Comic Book / Venom (2021)

aka: Venom Ewing And Ram V

Like Father, Like Son

Venom (Vol. 5) is an 2021 comic book series from Marvel Comics, launched as part of the Marvel: A Fresh Start initiative, picking up where Venom (Vol. 4) left off.

The series follows two different leads - Eddie Brock, the original Venom, is now the powerful King in Black. Meanwhile, Eddie's son Dylan is becoming the new Venom. Issues starring Eddie are written by Al Ewing, whereas issues starring Dylan are written by Ram V; with both arcs featuring artwork by Bryan Hitch.

Bryan Hitch left the series after issue #16, with CAFU taking the reins as its new artist with #17. Ram V then left the creative team after issue #17 to focus on other projects, leaving Al Ewing the sole writer in charge. In July 2023, it was announced that Ram V was departing Marvel to work at their Distinguished Competition, with Torunn Grønbekk joining the writing team.

In the wake of King in Black, Eddie Brock is the new King in Black and is determined to make amends for the devastation wrought by Knull across the universe; while back on Earth his son Dylan Brock is struggling to follow in his father's footsteps as the latest host of the Venom symbiote in a post-Extreme Carnage world where symbiotes are Public Enemy No. 1. However, both Brocks find themselves the targets of Meridius, a time-travelling King in Black from the distant future with a grudge against Eddie and sinister plans for Dylan and Venom.

The first issue was released November 10, 2021. In March of 2024, a crossover arc between it and Carnage (Vol. 4), "Symbiosis Necrosis" had the now apotheosized Carnage go after Venom and Dylan Brock in order to find Eddie.

The run consists of:

• Free Comic Book Day 2021: Spider-Man/Venom — A preview for Venom Vol. 5 #1
• Venom (Vol. 5) — Initially written by Al Ewing and Ram V, with art by Bryan Hitch and CAFU
• Free Comic Book Day 2022: Spider-Man/Venom
• Thor (Vol. 6) #27-#28 — Crossover cowritten by Al Ewing and Donny Cates
• Dark Web — Spider-Man's 2022 event, Venom #13-16 tying into it.
• Free Comic Book Day 2023: Spider-Man/Venom
• "Symbiosis Necrosis" — a crossover with Carnage (Vol. 4), Venom #31-32 tying into it, with #30 serving as a prelude
• Blood Hunt — Marvel's Summer 2024 event, Venom #33 tying into it

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Venom (2021) provides examples of the following tropes:

• Acting Unnatural: Meridius tries to act like a Nice Guy to Eddie to conceal his true intentions, but is so bad at it — not least of all because of constantly snapping at his minions — that Eddie immediately twigs that something is up.
• Admiring the Abomination: In Issue #2, Senator Arthur Krane accuses Carlton Drake of having an unhealthy admiration of the symbiotes. Drake denies it... but in the very next issue, he's caught waxing poetic in private about how everything they assumed to be true of the symbiotes was proven wrong, and that he wants to push the Venom symbiote into surpassing its limits, all with obvious childlike glee.
• All Bikers are Hells Angels: In issue #6, Dylan, Sleeper, and the Venom symbiote end up in Baywater, a small California town near the Mexico border in the grips of a brutal biker gang called the Hell Hounds. The three of them end up in the care of Jake Yahkin, a curmudgeonly but kindhearted old biker who fondly remembers the days of mullets and motor oil but is tired of fighting. Unfortunately, the Hell Hounds massacre Jake's gang while Dylan and Venom are fighting Bedlam, who mocks him for being too weak to save his friend.
• Anti-Climax Boss: Invoked in #30, where Carnage refers to Space-Venom Eddie as this after one-shotting him and destroying his codex.
• Arc Welding: In the 2023 Venom/Spider-Man Free Comic Book Day, it is revealed that obscure Golden Age character Flexo is a robotic/symbiote hybrid.
• Atop a Mountain of Corpses: In issue #3, the Venom symbiote recalls its time bonded to Tel-Kar during the Kree/Skrull War, triumphantly standing on a mountain of dead aliens, when reflecting that it used to be feared but is now sneered at when disguised as a dog.
• Back from the Dead: In Free Comic Book Day 2022: Spider-Man/Venom, a Flash Forward shows none other than Lee Price fighting alongside Dylan with a katana-shaped Necrosword, with the cover for #33—a tie-in for the Blood Hunt event—showing Lee Price rising from his grave as either a Revenant Zombie or vampire.
• Bad Boss:
  • Meridius treats and views the other Kings In Black in the Garden of Time with withering contempt at best, verbally abusing them at the slightest provocation and letting Bedlam attack the others freely.
  • Issue 24 has Doctor Doom blowing up a Doombot for failing to capture Eddie, since Doombots are the image of Doom, and for a Doombot to fail suggest Doom could fail, which is of course impossible.
• Bad Future: Near the end of time, Meridius has consumed the minds of every symbiote still around and used their corpses to build the Garden of Time.
• Battle in the Center of the Mind:
  • In the 11th issue, Dylan's codex is removed from his dying body by the Venom symbiote. Finding himself in the symbiote's Mental World, Dylan is attacked by manifestations of its corruption and encounters a hooded and a robed figure called the Keeper, who reveals himself as a copy of Eddie Brock, says the time has come for Dylan to learn the truth of his origins, and transforms into Venom to fight him.
  • Issue #20 has one between Eddie and Bedlam. Eddie wins, convincing Bedlam to side with him.
