Batman: White Knight Presents: Generation Joker #1

[cyberghostface]

 

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Venom #19 - "Absolution"

[laughing_tree]

When it comes to comics, nature and nurture can be diegetic or non-diegetic in that sometimes it all comes from the larger semiotics of the characters as well as their internal, in-world drives. Symbiotes have always been pretty metal -- dark, gooey, spiky, rebellious. All that's from Venom's original comic DNA as very much a bad guy. When the anti-hero wave of the 90s offers him a shot at redemption, you get Carnage to pick up his slack -- a cake to have and a cake to eat, a Venom to take the protagonist role, and one that can't be redeemed to do all the really nasty stuff you can do with a symbiote baddie. These are, thematically, the parents of every symbiote. So a lot of this stuff gets baked into the concept. Sure, we got to see some full-on hero symbiotes here and there, but no matter what retcon reaches back in time to alter the past, that darkness, the original '80s sins of Venom, is always there to be struggled against. -- Al Ewing

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