Trivia / Absolute Carnage

• Ascended Fanon: Carnage's "Dark Carnage" form was given the epithet "Prophet of the Void" on the Marvel Database wiki, which was picked up by John Tyler Christopher and used on his Action Figure variant cover. Writer Donny Cates and artist Ryan Stegman have also called him that on their podcast.
• Cowboy BeBop at His Computer: The first line in Issue #3 is "I lost the kid", a line which is also said under a surprisingly similar set of circumstances in Avengers: Endgame.^{More detail...} A teenage boy with spider powers succumbs to a terrible fate at the hands of a villain who has the powers of a god. Meanwhile, an older male hero who's become the teen's self-appointed protector can only watch on in horror, which pushes the adult hero one step closer to the Despair Event Horizon. Some comics news outlets interpreted this as a Mythology Gag deliberately invoking the MCU scene, but according to Donny Cates, he scripted the book before he saw Endgame, and it's just a coincidence.
• Executive Veto: Donny Cates initially pitched having Carnage kill several prominent characters, but this was immediately vetoed by Marvel's editorial department — leading to some grousing about the event being too "safe" since there weren't any stakes.
• Lying Creator: On Ryan Stegman's "Steg-Man and His Amazing Friends" podcast, Donny Cates remarked that the event's tagline that "Everyone Is A Target" and that it would feature everyone who ever bonded to a symbiote was impossible to deliver on with only five issues, and was only ever meant to hype up the event. He also stated that all the former hosts who didn't appear in the event were killed off-screen by Carnage and dumped in the mass grave — which fails to take into account that characters like Black Cat, Boomerang, Spider-Woman (who cameos in the Captain Marvel tie-in), Ironheart, Ms. Marvel, Jane Foster, Hercules, Devil Dinosaur, Colossus, Nightcrawler, Sam Alexander, Beast, Cyclops, Angel, and Iceman all bonded to symbiotes and at the time had ongoing series they appeared in.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Originally, Absolute Carnage was just going to be the third arc of Cates' Venom run. However, it ended up being reworked into a full-on line-wide event due to Marvel seeing the marketability of it as a whole, rather than simply having it be a self-contained story arc.
  • Concept art by Javier Garrón depicted Miles Morales' symbiote monster form with six eyes in place of the Knull symbol. This version also seems smaller than the final design, standing slightly taller than Miles' true form, whereas in the finished artwork, symbiote-Miles dwarfs characters like Venom and J. Jonah Jameson.
  • On Ryan Stegman's "Steg-Man and His Amazing Friends" podcast, Donny Cates admitted that the pacing of the event was rushed as a result of trying to tell such a massively impactful story in only five — technically seven — issues, and that he petitioned Marvel for more but was told no.
• Word of God:
  • Donny Cates, in addition to his usual clarifying statements on Twitter, has been participating in a podcast with Ryan Stegman, where they've answered a handful of fan-questions.
  • The editorial section for Absolute Carnage #3 and Absolute Carnage: Lethal Protectors #2 clarifies that Dark Carnage's immunity to sonics and fire comes from Chthon's eldritch magic, courtesy of the Darkhold; that the symbiote biomass used in the creation of the Venom Bomb was so heavily-modified that it didn't leave a codex in the people it infected; and that Spider-Gwen's symbiote's artificial nature precludes her from Carnage's codex hunt.
  • On Twitter, when a fan suggested that the Anti-Venom symbiote, no matter how different it is from a regular symbiote, would still have left a codex and thus still result in Flash Thompson having a codex, Cates expressed agreement to that idea. Previously, many assumed that the Anti-Venom symbiote eliminated Flash's Venom codex and did not leave a codex of its own due to its unique characteristics.
  • When asked why he called the Grendel symbiote the "Carnage symbiote" after saying that the original Carnage symbiote is dead, Cates voiced the opinion that any symbiote that Eddie Brock bonds to is the "Venom symbiote" because he is the person who came up with the name Venom, and that any symbiote that Cletus Kasady bonds to is the "Carnage symbiote" for the same reason... which fans quickly pointed out doesn't mesh with the times that Eddie went by Anti-Venom and Toxin when bonded to those respective symbiotes, that other people have used those codenames when bonded to the symbiotes, and that even the symbiotes themselves have called themselves "Venom" and "Carnage" when they're not bonded to hosts.

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