• Beneath the Mask: The already awkward dinner with Norman, Normie and Dylan isn't helped by the fact that while Norman's been cleansed of his sins, he's still Norman underneath it all, with all the arrogance and madness bubbling away. He's just pushing it down rather than running with it, but he despises Dylan on sight.
• Berserk Button: Flexo is set off by anyone with a metal face, thanks to Doctor Doom and some time travel shenanigans. Dylan accidentally presses it by pretending to be Iron Man.
• Big Bad Ensemble: The Absent Throne is a mysterious organization with designs for Dylan Brock, and are led by the enigmatic Meridius, a being that hijacks control of one of Eddie's symbiotes from the future to threaten him, has Eddie's corpse collected for an unknown purpose, and in the far future greets Eddie's time-displaced codex as though he's a friend. Issues #2 and #3 reveal that Absent Throne is affiliated with the Life Foundation, Alchemax, Senator Arthur Krane and the Friends of Humanity — who are in turn affiliated with Mayor Wilson Fisk and his Thunderbolts (tying into Devil's Reign), and the Beyond Corporation (tying into Spider-Man Beyond). The eighth issue reveals that Kang the Conqueror is also a member, Meridius having recruited him to manipulate Eddie.
• Bitch in Sheep's Clothing:
  • Meridius tries to play this role to Eddie, but can't quite manage to actually hide his nasty personality, leaving Eddie immediately and rightfully suspicious. Played straight with Archer Lyle, who pretends to be an Intrepid Reporter without fear but is really a Dirty Coward willing to sell out Dylan, Venom, and Sleeper to Life Foundation to save her own skin.
  • Madelyne Pryor seems nice enough to Eddie in #13, offering to help him find his son if he helps her... but in Dark Web #1 she rips out chunks of his memory in an attempt to make him more servile, causing him to regress back into his original mindset as a villain and go AWOL to hunt down Spider-Man.
• Blatant Lies: In Free Comic Book Day Spider-Man/Venom 2023, as Joshua Williams is regaling the Mystic Comics reporter about how Flexo rescued them from the evil Dr. Mundo, the reporter asks what happened to Dr. Mundo and his mobster henchmen. The two brothers nervously glance at each other and unconvincingly say Flexo emitted a portent but nonlethal knockout gas from the bullet holes and the criminals were turned over to the authorities, which the reporter happily believes. What actually happened is that Flexo went berserk and ate them.
• Bring It: When Carnage sees Eddie can regrow from any symbiote matter, he wonders if he even can kill him now, and decides he's going to test this. Eddie's response? "Try."
• Bullying a Dragon: Eddie's first plan in issue #21? Go have a fight with Doctor Doom. Issue #22 shows, before we even see Eddie actually doing this, that the end result is an extremely pissed Doom.
• The Bus Came Back:
  • In The Amazing Spider-Man (2018), the Life Foundation was revealed to been shut down due to bankruptcy. However, Venom #2 reveals that Carlton Drake's evil symbiote-obsessed organization recovered from this by capitalizing on the downfall of Roxxon in Immortal Hulk and the symbiote-related attack on Alchemax in Extreme Carnage, and have allied themselves with Absent Throne and Senator Arthur Krane to obtain revenge on Venom.
  • Carlton Drake himself returns after having last been seen in 1995's Spider-Man: The Arachnis Project, mutating himself into a Xenomorph Xerox spider-monster. In issue #4, Meridius takes credit for returning Drake to his human form,^note Despite Drake having already reverted back to his human form at the end of The Arachnis Project. with Drake serving as The Dragon to Meridius' Big Bad.
  • Flexo the Rubber Man was last seen seemingly being destroyed in an explosion in Marvel Zombies Destroy! #5, but resurfaces no worse for wear in Venom #19.
• Butterfly of Doom: While in a time-travelling fight with Eddie Brock and Bedlam, Doctor Doom notes the cliché of a time traveller causing major changes to the past by doing something as minor as accidentally killing a single butterfly stems from A Sound of Thunder... and is absurdly incorrect, as one would need to kill a lot of butterflies (read: do something major) to change the course of the timestream, which otherwise simply incorporates minor changes into itself so that they were always meant to happen. Even then, without using Doom's patented combination of science and magic to time-travel, instead of changing the past you'll just create an alternate timeline.
• Car Fu: With some... sort-of help from Doctor Doom, Eddie gets a time machine from Kang the Conqueror, who dryly notes that knowing Eddie he will crash it into someone. And indeed, he does.
• Chained by Fashion: Carrying on from his statement in Cates' run that his favourite comic character sports chains, Dylan initially uses chains instead of webs to traverse New York as Venom.
• Chainsaw Good: In the Dark Web tie-in issues, Meridius mocks Bedlam for not using a bladed weapon to counter Codex (Dylan Brock)'s Necrosword katana. Bedlam manifests a chainsaw arm-blade, which he uses in the finale to rip and tear Limbo's demons to shreds.
• Co-Dragons: Carlton Drake of the Life Foundation and Kang the Conqueror are both working for Meridius in order to torment and gaslight Dylan and Eddie respectively, and are high-enough up Absent Throne's food chain to report directly to him.
• Conflict Killer: The one thing Bedlam hates slightly more than any version of himself is Carnage, something Finnegan exploits in issue #32.
• Continuity Nod:
  • In a series of panels at the end of the Free Comic Book Day preview, Big Mother — the antagonist of the first arc of Scream: Curse of Carnage, wherein she was retconned into being a symbiote-dragon — is shown towering over Venom.
  • Eddie references Dormammu's invasion from the events of The Last Annihilation.
