its platform)

Yeah why not, Ultimate Venom is a big part of my childhood so this feels like a good topic to tackle, especially to talk about why i’m really dissatisfied with how it was used later on in the Ultimate Spider-man Series.

Other Lectures -

   0. - Masterpost

Let’s rewind back to the year 2000. Marvel really really wanted to make their comics appealing to a newer and younger audience, so the idea they came up with was to create an entirely new and secondary continuity with revamped and reimagined versions of their main heroes. Don’t be fooled tho’, all of them are shit. All of them except Ultimate Spider-man. The series was written by Brian Michael Bendis (a writer with a very specific style of writing for which he’s costantly made fun of) and drawn by Mark Bagley (long term artist who already worked at Marvel for a long time by that point and he was extremely familiar with the character of Venom since he worked on the Lethal Protector series and a lot of Spider-man comics during the 90s, Venom’s iconic look is based mostly on Bagley’s art despite not being the first artist to draw the character, that would be Todd Mcfarlane).

Anyway, the point of the Ultimate comics was to repackage classic stories but with a more modern taste. Not every single alteration was necessarily good or worked, but the Ultimate comics are still a really huge inspiration for lots of secondary media Marvel puts out even to this day (Spider-man Homecoming for example takes A LOT of inspiration from the later issues of Ultimate Spider-man). But where’s our favorite bulky tentacle idiot in this new continuity?

Ok so, back in the day Peter and Eddie Brock were childhood friends and their fathers were two scientists working together on a project. An organic suit that could enhance the immune system of the body making it able to cure anything, even Cancer. This was the “Venom Project”. The two eventually got short on funds and had to resort to working for Trask industries but the company eventually stole the project from their hands. The two started working on a secondary version of the suit which they called “phase 2”, making it form fitting and enhancing not only the host’s immune system but also their physical strenght in hope to use it as leverage for a court case where they were going to try and take their project back. Unfortunately on the flight there Eddie’s father tried the suit on. becoming the first Venom and crashing the plane, killing everyone on it.

Yeah Venom is the reason why Peter’s parents are dead in this continuity.

Anyway, cut to a bunch of years later, Peter is now Spidey and because of documents he just discovered about his parents he decides to get back in touch with Eddie, now a college student.

Let me make this absurdly clear: Ultimate Eddie is really lame. They tried to do something similar to the original one, with Eddie being basically a dark mirror of Peter (lots of power, same powers but pinning the fault on everyone except himself = no responsability), but he’s not interesting at all. He’s just a whiny egocentric asshole.

Anyway, Eddie shows the suit sample he still had with him to Peter, and Pete decides to sneak into the lab it’s in to steal a piece of it so he could continue his father’s work. Unfortunately a tiny piece of it fell on his hand, covering him completely and giving him the black suit. 

Pete is really liking the suit since it’s making him faster, stronger, can produce webbing on its own and he can even take a bullet through the shoulder without worries since the suit heals that shit completely. Nice.

Unfortunately there was an issue he didn’t expect: the fact that the suit was actually a man-made parasite that would eventually make the host go berserk and feed on people so it could continue living. And that’s what happened, the suit tried to take control of Peter and make him kill someone, but Pete managed to kill the suit he was wearing by inadvertenly electrocuting himself. He then went back to the lab to destroy the rest of the sample of the Suit but he was confronted by Eddie. 

Eddie was shocked by Peter's lies, which didn't bode well with the new discovery that he was Spider-man and that he was trying to destroy the only thing Eddie still had of his father. Peter managed to “convince him” to let him take the suit so he could destroy it, but Eddie didn’t tell him that they had another sample in the lab, and decided to DUNK himself into the goddamn thing. Flawless plan.

And he became Ultimate Venom. This is probably one of my favorite designs for the character, i love how much of a mess it looks like: with stuff not looking exactly right and the implication that it just swarms and moves costantly. I lllllove it. 

Anyway, Eddie was now mostly under the control of the parasite and started absorbing people. Unfortunately the parasite had a huge issue, it wasn’t complete and it was based on Peter’s Father’s dna so it needed the next best thing to Peter’s father to be complete: Peter himself. So now the plan was to absorb Peter so the Artificial Symbiote could be whole and stop tearing Eddie from the inside out. Unfortunately during the fight he got electrocuted and disappeared without a trace.

If you guys played the PS2 Ultimate Spider-man game this shit might sound really familiar to you: well that’s because most of what i just talked about is LITERALLY THE INTRODUCTION/TUTORIAL OF THAT GAME. You can check the whole thing now, gogo, Ultimate is a nice game.

