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