  • When one of his symbiote team is compromised and taken over by another entity, Eddie wonders if it's Knull or Carnage. Knull is a given, being their god and all, but the Carnage reference seems to not only be in reference to Carnage's actions during Donny Cates' run, but also the Extreme Carnage series that saw Carnage creating his own hive.
  • In Free Comic Book Day 2022: Spider-Man/Venom, Eddie Brock is confronted by an apparition in the form of a Venomized severed left hand, a nod to when he sacrificed his left hand to avoid being taken over by Carnage in the "Venom Island" arc of Donny Cates' run.
  • In Free Comic Book Day 2022: Spider-Man/Venom, the core of the Symbiote Hive-Mind is called the Qlippoth of Omega and the UnBeyond, linking it to both the Below-Place from Immortal Hulk and the Beyond.
  • In Defenders (Vol. 6) #1, Doctor Strange invokes the Onyx King and the nameless things that cower before the Onyx Throne. Venom #18 reveals that the "Onyx King" is another name for the King in Black, implying that "nameless things" refers to the symbiotes and their ilk, and that the "Onyx Throne" refers to either the Spire or the Un-Beyond.
  • In issue #25, Eddie gets his hands on the Rosebud II, a time machine Reed Richards built in the 90s (long story).
  • Doom admits after his past self tries to kill him that he'd probably do the same, not knowing he has in fact done just that, back in Iron Man #250, having forgotten due to magic-related Laser-Guided Amnesia.
  • In #31, Carnage murders the son of the police officer Eddie Brock killed in Amazing Spider-Man #300, displaying his corpse in Dylan's apartment with a recorded message repeating Eddie's statement that "Innocent death is always unpleasant. But nothing must stand in our way. Nothing must block our righteous vengeance." Carnage also calls the Venom symbiote out on all the horrible things its bloodlust caused Eddie Brock and Anne Weying to do throughout the 1980s and 1990s, making Dylan relive its memories of them.
• Continuity Overlap:
  • In issue #2, Senator Arthur Krane makes a televised broadcast advertising his endorsement of Mayor Wilson Fisk, setting up Agony being shown as a member of Fisk's Thunderbolts in Devil's Reign.
  • In issue #3, it's revealed that the Absent Throne is pulling the strings of the Beyond Corporation, tying into Ben Reilly's tenure as Spider-Man in Spider-Man Beyond.
• Covers Always Lie: Issue #22's cover has Venom and Flexo fighting HYDRA in WW2. This isn't remotely what happens in the issue proper.
• Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass: Finnegan is perceived as the weakest and most impotent of the Kings in the Garden due to being Eddie right after a brutal Despair Event Horizon. But once he's given a reason to fight, Finnegan immediately and bravely jumps into battle, helping restrain the supposedly much stronger Tyro.
• Crossover:
  • #14 thru #16 tie into the Dark Web event, showing Dylan Brock going after Eddie, who was brainwashed by the Goblin Queen and Codex.
  • #31 and #32 overlap with Carnage (Vol 4) as part of an event called "Symbiosis Necrosis", where the apotheosized Carnage finally enacts his longtime goal of going after Eddie Brock to usurp the throne of Earth-616's King in Black for himself.
  • #33 ties into Blood Hunt, with the cover showing Lee Price—one-time host of the Venom and Mania symbiotes—being reanimated after having been killed by Dark Carnage in the lead-up to Absolute Carnage.
• Curb-Stomp Battle:
  • In #12, Sleeper Agent inflicts an effortless beatdown against the same Life Foundation agents who the Sleeper symbiote had struggled against off-panel, nullifying their attempts to incinerate him and destroying Carson's sonic spear.
  • In #19, Venom delivers a brutal beatdown to the Gold Goblin, effortlessly withstanding Norman's attempt to zap him with his electrified gauntlets and smashing him into several walls before preparing to impale him.
  • In #31, Carnage effortlessly overpowers Venom, mind rapes Dylan by forcing him to relive the Venom symbiote's memories of its worst actions, and then rips him out of the Venom symbiote before impaling him through the heart.
• Deity of Human Origin: Post-King in Black, Eddie Brock is the new God of the Symbiotes and spends most of his time overseeing the Hive and trying to undo the damage his predecessor Knull wrought, straining his relationship with his son Dylan. Extreme Carnage and the previews also show he isn't off to a very good start, with Carnage forming a rival hive on Earth, other symbiotes — like the red-eyed one seen in the previews — rebelling against his leadership, and a conspiracy seeking to dethrone his reign.
• Despair Event Horizon:
  • Tyro crossed it long ago, and now just tries to suck up to Meridius. Issue #13 shows the moment he transitions from being Wilde to Tyro, after giving Eddie the idea to send his mind to Limbo.
  • In #25, Eddie is horrified that he accidentally saved Adolf Hitler during World War II. Upon time-travelling to the 1960s and running into a teenaged Peter Parker, Eddie is shaken to see his former nemesis—now the person he looks up to for inspiration on how to be a hero—as Just a Kid unable to give him advice on how to proceed when he needs it the most. With a confused Peter assuming the "Parker" that Eddie is talking about is his recently-deceased Uncle Ben, Eddie smashes a brick wall in frustration and despair while lamenting that Peter's "with great power comes great responsibility" is a curse that will bring both of them misfortune, and that he wants nothing to do with it anymore.
• Diabolus ex Nihilo:
  • Doom warns Eddie that a side-effect of his Magitek time machine is that it attracts "synchronicity", but since they're currently in the Cretaceous he can't think of anything with a connection to either of them showing up. Then a Venomized T. rex bursts out of the jungle, growling Eddie's name. Once they leave, it turns out to be Meridius, but why he's there goes unexplained.