That game was supposed to be a tie-in with the comics but since the comics hadn't resolved the Venom plot yet it made its own plot that ended up diverging from the comic events that came after the game release. I'll start talking about the differences between game and comic later.

From here the events of the comics play really similar to the ones in the game (just with some alterations here and there): Eddie mianders around New York, sometimes falling under the Symbiote’s control and killing people while being chased by Silver Sable and her gang trying to catch him so they can take him back to the company who originally stole the project from his father. 

At the same time Spider-man meets the Beetle, a b-tier supervillain who now has a snippy new robot suit and is constantly trying to steal Symbiote samples for vague reasons.

From this point, the events of the Videogame and comics differ a quite a bit, let’s start with the comics:

At one point the CIA decided to create clones of Peter so they could use them as government agents. One of the clones was a malformed version of Gwen Stacy (who in this continuity was killed by Carnage, which was created as another mangled clone of Peter). But this Gwen clone was special because it was created using elements of the original Carnage, making her a weird Gwen Stacy/Carnage hybrid. 

Kinky i know. 

She managed to escape her enclosure and eventually met Peter and Eddie. Eddie absorbed the Carnage parts of the Gwen clone becoming whole and attaining full control over the Symbiote (while also getting a really terrible redesign), and then he fled. 

The Beetle eventually met up with Eddie and captured him so he could take him to Latveria (that cool European Country Dr. Doom is the ruler of).

That’s literally the last time we see Eddie in the Ultimate comics. What a satisfying and not terrible at all ending. Especially with Nick Fury being like “YO THAT SHIT COULD CAUSE WORLD WAR III BOI!!” Bleh.

Videogame: the company eventually catches both Eddie and Peter and they start experimenting on Peter’s body, injecting a sample of the Venom Symbiote DIRECTLY INTO HIS BLOODSTREAM turning him into Carnage. Venom fights this Carnage and absorbs the sample out of Peter, becomig whole and attaining full control over the Symbiote (he even gets the white spider logo on his chest, neat).

He then decides to get revenge on Bolivar Trask (the President of the company) since he's the main indirect reason that caused the death of his and pete's parents, but Spidey stops him and Trask is arrested for all the illegal bullshit his company did during the years. Eddie manages to escape capture and kills Trask while he’s in prison. After that he disappears and nobody has seen him again since…

 And that’s how the videogame story ends.

Honestly, i like the videogame ending a bit more despite the fact that both versions have stuff that i genuinely like or hate. It’s just that the comic one has more stuff to hate. Also the videogame feels like it has a proper ending, there is a sense of closure missing from the comics.

I know there’s another appearence of Venom in the Ultimate comics but it’s when Miles Morales takes the stage as the new main Spider-man and in the grand scheme of things it’s just a random guy wanting Spider-man for no given reason and they don’t even explain where he managed to get the Symbiote. It’s also absurdly pointless when you count the fact that Marvel erased the entire Ultimate Universe during a recent event (but not really?). Which means no more stories in that universe (but not really, comics are dumb like that sometimes).

So no real conclusion to what happens with Venom in the ultimate comics.

What a rip off. Just play the goddamn game.

Update - April 2020 -

Hello from the future! Or your past in this case! Currently going through a global pandemic as i repost and edit this lecture on newgrounds and since 2018 we've had news regarding Ultimate Venom!

The current Venom comic series started in 2018 outside of being really good most of the time also deals with a lot of forgotten plot threads from previous Venom comics in interesting ways.

In the series there's a new villain called "The Maker" which is an evil version of Reed Richards (Mr Fantastic from the Fantastic 4) from the universe where the Ultimate Comics took place. The Maker has a weird fascination and interest for symbiotes for reasons that were unknown up until...

He showed that the Symbiote from the Ultimate Universe is still alive and kicking.

We don't exactly know what his plan is yet and we don't have any more updates for now but i guess we'll see...

If you want to know more about this stuff feel free to check my other Lectures or check these comics:

• Venom 2018 series
• Web of Venom - Carnage Born
• Web of Venom - Cult of Carnage

IT'S BEEN A FUCKING LONG RIDE but we're finally almost there. At the time i'm writing this Lecture, we're a month away from the beginning of ABSOLUTE CARNAGE, the super special awesome new Marvel event all about Symbiotes.

Unfortunately Marvel is doing a piss poor job at advertising this event, especially for people who are not familiar with any of the characters or concepts involved. But that's why you have an idiot like me obsessing over all this useless bullshit, so i can give you all the info you need to hopefully enjoy US comics despite their terrible structure and absurd lack of interest in being friendly to newcomers and potential new readers.

