Every Wednesday, thousands of members of the comic book community pour into local comic shops to grab the new comic book day releases. Most weeks, the community is split over which books are the ones to grab, but every once in a while there is really one true winner. This week happens to be one of those weeks. No matter whether you found yourself in a discussion on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, your LCS or an old school message board or forum, the discussion most likely surrounded one book this week. That book was Venom.
Now, most of the time I talk about a property in the pages of ONE37pm, we are talking about movie rights or movie releases and their subsequent impact on the comic market. This week though, we are talking about Venom purely from a publishing perspective. Venom has always been a popular character ever since he debuted in a cameo in Amazing Spider Man #299. Originally a villain, his popularity in the early 90s demanded a face turn and in doing so, boxed in creators, forcing them to write the character as good, but with all the badass traits that made him popular in the first place. Many writers tried to accomplish this with varying degrees of success. Each time, the tone of the character and series would change. This all became a distant memory when the dynamic duo of Donny Cates and Ryan Stegman was announced to take over the title in 2018. Cates was the hottest indie comics writer around before taking over his dream character in Venom.