  • From Eddie's point of view, Carnage just shows up without any warning after he's geared himself up for a final showdown with Meridius.
• Disappointed in You: Carnage says as much to "Space-Venom" Eddie, lamenting that his last words, aside from being a mispronunciation, are barely even a quip.
• Dramatic Irony: In the first issue, Eddie Brock thinks to himself that with him in charge of the Hive-Mind the universe has nothing to fear from the symbiotes... which goes to show how ignorant he is of what's happening on Earth and even in the Hive, as the events of Extreme Carnage definitively prove that statement wrong.
• Entertainingly Wrong: In #30, Space-Venom assumes that the one responsible for slaughtering the cat-alien refugees was Carnage, when it was actually Meridius.
• Even Evil Has Standards: When Meridius observes how Dylan is living at the start of the comic — left alone at home with nobody to watch over him except Sleeper because Eddie is busy being God-Emperor of the symbiotes — he gets genuinely morally affronted, remarking that no father should raise their child in such a way and that it just reaffirms his belief that Eddie deserves whatever suffering Meridius inflicts on him. In general, while Meridius is more than willing to manipulate Dylan for his own ends, he doesn't seem to actively hate him like he does Eddie.
• Evil Feels Good: Meridius discovers this in #29, gleefuly revelling in committing genocide against the Symbiote Hive while sneering that their pacifistic existence—something that Eddie was trying to imbue them with at the beginning of the series—disgusts him.
• Evil Former Friend: During Mike Costa's run, Liz Allan, CEO of Alchemax, formed a (begrudging) working relationship with Eddie Brock, and in Donny Cates' run she let Eddie, Venom, Dylan, and Sleeper live at her and Harry's house — even treating Dylan like a second son. In issue #3 it's revealed she's involved with Absent Throne, callously having Dylan and Sleeper subdued and carted off while treating them like expendable resources. In the fourth issue she secretly expresses remorse for subjecting him to tortuous experiments when alone in her office, but Meridius manipulates events to push her further into the role of an antagonist, which succeeds in issue #6 when she commits to being Dylan Brock's enemy and pledges her support of Arthur Krane's Symbiote Task Force.
• Evil Me Scares Me: In the 9th issue, Eddie's codex finds himself trapped inside Bedlam and initially mistakes him for Carnage due to the red-colored symbiote-ooze and sheer hatred and bloodlust he's feeling. However, Eddie quickly realizes that Bedlam isn't Carnage at all, but an evil version of himself. He's further horrified by the revelation that Meridius is his "most evil [future] self" — which leaves him so consumed by self-loathing that a few in-poor-taste quips from Wilde almost cause him to transform into Bedlam.
• Existential Horror: Both Dylan and the Venom symbiote are left broken and hurting by Eddie Brock's death, with Eddie's warning for Dylan not to bond to it sowing the seeds of mistrust between them. In issue #3, the Venom symbiote has a minor existential crisis while processing everything that's happened to it, lamenting the loss of everything it's ever cared about.
• Expendable Clone: Kang the Conqueror uses time travel to duplicate himself, so he has warm bodies to throw at enemies. Doom finds this, and Kang's lack of remorse for essentially killing himself, disgusting.
• Eye Scream: In Free Comic Book Day 2022: Spider-Man/Venom, Eddie is shown to have had his left eye gouged out even while within the Symbiote Hive-Mind. After a pep-talk from the Eventuality, it starts to grow back.
• Face–Heel Turn: Liz Allan is manipulated by Meridius into becoming a servant of the Absent Throne.
• Fish out of Temporal Water: At the end of the first issue, Eddie is killed by soldiers working for the Absent Throne, and his codex is sent millions of years into the future.
• Flat "What": This is the reaction of everyone present when Eddie wearing Bedlam appears in the Garden of Time in issue #25.
• Food as Bribe: Venom's got a sweet tooth. As payment for helping Dylan in issue #22, he asks for chocolate. When the situation gets worse, he inflates to Belgian chocolate.
• Foreshadowing: During Eddie's trip through Limbo in issue #13, the alchemist apprentice he meets takes Eddie killing his master in stride, noting that due to the way Limbo works, it's less of a handicap. Eddie gets a first-hand experience of Limbo's temporal screwiness a few issues later.
• Freak Out: Tyro, like Eddie, has a meeting with Eventuality down in the Engine Room. Where Eddie accepts the advice given, Tyro screams and flees back into the time stream, leading him on the path to becoming Meridius.
• From a Single Cell: With a little coaching from the Eventuality, Eddie realizes he can get back to his body in the present because it's his, allowing Eddie to revive himself even though he'd been reduced to a charred skeleton.
• Fun T-Shirt: The shirt Eddie gets off a biker The Terminator-style after coming back to life naked says "Himbo Frankenstein". When Doom mentions this, Eddie admits he has no idea what "Himbo Frankenstein" is and asks if Doom knows.
• Fusion Dance: Issue #21 ends with Eddie dominating and subsequently bonding with Bedlam, resulting in a red, four-armed version of Eddie's original King in Black form.
• Future Me Scares Me: Abounds with the time travel.
  • Eddie is horrified to discover Bedlam is his future self, and even more so with Meridius. He's not terribly taken with Wilde or Tyro, and Wilde points out he's not enthused about the idea of going over the Despair Event Horizon and becoming a lickspittle like Tyro.