Ok ok me being a sassy asshole aside, unlike a lot of recent Marvel events Absolute Carnage has a lot of good things going for it and i'm here to lay down all the important bits to people who might be interested in it. This lecture will also be full of links to past lectures that will go a lot more into detail about the stuff we're talking about, mostly because repeating all that stuff here would make this post way too long for anyone.

So, what's up here?

Like we discussed in Lecture 7, the Symbiotes are a race of creatures created by an Eldritchian space god (Knull) specifically to be used as an army to infect and kill all living creatures which he thinks are invading his domain (basically the entirety of the galaxy). It's a huge case of "you kids get off my lawn".

Unfortunately along the way he got his butt kicked by Thor so hard that he lost control of his hivemind and some of the symbiotes were not really into that whole genocide bullshit anymore so they decided to betray him and used their bodies to form a huge mass around his body to trap him, which eventually ended up being known as "The planet of the Symbiotes".

Cut to a bunch of centuries later, Spider-man unknowingly takes to Earth with him one of these Symbiotes but then discovered that it was basically a puddle of yandere space goo that tried to get a bit too clingy with him to the point where he was forced to forcefully removed it from his body. Unfortunately this symbiote eventually met up with a former journalist (Eddie Brock) who was super convinced that Spider-man ruined his life, creating Venom, who was super hell bent on getting revenge on Spidey since both Eddie and the alien goo were super mad with him specifically. Eventually the Symbiote created a spawn that bonded with a crazy serial killer known as Cletus Kasady, which created Carnage.

It's absolutely natural for Symbiotes to despise each other between family members, which meant that Venom was super into the idea of teaming up even with Spidey if it meant tearing a new one to good ol' Carnage. Especially if you also count that Carnage was a lot stronger than his daddy.

Venom preferred to use violent solutions only on "bad" people (most of the time at least) and protecting people he considered "innocent", while Carnage was super into just killing everyone he wanted, convinced that he was "freeing them" and that "death was the highest form of art and freedom" and that "there was no order, only chaos and carnage" and that people were just fooling themselves that rules and morals were a thing.

During the years a LOT of stuff happened with these 2 idiots (most of which is recounted in these lectures), but the general jist is that: both these symbiotes are huge whores and bonded with a shit ton of people during the years and had an absurd amount of spawns, even for the standards of their own species (and most of the time caused by very very dumb comic book reasons), which complicated matters even more since all those spawns bonded with other people too.

Basically you can count on one hand the amount of people in the Marvel universe who DID NOT bond with a Symbiote.

Which brings us to Absolute Carnage.

Carnage was previously stuck floating in the mesosphere (don't ask) and when he managed to fall down on Earth again his Symbiote sacrificed itself to save him. After that a crazy cult super into Knull and his bullshit about being the god of the void and stuff were totally like "yo Carnage is probably the emissary of Knull's belief! We should help him!" So they used a piece of Knulls mind that got stuck on Earth after the fight with Thor to recreate Carnage's symbiote, basically turning him back into Carnage again but super powered up since he was now with a piece of the Symbiote God.

Carnage felt for a moment a connection to Knull and was super into the idea of getting more of that shit and maybe become the new God of the symbiotes so the cult tells him that it's not only possible, but that to get that he'll have to do the thing he enjoys the most: killing people!

That's right, to make his connection to the god of the symbiotes stronger he needs to rip out the spine of every single people who ever bonded with a symbiote in the marvel universe and eat it.

And that's what Absolute Carnage is about:

Carnage is now on the hunt for every single person who's ever bonded with a Symbiote during the last 30 years.

That's not only a lot of people but the list also includes a lot of heavy hitters from Marvel like Captain America, Hulk, Iron man, etc.

The creative team behind the event is the same one behind the current 2018 Venom series, which is really really good and promises a lot of interesting surprises and a lot of (good) fanservice for fans who've been following these characters for years since the writer behind both the current Venom series and this event seems to have a fixation for symbiotes even bigger than mine, which says a lot.

And yeah that's basically the jist of it. If you want to know more about this stuff feel free to check my other Lectures or check these comics:

• Venom 2018 series
• Web of Venom - Carnage Born
• Web of Venom - Cult of Carnage

This is going to be a very red summer, and remember: God is here.

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That’s it. Have fun.

The guys on Tumblr decided to torture themselves by asking me to blabber more about Symbiote related topics, so who am I to say no?

Some people actually asked who the Anti-Venom is and how he came to be which is actually a legitimate question since this character had a weirdly short and rushed history in Marvel comics, despite popping up in more mainstream media (like the Ultimate Spider-man cartoon or the Edge of Time videogame). You'll get what i mean, it gets pretty dumb pretty fast. The timing of this couldn't be better since Anti-Venom also ties in with a major character from the Ps4 Spider-man game from Insomniac Games. You'll see what i mean later.

