Guide to Venom (Early Access for Pledgeonauts and up)

I am incredibly excited to finally bring to you one of CK's longest-gestating guides for one of the last major Marvel heroes missing from its coverage!

Venom - The Definitive Collecting Guide and Reading Order 

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This guide covers every Venom appearance for Eddie Brock, Mac Gargan, and Flash Thompson, from the alien symbiote first attaching itself to Spider-Man in 1984's Secret Wars through Venom's new ongoing series in Marvel Legacy.

I've been chipping away at this guide for a long time, but it took Marvel Legacy for it to finally click for me.

Marvel Legacy started Venom with issue #150, despite him only having two (or three, depending on how you count) ongoing series adding up to under 100 issues.

In checking their math, I realized that all of Venom's 90s mini-series weren't such a mess - they were basically a 62 issue ongoing series broken up into arcs (similar to how Mike Mignola releases Hellboy).

Seeing the math laid out so plainly in front of me (plus, seeing the comprehensive contents of 2018's Venomnibus in the recent Marvel solicits) suddenly make a big chunk of this guide easy to digest. I even realize that Venom's pre-mini-series era in Amazing Spider-Man had been captured in just a pair of paperbacks and finally understood how Deadpool's pair of retcon series fit in.

This guide took a long time to put together - about as much as a DC Silver Age Hero. However, I had a lot of fun along the way, getting to re-read a slew of Venom's early appearances, plus learn about Eddie Brock's early 2000s return and mid-2000s breakup with the symbiote suit when he had cancer.

(I originally intended to cover all symbiotes on this page, but in putting this together I realized that Venom, Anti-Venom, and Toxin are all one thread of symbiote, and Carnage and his offspring are another (even though Toxin is also a Carnage offspring). That matches well with my recent decoupling initiative in other guides. Carnage can enjoy his own spotlight sometime in 2018.)

What's up next? I'm almost through my full coverage of Marvel Legacy - all that remains are a certain second slinger (already covered elsewhere), a silver-haired vixen, Marvel's second major all-kid team, a certain winged patriot, and one other guide that was almost the first one I created for Patreon! 

I might even get all of those done this month! That will give me tons of fodder for regular guide releases to the general public in the new year so I can turn my attention back to some tricky DC guides (and giving you a regular Patrons' Choice again).

As always, I value your feedback - both on this new guide and in general. Don't hesitate to comment to let me know your thoughts.