  • In issue #25, due to a time travel accident, Doctor Doom of the here-and-now meets himself from the Stan and Jack days. Once Past Doom determines his future self isn't a rogue Doombot or an imposter, he freaks at his "corrupted" future self and tries to kill him.
• Future Self Reveal: This is hinted at in Issue #9, where Eddie's combat mode sports jagged horns and arm-spikes nigh-identical to Meridius', and while manifesting his humanoid form after time-jumping his half-formed chest-emblem looks very similar to Meridius' own chest emblem — implying that Meridius is an evil future version of Eddie attempting to ensure his own existence through a Stable Time Loop. Issue #10 not only confirms this, but reveals that all of the Kings in Black are Eddie's future selves at various points in the time-loop, with him turning into Finnegan out of shock and despair before being mauled by Bedlam in a recreation of the scene from Issue #2.
• Gas Mask Mooks: In #23, Venom and Toxin run afoul of Noname, an organization of former Allan Chemical/Alchemax employees whose loved ones died in a toxic chemical leak the corporation covered up. Seeking revenge, the members of Noname—who collectively call themselves Noone and dress in identical suits of body armor and gas masks—capture Alchemax employees and livestream them being tortured them to death in an attempt to pressure the corporation to publicly confess its wrongdoings.
• Get Out!: Kang and Doom's chat in issue #25 ends with Doom needling Kang about his inability to truly rewrite time, and his destiny to become Immortus (a fact Kang hates). Kang immediately kicks him out.
• Gone Horribly Right: When confronting Flexo in #22, Dylan tells the Venom symbiote to shapeshift into a suit of Iron Man armor while he pretends to be Tony Stark. It works to fool the police, but Flexo mistakes him for "Metal Face" (revealed at the end of the issue to be Doctor Doom) and attacks. The symbiote is unamused and snarks that it wants chocolate as payment, upping the price to Belgian chocolate as the situation deteriorates.
• Good Is Not Soft: The Eventuality is a truly benevolent being that gives Eddie the knowledge, power, and confidence needed to fight back against Meridius… but it's also very blunt about and not especially sympathetic to Eddie's complaints about his situation, being very much a Tough Love kind of teacher. It explicitly notes that Kings in Black get their hands dirty, their hearts broken and that it's not going to sugarcoat how hard the path Eddie has locked himself onto is. But it needs to be followed because the work needs doing.
• Hand of Glory: Eddie meets his post-Meridius self which takes the form of a floating, clawed symbiote hand with blazing fingertips. They offer Eddie five questions, and each time it answers one a finger goes out.
• Have We Met Yet?: Issue #8 has Eddie accidentally run into Kang the Conqueror, who is apparently very familiar with Eddie and claims they're old friends. Eddie, meanwhile, has no real idea who Kang is beyond him being "some mook the Avengers fight". A bemused Kang then remarks that this must be their first meeting from Eddie's perspective; from Kang's perspective, the two have known each other for years.
• Heel–Face Turn: Eddie proving that is no Stable Time Loop keeping them trapped causes Wilde and Finnegan to both immediately turn on Meridius and support him, with the latter in particular helping him fight Tyro.
• He's Back!: At the end of issue 18, having had the role in the universe he's stepped into explained and given a proper idea of the power and responsibility he now wields, Eddie regains his will to fight and sets off into the timestream to kick Meridius' ass.
• Hidden Depths: Carnage of all people testily corrects Eddie when the latter mispronounces the name of Friedrich Nietzsche. This arguably isn't as weird as it sounds given that Cletus largely shares Nietzche's philosophy; it's not all that surprising he's read the guy's work.
• Hijacked by Ganon: In #30, Meridius manifests as a colossal version of himself and reveals that the Garden of Time itself is his body and that he was just lending bits of himself to the others, whose bodies he begins to absorb. Just as he boasts that there's no way Eddie or anyone can beat him, Carnage pulls a Chest Burster—absorbing Meridius' power in the process—and takes over as the principle threat, showcasing just how powerful he's become by killing Space Venom in one attack.
• His Own Worst Enemy:
  • Kang outright says as much after betraying one of his own temporal copies and justifying it with their timeline now being free for him to conquer. The same is shown for Doom in the same issue when confronted with his past self, with a mention made of an incident also involving time travel he went through over in recent issues of Fantastic Four.
  • Eddie proves he's this to himself throughout the series, but nowhere is it more blatant than #30. Eddie and his version of Bedlam fight Space Venom (who Eddie blames for having gotten them in this predicament), the original version of Bedlam (who Eddie's Bedlam squares off with), and Tyro (who declares that he's come too far and doubles down on becoming Meridius and using Dylan to escape becoming the Eventuality); while Finnegan and Wilde—seeing the loop can be broken—join forces with Eddie.
• Hitler's Time Travel Exemption Act: Played with in #25, where it's revealed that Flexo had been charged with assassinating Hitler and other Nazi top brass in 1941, but a time-travelling Eddie unwittingly derailed this. When Eddie finds out he's horrified he accidentally saved Hitler—allowing World War II to go on for three more years—and begs Doom to help him stop himself from doing so.
• Hulking Out: After the reveal, Eddie runs the risk that losing his temper will turn him into Bedlam. And given the circumstances he's in, Eddie hasn't got much control left.
• Hypocrisy Nod: Doom is forced to admit to himself that his arrogance, pride, and 110% assurance of infallibility cross over into hubris while confronting his past self in #25, whose behaviour appalls him even as he acknowledges he'd react in the same way when confronting someone claiming to be his future self.