As mentioned before, Eddie Brock became the new boyfriend of the Venom symbiote, making Venom an official thing. But who's Eddie in the comics? Eddie Brock was a journalist working for the Daily Globe and while working there there was a serial killer called the "Sin-Eater" who was killing a bunch of people. Someone contacted Eddie and started telling him that he was the Sin-Eater, giving him a bunch of evidence to prove it and asked Eddie to publish that stuff on the paper he was working for so people could know his story. Eddie became extremely famous because of this story, to the point where the police started pressuring him to release the identity of the killer. Eddie eventually gave in and helped the police to arrest the guy but unfortunately for him that idiot wasn't the real killer: he was just a rando who lived right next to the real one and just wanted attention. This came to light when Spider-man caught the real Sin-Eater, starting a chain of events that almost literally brought Eddie's life to the shitter: his career and credibility were ruined and he couldn't get a decent job anymore, his wife decided to get a divorce and he eventually also found out that he had a specific type of cancer that would eventually end up killing him. During this period he started to make Spidet the symbol of his ruined life, blaming him for every bad thing that was happening to him.

This situation also created a crisis of faith in Eddie (he was a pretty religious boy up to that point and this entire deal made him start to question everything), to the point where he eventually decided to go to a church nearby to ask for forgiveness before killing himself. "Fortunately" for him, that was the church where Spidey thought he killed the symbiote in, and before Eddie could kill himself the symbiote attached to him. They were immediately a good match, especially since both of them had a huge hateboner for good ol' Spidey. And this Venom was created.

For a while they were pretty content with each other, except for the fact that the symbiote was an indecisive bitch, showing multiple times that if the chance of getting back with Peter was on the table, it would jump on it immediately. The duo tried multiple times to kill Spidey and eventually also had a separate miniseries where they decided to become heroes (or more like anti-heroes) on their own in San Francisco, after a truce with Spidey.

That didn't last unfortunately. During the years the symbiote became more intelligent and malicious. Eddie costantly tried to keep himself and the symbiote at bay to be sure they wouldn't kill people who didn't deserve it (in fact Venom never actively ate someone's brain, they only ate a piece of someone once and it was because the symbiote was going berserk), but holding the symbiote's instinct became progressively harder to do, to the point where Brock was now stuck in an abusive relationship with it where the symbiote was in control. Eventually the Symbiote tried to leave Eddie to die of cancer so it could permanently bond with Spidey again, but that plan failed and the symbiote APPARENTLY lost an unborn child because it was stuck with Eddie's sick and weak body again. After that there's the official breakup.

Knowing that the symbiote would just find a new host anyway, Eddie decided to auction it to a bunch of supervillains and gangsters so he could use the money received for charity. IT'S A SUPER GOOD PLAN THAT TOTALLY WON'T BACKFIRE TRUST ME. For really real. The fact that this plan was inspired by the fact that Eddie just finished watching Mel Gibson's Passion of the Christ is also another clue on how well thought out this plan was.

Because of the auction the Symbiote got stuck for a couple of issues with Angelo Fortunato, one of the 2 candidates for the title "Worst Venom Host ever" (the second one comes way later on). The symbiote dropped the boy from the top of a building when he realized how shit Angelo was and he left to find a better host. Because of the amount of people Angelo killed in his first and only outing as Venom, Eddie had a crisis of coscience and tried to kill himself for real, seemingly succeding. Or at least that's what everyone thought for a bunch of years.

The symbiote eventually found Mac Gargan, who most of you probably know more as "The Scorpion" and the two officially became the second Venom. Mac Gargan's Venom is one of the worst iterations of the character, mostly because it has zero personality and it's a walking stereotype of bad clichès commonly associated with Venom. It offers nothing except being a beefy jobber for the Thunderbolts, a team of supervillains that officially worked under direct control of the government to hunt and/or kill superheroes who did not accept the Superhero Registration Act (this stuff happens around the time the absolute mess that is the Civil War comics was happening, that shit was bad and stupid for everyone involved). Anyway, it feels like i'm losing myself in a weird unrelated tangent right? Unfortunately all this bullshit is kinda necessary because now i can tackle directly what the fuck is up with Anti-Venom.

You might recognize Mr.Negative as "that asian mobster with superpowers" from the new Spider-man videogame. Well in the comics he's... That asian mobster with superpowers. Honestly, the game did a much better job with this character. But yeah like in the game his civilian persona was a prominent political figure in New York and to hammer down even more how much of a cool guy he was to the public he built a homeless shelter where he secretly used his powers to cure any illness the hobos might have. Guess who was a regular at the shelter? Beside Aunt May wo worked there i mean.

