Like a “turd in the wind”, Venom is slowly but surely rolling towards us for it's October release. Sony Pictures’ initial foray into a “Spider-Man Cinematic Universe” that doesn’t actually have Spider-Man in it starts with arguably his most popular antagonist. Fans were shocked at the casting of Mad Max himself, Tom Hardy, as the titular character, Eddie Brock, and Sony has been moving full steam ahead with their universe by casting Jared Leto as Morbius the Living Vampire and hiring a writer to start work on a Kraven the Hunter movie.

However, Venom isn’t the only symbiote that we’re going to see in his movie. Venom will be joined by Riot and Scream, two symbiote characters who, in the comics, were created by the Life Foundation using Venom’s genetics. These two were joined by three others in the funny books making for quite the symbiotic quintuplet, with Lasher, Phage, and Agony rounding out the pack.

All this being said, join us on a living costume tour of the heroes and villains of the “Venom-verse”.

Venom

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Image via Marvel Comics

Well let’s go ahead and get the big guy out of the way first. Venom, originally created by David Michelline and Todd McFarlane, has had a lot of different origins in the comic book universe. An alien organism bonded to Spider-Man while fighting villains on “Battleworld”, a suit designed to be the cure for cancer that went horribly awry, and even the offspring of celestial beings who were the creators of the Marvel Universe (as recently revealed in the comics) are but a few of those origins that have been used to explain the sentient costume’s arrival to earth. The most commonly known, and first origin for the character, is that Spider-Man had needed a new suit during a battle on an alien planet and received a black costume from an alien device. After realizing that said “black suit” was in fact alive, he decided to do everything in his power to get it off of him before it bonded permanently. Feeling rejected, the suit would go on to find Eddie Brock, a reporter who had a prize winning story of his debunked, thanks to the actions of Spider-Man. Learning Peter Parker’s identity thanks to the suit, Brock and the symbiote dubbed themselves Venom and vowed to kill Spider-Man, like a psychotic jilted lover.

Now eventually, Venom’s popularity required his character to change, in that a deal was brokered between Brock and Spider-Man where the two (three?) would leave each other alone after Eddie realized that Peter was in fact saving innocent people. This lead to the mini-series, Venom: Lethal Protector, which the upcoming film is loosely based on. As the comics continued, Venom was given a number of his own mini-series, flip flopping between the role of hero to anti-hero to villain and back and forth. The symbiote sometimes shifted hosts entirely, abandoning a, at the time, cancer-ridden Eddie Brock for the likes of Angelo Fortuno (a gangster’s son), Mac Gargan (The Scorpion), and eventually Flash Thompson, Peter’s schoolyard bully, who used the symbiote as part of a government operation. As is the case with most things in comic books, the symbiote returned to Eddie Brock, re-establishing the status quo where he operates as an anti-hero in his own comic book series.

Venom’s powers are intrinsically tied to Spider-Man, granting the wearer of the symbiote a version of Spidey’s but amplified. He’s stronger, faster, and more agile than our friendly neighborhood wall-crawler, along with being able to block his Spider-Sense which warns him of incoming danger. Of course, seeing as how Spidey won’t be related to Venom’s origin in the film, expect slightly different explanations and representation of Venom’s powers. The symbiote is only weak to sonic blasts and fire, sometimes causing it to leap from Eddie and scamper to safety. Venom can also make himself invisible ala the Predator and use the symbiote to whip up useful disguises should they need to blend into a crowd. Venom was created to be a perfect “bully” to Spider-Man, creating a twisted, dark retelling of his Peter’s days being bullied growing up. Ultimately though, we’ll see which of these powers are thrown into the film adaptation come October.

The Five Symbiotes

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Image via Marvel Comics

Our main baddies for the film appear to be a rainbow of symbiotic terrors, each having varying appearances and slightly different abilities. While all five aren’t necessarily confirmed to appear, Riot, Scream, and their three amigos are practically tied at the hip when it comes to their comic book appearances. As mentioned earlier, the five were created by the Life Foundation, seeking to create new weapons for the military/their own corporation by extracting “children” from the Venom symbiote. Riot, Scream, Phage, Lasher, and Agony were simply security guards and employees of the Life Foundation before being given their very own symbiotes to unleash on the world. Now, sometimes, comic books can create these ideas, such as the five symbiotes, where not as much thought is given to the characters as to their appearances and sales capabilities. These five’s characters are pretty much a blank slate which is why I’m sure they’ll be vastly different from their comic counterparts, with Riz Ahmed playing Riot in this version and also the CEO of the Life Foundation to boot. Michelle Lee will be playing Donna Diego, aka Scream, in the picture as well.