• I Did What I Had to Do: When Eddie confronts Wilde in #12, demanding to know why Wilde — as Bedlam — killed their son, Wilde says that 1) Eddie is a hypocrite to get so angry about it since he's going to attack Dylan as Bedlam himself; and 2) attacking Dylan made sense at the time since he knew Dylan wouldn't die and that the suffering would make him stronger.
• I Hate Past Me:
  • Much of Meridius' MO is based around his utter contempt and hatred towards his past selves, gaslighting them in order to ensure his own existence while seething every time he has to interact with them in a civil manner.
  • In issue #25, Doctor Doom winds up in early 60s Marvel-time, right on the doorstep of the Latverian embassy, where his past self is concocting a scheme. Unfortunately, Doom's attempts to solicit help fail because this is Stan and Jack-era Doom; an utterly unhinged paranoid maniac who first assumes his future self is a rogue Doombot, then an imposter. Doom is appalled by his younger self's behavior, while also admitting (from experience) he'd probably be the same if it was the other way around.
• In Spite of a Nail: The Eventuality calls himself that because all of Eddie's branching paths through time lead to him. He can lose and regain the power again and again or fight it like Meridius is, but once he became the King in Black the Eventuality is the only possible outcome for him.
• Internal Reveal: In #12, Dylan learns that he's technically just as much Venom's son as he is Eddie's, and in accepting his true nature regains the powers he'd seemingly lost and is reborn as Codex.
• Intrepid Reporter: In #2, Eddie's voicemail message sends Dylan to look for an old friend of his from his reporter days named Archer Lyle, who reveals she can handle high-tech military weapons and kick all sorts of ass when she saves Dylan and Venom from being captured by soldiers sent by the Life Foundation. When talking about her friendship with Eddie in issue #3, she reveals she used to be even more intrepid in the past, charging headlong into active war-zones in search of a scoop.
• I've Come Too Far: When Eddie proves to the other Kings in Black that Meridius was wrong and there is no "cage" keeping them trapped in the time loop, most of them are understandably overjoyed, but Tyro instead has a Villainous Breakdown and attacks Eddie in a mad rage, ranting that this would mean all the horrible things he's done and all the abuse he let Meridius inflict on him was for nothing. He refuses to give up now.
• The Kid with the Remote Control: Flexo's original stories had his inventors controlling him with a remote. His reappearance here changes that. Flexo only helps them because they feed him, and even then the symbiote's liable to do what symbiotes will if it loses control. Needless to say, they're worried what might happen if something happens to them. When Flexo lost control in World War 2, the army had them put him on ice.
• Light Is Not Good: In the Free Comic Book Day preview, Ana Kravinoff — estranged daughter of Kraven the Hunter — is shown bonding to an Anti-Venom Battlesuit and mauling a symbiote with it.
• Lured into a Trap: In issue #3, Dylan and Sleeper volunteer to help Eddie's old friend Archer Lyle with her investigation into Absent Throne — the shadowy cabal responsible for Eddie's death — which has been pulling the strings of groups like the Life Foundation, Alchemax, the Beyond Corporation, and the Friends of Humanity. Archer agrees so long as Dylan leaves the Venom symbiote behind, and lures him into an ambush by Alchemax security forces — revealing that Absent Throne found out about her looking into them and blackmailed her into helping capture Dylan.
• Magic A Is Magic A: The Eventuality explains to Eddie that the magic of the Marvel Universe is divided between Light magicians (like Doctor Strange) and Dark magicians (like Kaluu). The key — if esoteric — difference between these forms of magic being that the former affect the universe from an outside perspective, while the latter does so from an inside perspective. This being a reflection of the difference between the Beyonders (Kings in White/Ivory Kings) and the Kings in Black, the former group maintaining the multiverse from outside, the other from within.
• Manchurian Agent: Issue #11 reveals that when Sleeper returned to the Brocks it left an offshoot of itself in Hank Hensley as a contingency plan. When the trouble with the Absent Throne began, Sleeper compelled Hank to sign on to the Life Foundation as a security guard, and when Dylan was captured it activated him to help rescue him.
• Master of Your Domain: The Eventuality helps Eddie realize that he can self-resurrect from his remains, and Eddie returns capable of manipulating his own anatomy to achieve superhuman feats. He's capable of using Uninhibited Muscle Power without worry of the damage because he can immediately patch himself back up, extend his intestines to grapple people like tentacles and shoot out his nerves to mentally interface with Bedlam.
• Mental Time Travel: The King in Black can send their codex into any symbiote at any point in time and space, and since symbiotes can shapeshift they might as well have sent their body.
• Mind Rape: Is inflicted on Eddie during the events of Dark Web, "resetting" him back to how he was in the 80s, and causing him to start turning into Bedlam. Worse, it's shown the effects aren't entirely permanent. While talking with Eventuality some of Eddie's memories start coming back.
• Mirror Character: Parallels can be drawn between Eddie and Kang, especially since the former comes to the latter for advice on timeline manipulation and Eddie meets his own Immortus in the form of Eventuality.
• Mirrored Confrontation Shot:
  • In Free Comic Book Day 2022: Spider-Man/Venom, Eddie is given a vision of Meridius' team of Kings in Black (Meridius, Bedlam, Wilde, Tyro, Finnegan, and Eddie himself) facing off against the team his son's been putting together to oppose them (Dylan Brock as Venom, Normie Osborn as the Red Goblin, Flash Thompson as Agent Anti-Venom, Bren Waters as Toxin, Lee Price wielding a Necrosword katana, and... Flexo the Rubber Man).