MOTHERFUCKING EDDIE! He's alive and he's actually getting better! And it's all thanks to Mr.Negative's confusing powers! One thing both of them don't know tho', is that those powers are also mutating what remains of the symbiote inside Eddie's organism.

The symbiote remains fuse with Eddie's white cells and when the symbiote comes into contact with him again the white cells mutate even further, creating the stupidly named Anti-Venom.

Anti-Venom is NOT an actual symbiote and it doesn't have a mind of its own. Eddie has complete control over this bullshit and it shares all the powers Venom has, plus the fact that it can literally cure anything (even cure superheroes and villains of their powers) and it can burn symbiotes just by touching them.

Anti-Venom had a miniseries where he teams up with the Punisher but after a while it was clear that the character was way too overpowered and no one at Marvel really knew what the fuck to do with him, so they decided to remove the Anti-Venom powers from Brock during Spider-Island.

Spider-Island was an event where an obscure Spidey villain from the early 2000s comes back and decides to infect the entire population of New York with a virus that would give them Spidey's powers but also eventually turn them into monstrous spider-human mutant abominations. Eddie sacrificed his Anti-Venom powers to cure the entire population from this spider virus, and went back to being regular old Eddie Brock once again.

As said before Anti-Venom appeared in a bunch of other stuff during the years but i'm not that familiar with most of those iterations. The character got decently popular despite its really short history, to the point where he actually came back during 2018. Sort of. Kinda. And for a very short amount of time again.

But that's an overly long post for another time.

An introduction: this series of lectures was created because of Venom's sudden popularity after the second trailer for the movie came out. I saw people arguing over how having a Symbiote or the Venom symbiote specifically worked, so i decided to create this post to give people a point of reference. From there people started asking me if i could blabber about other symbiote related topics and that's how these lectures were born. So here we go with the basics:

How the Symbiote actually works is the subject of many, many rectons along the years. The current (at least, current at the time i originally wrote this Lecture) version states that the Klyntars (the proper name for the Symbiote race) are naturally benevolent creatures that seek a good host to bond with so they can use their combined power to spread peace and justice through the galaxy. Unfortunately Symbiotes (for some """"strange""""" reason) tend to be extremely susceptible to bad hosts: if they bond with someone who's a legitimately terrible shit it influences their minds, regressing them into a more ferocious and instinctive creatures. That's the fate that befall the Venom symbiote, his first host actually forced him to help them commit a genocide that kinda super fucked up with him. Corrupted symbiotes are more generally known through the galaxy because their regressed state makes them seek out new hosts to drain and kill in a matter of months, in fact they're known as planet conquering parasites who kill almost every living thing on the planets they invade. The Venom symbiote (even if it was corrupted) apparently still had some resemblance of his former self since he wanted a host to live with instead of draining and kill them, but that made him an outcast among the rest of the corrupted Symbiotes, who then imprisoned him inside a machine that eventually found itself on Battleworld, a planet created by a cosmic being as a battle arena for Earth's mightiest heroes and villains.

Then Deadpool showed up. And wore the Venom Symbiote for 5 minutes and put it back.

Then Spider-man showed up and became the the facto first long term host for corrupted Venny. Because of their simple minds corrupted symbiotes usually tend to work only on a full 10 on the scale of emotions. There's no inbetween, they're either extremely happy and lovable or extremely angry and violent. Such a simple mindset and the fact that Venny was not used to a human moral code (being an alien and all) creates huge issues, especially in the relationship with Spidey.

Initially Spidey thought of it as nothing more than a cool suit but eventually the symbiote started being too needy, wanting to permanently bond with him and eventually also starting to pilot Peter's body in his sleep to go around New York and beat up people. This led Spidey to forcibly take off the symbiote which, because of its extremely simple mindstate became absurdly bitter and vengeful towards Peter, swearing to make him suffer for not accepting him. And the fact that because of their symbiosis the Symbiote now had all of Spidey's personal informations ready to use helped a lot in the ordeal.

Moral of the story: the Venom symbiote is basically a super ex girlfriend that knows everything about you and wants to ruin your life and kill you. A super buff and extremely sick looking yandere. Eddie Brock is basically the Symbiote's new boyfriend who also shares his hate for his ex boyfriend.

There's more shit to say about the long history of the character but i feel like i already bored you enough with the basics.

See ya next time!

I did not survive the Tumblr purge so i decided to try Newgrounds. It's an entirely new experience for me since i've never been on this site but people told me good things about it. Let's hope things get better.