So where are these characters now? Hoo boy. Well after originally bonding with their symbiotes and fighting Venom and Spider-Man for a few pages, the five escaped and started hanging out with each other to try to communicate and control their symbiotes. Unfortunately, things didn’t go as planned as all of them started slowly losing their minds. In the mini-series, Venom: Separation Anxiety, it was revealed that Scream had gone coo-coo for Cocoa Puffs and was killing the rest of her teammates as she believed that symbiotes were a curse on the earth. After striking out solo for a time, Scream was eventually killed by a symbiote-less Eddie Brock who had a similar state of mind as Donna and was attempting to eradicate the symbiotes from the earth. The other four symbiotes, though their hosts were now dead, had different activities that they were destined for.

Hybrid

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Image via Marvel Comics

Now this one’s a bit of a cheat as Hybrid isn’t necessarily confirmed for the movie but hey, the sum of the parts make up the whole. With the four remaining symbiotes being held in the Marvel Universe supermax prison, the Vault, lo and behold a prison guard named Scott Washington just so happened to bump into the four living costumes. With the four deciding that the best chance for their survival was to join together, they latched onto Scott all at once and created the new superhero, Hybrid. While having pretty much the same powers as Venom, Hybrid had the bonus abilities to absorb chemicals and use his symbiotes to help him glide through the air. Washington himself was a paraplegic, having lost the ability to walk thanks to gang violence, but with the symbiotes wrapped around him, he could walk again. A similar storyline was used with Flash Thompson’s acquiring of the Venom symbiote as he was missing his legs due to his time serving in the Middle East.

Much like Scream, Hybrid also fell victim to a crazed Eddie Brock in a similar fashion but the symbiotes attached to Scott managed to save themselves once again and were long thought lost. When Carnage, one of Venom’s more psychotic children, took over a mid-western American town, the government created a new program that bonded the four symbiotes to four soldiers to help combat the threat. From here, they even bonded with Deadpool at some point because really, Deadpool just has a way of sticking his head into all Marvel stories one way or another and they haven’t been seen since. Hybrid may or may not appear in this initial outing for Eddie Brock, but it made for a neat character that could be translated to the silver screen easily enough.

Carnage

Last but not least, we go with Venom’s most popular offspring, Cletus Kasady, aka Carnage. Now Carnage himself has not been confirmed for the film and more likely than not, he won’t be the main antagonist. But all I’m saying is, Woody Harrelson’s role in the movie is still a secret so I’m expecting a post-credit scene with him setting up the sequel for sure. Anyway, this Natural Born Killer, Cletus Kasady, was raised in a dysfunctional home and found that he had a knack for mass murder after seeing his father kill his mother in front of him. Sharing a cell with Eddie Brock when he was locked up in Rikers Prison, Cletus found himself given his very own symbiote when the Venom suit broke Brock free. When Cletus started killing people around New York City, Spider-Man had to team up with Venom in order to stop him, and Carnage was established as one of the more gruesome villains of the Marvel Universe. Kasady even put together his own team of super villains whose sole purpose was to kill as many people as possible in the big crossover event dubbed Maximum Carnage (which you shouldn’t read because it ends with the villains being defeated by a “love gun”). Instead, if you’d really like to get into the head of Carnage, I would recommend the comics Carnage: Mind Bomb and Carnage: It’s A Wonderful Life to give you a good, albeit disturbing, view of the character.

Carnage’s abilities are, like the other symbiotes, comparable to Spider-Man’s, only he’s far stronger and faster than even Venom. He also has the terrifying ability to form his symbiote into a variety of objects, mostly axes, knives, and other instruments of murder that Kasady can think of at any given moment. Much like Venom, the Carnage symbiote has attached itself to a slew of willing and unwilling hosts, specifically Ben Reilly (Spider-Man’s clone), the Silver Surfer, the Green Goblin, and even an entire Colorado town in Carnage USA. Currently, the Carnage symbiote was seemingly destroyed after bonding with Norman Osborn while Kasady is still in lock up, but it’s been thought dead many times before and will surely pop back up when a comic needs a Carnage sales boost.

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Image via Sony Pictures