  • On the cover of Issue #12, Dylan's Venom form and Eddie's Venom form are shown face-to-face roaring at each other.
  • The cover of #30 shows Finnegan fighting Space Venom, Tyro fighting Wilde, naked resurrected Eddie fighting a younger Eddie as Venom, Eddie bonded to Bedlam fighting Meridius, and Eddie as Venom fighting Bedlam; all standing in a line with each other.
• Misplaced Retribution: In issue #19, Dylan attacks Norman Osborn, who ordinarily would deserve an ass-kicking, but in this instance it's not for anything Norman's done to Dylan personally, but because Dylan can't attack Eddie. The symbiote then takes over and tries to kill Norman for what he did to Flash Thompson in Go Down Swinging, only relenting when Dylan tells it to stop.
• My God, What Have I Done?: Eddie has several moments over the course of the series where he realizes just how badly he messed up being a father by abandoning his son to "play God". In #25, he meets a teenaged Peter Parker who's only recently become Spider-Man, and is disgusted with himself upon seeing the man he'd wanted to kill more than life itself as a kid only a couple of years older than Dylan.
• Mythology Gag: In issue #25, as Doom and Kang outline the nature of time travel in the Marvel multiverse, they call the rules of You Can't Fight Fate "Gruenwald's Law", after Mark Gruenwald (one of the writers who codified the rule for Marvel that time travel just creates alternate realities).
• Names to Run Away from Really Fast: In issue 3, the Venom symbiote — when lamenting how far it's fallen from its glory days — states that its unpronounceable name was once feared as a symbol of death and despair.
  Venom Symbiote: My name is not spoken nor heard. It is felt. In the beginning of a violent thought. In the ending of ancient stars. In the hum of an all-black blade. In the last breath taken on some long-forgotten battlefield. And yet here, I am a dog — a dog, Eddie Brock. Tethered by the flimsiest of chains on some street corner, watching weaklings sneer as they walk past.
• Natural End of Time: Meridius' Garden of Time is located at the very end of the Eighth Cosmos, where the Symbiote Hive clustered together to await the end of the Multiverse and the beginning of the next.
• Never Got to Say Goodbye: By the time of the beginning of the first issue, Dylan is angry and resentful that Eddie has been spending more time as the God of the Symbiotes than he has being a father. When Eddie reaches out to him to warn him he's in danger and needs to leave their home, Dylan furiously resolves to give Eddie a piece of his mind... only to watch his father be blown to smithereens by mercenaries sent by the Life Foundation to capture Venom. Dylan is subsequently devastated — especially since the last thing he'd intended to say to his father was that he hated him.
• Next Tier Power-Up: Carlton Drake and Meridius' goal, as outlined in Issues #3 and #4, is to push Dylan Brock and the Venom symbiote into surpassing their limits and growing stronger by forcing the former to give into rage and despair, and the latter to mutate through being repeatedly injured by its primary weaknesses and allowed to recover and adapt.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero:
  • The ninth issue reveals that Eddie's attempts to posthumously prevent his death only end up causing the many of the events of the series to happen, including getting Archer Lyle in trouble with the Absent Throne, which gets Dylan and Sleeper captured and tortured by Alchemax.
  • Dylan's attack on Norman breaks a pipe, which was connected to a cryo-stasis unit, which was keeping Flexo the Rubber Man on ice.
• Nightmare Face: Flexo the Rubber Man's Golden Age appearance looks quite goofy, as even his creators admit. When the reporter asks them just what became of Doctor Murdo, they evade the subject, while the readers see a shot of Flexo looming over the mad scientist with glowing eyes, mouth full of teeth and a symbiote's Overly-Long Tongue.
• Non-Linear Character: Meridius, thanks to his nature as a King in Black and location in the Garden of Time, is able to jump into and take control of symbiotes all across the timeline to manipulate it, leading to things like him doing something in the present, then going back to the past to ensure he's capable of doing what he did in the present. Eddie Brock himself does his share of time-jumping as things progress. This is because they're different versions of the same person, as are all the Kings in the Garden. In the time loop that Eddie has inadvertently put himself in, the progression goes like this: he starts as Space-Venom (his normal self), turns into Finnegan after hitting the Despair Event Horizon, transforms into Bedlam out of Uncontrollable Rage over his situation, shifts into Wilde as he grows tired of it all, becomes Tyro when he hits on the idea of studying under Meridius, and then finally becomes Meridius after mastering his powers but rejecting his duties as the future Eventuality. All of this is presented in Anachronic Order and involves copious amounts of time travel. Then Eddie proves this is not set in stone and time shenanigans lead to a new Eddie being made. It gets even more complicated from there. All of this madness gets lampshaded by the Eventuality and later Eddie himself, who both note that his timeline is a tangled gnarl of possibilities that zig and zag through each other.
• No-Sell:
  • While in Limbo, Bedlam is attacked by some techno-organic demons. Normally, the transmode virus would be game over for anyone, but as a King in Black, Bedlam can just burn it out of his system.
  • As part of his own power-up, Carnage has All-Blood, which can effortlessly kill Kings in Black, as he demonstrates on Finnegan. So he's surprised when it doesn't kill Bedlam.
• No Sympathy: During Dark Web, Eddie attacks the X-Men for Madeline as a distraction. Synch figures there's something off with him, despite not knowing the man, but also feels that since Eddie has attacked his house, he doesn't care.
