Anonymous asked:
brevoortformspring answered:
I think making Flash into Venom was a master stroke, a brilliant idea from Dan.
One of the problems with the classic Venom, love him or hate him, is that Eddie Brock, for all of the many, many pages devoted to him, was a fairly thin character. Nobody ever truly made him into an individual that you much cared about. So you were reading VENOM for Venom, not for Eddie.
But Flash has 50+ years of investment built into him. We’ve seen him in a bunch of different roles over the years—tormenter, friend, accused villain, romantic rival, amnesiac football coach—and all in context to Peter Parker. So making Flash into Venom gives that character a concrete hook into the world and life of Peter Parker in a way that was never possible with Brock. And especially after Guggenheim’s story about Flash’s service and the loss of his legs, he was in about as sympathetic a position as he’d ever been in from a reader point of view.
The thing is…It’s stupid to compare the two.
It’s simple folks.
Eddie Brock is a bad guy
Flash Thompson isn’t.
Flash as Venom is an anti-hero whereas Eddie Brock as Venom wasn’t a character who was no more or less thin than the majority of Spider-Man’s villains (or majority of Marvel villains really) when they first appeared. I mean most of Spider-Man’s villains didn’t get developed until decades after they first appeared. The Rhino, Doctor Octopus and Electro had to wait from the 1960s until the 1990s for development, Sandman had to wait until the 1980s and guys like the Shocker are still waiting.
Eddie Brock isn’t a character we can care about but you know what…he isn’t supposed to be. He’s the villain for God’s sake. How much did you care about Doctor Octopus or Electro or the Rhino beyond they’re being bad guys who could challenge Spider-Man? Not much. Even when they were fleshed out it didn’t make them truly sympathetic, it just gave more understanding into what made them bad.
Flash as Venom is entirely different because he isn’t a bad guy at all, he’s a hero. Eddie wasn’t that at all until they derailed him and made him into the Lethal Protector. And that’s why it’s redundant to compare him to Flash as Venom. You might as well compare Phil Urich’s Green Goblin to Norman Osborn. Yeah you care more about Phil and understand him more and see him as more sympathetic because he’s not a friggin lunatic who likes throwing blondes off of bridges.
Equally we’ve yet to ever see Flash’s Venom become a bad guy so I don’t see how the comparison is at all valid.
As for Brock not having a concrete hook into the world of Spider-Man, again how the Hell did Electro, or Shocker or Doc Ock or even technically Norman Osborn when he started out have that at all?
It’s basically a case of judging a character by a criteria which is inappropriate. Why judge a villain by the criteria needed of a good protagonist and then criticise him when he shockingly fails to live up to that?
By the same token examine Flash’s Venom by the criteria of a villain and you will see he is a crappy villain. He isn’t malevolent, he isn’t scary, he isn’t someone you love to hate or has good motives for being a villain and frankly he’s clearly an ineffective villain because he doesn’t do anything particularly villainous or fight Spider-Man or hate him or anything like that.
The reason for that being that he isn’t a villain!