The second part of my Deadpool birthday swag, Back in Black is set between the moment that the alien symbiote, Venom, abandoned his Spidey-host and before he latched on to Eddie Brock, and spent a while driving Deadpool’s body around instead.
To be completely honest, I don’t really know much about the character of Venom besides what I saw in Spidey 3 where it turned Peter Parker into an even bigger douche than Tobey Maguire is in real life. But while Venom doesn’t succeed in turning Deadpool into that big of a douchebag, it does make for a more subdued outing than I’m used to. Far less time is spent cracking wise, far more time is spent thinking about murdering Spidey, and the constant call-outs scattered throughout, telling us where and how we can find out more about the people and adventures referenced in Venompool’s adventure, made for a more distracting than usual read for me (the call-outs also didn’t really do their intended job on me – I’m not interested in picking up any of the many various editions referenced here). Deadpool does look pretty sweet all Venom’ed up though, so that’s a nice silver lining.
I can’t say that this has really inspired into spending more time with Venom in graphic novel format (although, thanks to the casting of Tom Hardy, I most certainly will be up for spending some time with him in movie format) and I didn’t enjoy Back in Black quite as much as my previous outings, but it’s still a nice diversion for an hour or so.