• Nothing Personal: In the third issue, Archer sells Dylan and Sleeper out to Alchemax despite her having been a friend of Eddie Brock's. When he confronts her, she says it isn't personal, but that the Absent Throne caught her investigating them and helping them capture Dylan was only choice they gave her to escape with her life. Liz Allan, who once also treated Dylan like a second son, is also cold towards him when telling Archer she did the right thing, and while performing tortuous experiments on him.
• Not Quite Dead: Eddie's human body is blown up, but as a King in Black he has — without even fully realizing at first — transcended into something decidedly more then human, which Kang lampshades in Issue #9. As such, when his body is destroyed, his mind/soul/codex is simply unstuck in time until it lands and anchors itself in a symbiote in the Garden of Time along with other Kings in Black.
• Once More, with Clarity:
  • Issue #10 shows some of the events of the first issue again. It turns out that Meridius was the one who remote-piloted "Ringo" and butchered the alien refugees, and that at least one of the Eddies was Meridus assuming Eddie's form (via time-travel and remote-piloting symbiotes) to manipulate Dylan — and he wonders if the Eddie who warns Dylan over the phone not to bond to the Venom symbiote is his future self doubling back to make sure Dylan does so or the real Eddie Brock's future self.
  • Issue #9 shows some of the events of the first and fourth issues from Eddie Brock's perspective, with him attempting to use Mental Time Travel to Set Right What Once Went Wrong. It shows that Eddie posthumously sent an email to Archer Lyle six days before his death asking her to look out for Dylan and investigate the Absent Throne, then jumped ahead to find Archer had betrayed Dylan and that bonding to the Venom symbiote had put his son in even more danger. Eddie then time-jumped back to just before his death intending to prevent Dylan from bonding to the symbiote altogether, calling his son to warn him not to trust the imposter Eddie (Meridius in disguise) and not to bond to the Venom symbiote, and to come to the motel. Eddie's own past self derails his plan to take Dylan and escape before the helicopters attack, setting Dylan up to witness his father die and have the Venom symbiote bond to him in order to protect him from the soldiers.
  • Issue #10 shows that Eddie is trapped in a time-loop that he will repeat as each of the Kings in Black, suffering through Bedlam's mauling as Finnegan with the knowledge that he'll be doing the mauling as Bedlam next.
  • Issue #21 details how Flexo supposedly lost control and wiped out an entire village in World War 2. Issue #25 shows the full details; It wasn't Flexo at all. He was summoned off-course by Eddie, and Doctor Doom laid waste to the village because he was in a bad mood and there were Nazis around. Flexo just wasn't able to explain himself.
  • In issue #5 Tyro tries to say something to Meridius, who shuts him up. It's not until issue #29 we see the event from his point of view, and what it was he wanted to say.
• The One Thing I Don't Hate About You: While Doctor Doom may despise Kang for his behavior (and, y'know, not being Doom), he does regard him as being slightly above Eddie.
• Parents as People: Eddie loves Dylan and wants to be a good father, but his strange life as the new King in Black results in him not being there as much as he should, straining their relationship.
• Pay Evil unto Evil: Due to a malfunctioning time machine, Doom and Eddie wind up in Germany in the 1940s. Doom is only too willing to vent his frustrations on the local Nazi soldiers.
• Place Beyond Time: The Garden of Time, the final evolutionary state of the Symbiote Hive under Meridius' reign, takes the form of a vast, strange garden at the supposed end of time. It is also Meridius' base of operations... and a time-looped prison he seeks to escape.
• Please Kill Me if It Satisfies You: When Dylan Brock and the Venom symbiote go after Norman Osborn, the Gold Goblin tries to fight back and run away when that fails. On the ropes and about to be impaled, Norman laughs and admits that he deserves to die for everything he's done, but that he always thought Spider-Man would be the one to kill him and that he must've done something that cut the new Venom to the heart to earn this level of hatred and rage.
• Point of No Return: The Eventuality explains to Eddie that the reason he's become trapped in this whole situation is because he's unwittingly progressed far enough in the path to becoming a cosmic entity that there's really nowhere else to go but forward; no matter what he chooses to do now, he will become the Eventuality eventually and can no longer hop off the rails, simply because he's already initiated the process of ascension.
• The Poorly Chosen One: Eddie rages against the full scope of the responsibility of being a King in Black in issue #18, the Eventuality wryly replies that Knull voiced those same objections when he was chosen too. When Eddie says that someone like Spider-Man would have been a far better candidate, the Eventuality agrees but retorts that it ended up being Eddie, telling him to stop whining since someone has to do the job.
• Really 17 Years Old: In #31, Dylan applies for a job at a warehouse and lies that he's 21 instead of his actual age of ~14. The manager raises an eyebrow at it, but decides he's not above exploiting minors for cheap labor.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech:
  • In #6, the Venom symbiote — embittered and angered by Eddie's death and succumbing to corruption — berates Dylan for rejecting his inner darkness and being too afraid to accept what he and it really are.
  • In #31, Carnage mockingly calls the Venom symbiote out on all the horrible things it and Eddie did during their first tenure as Venom, as well as what it did to Anne Weying, and that it's trying to keep all this hidden from Dylan out of shame and fear of rejection. When Carnage forces Dylan to relive what his human parents experienced when first bonded to the Venom symbiote, he's horrified and disgusted, and doesn't resist when Carnage tears him out of it.
• Recursive Reality: Free Comic Book Day 2023: Spider-Man / Venom reveals this to be the case with Mystic Comics #1, which in-universe is a fictional account of the adventures of Flexo the Rubber Man.
• Red and Black and Evil All Over: Bedlam is a colossal antagonistic symbiote who is primarily red with black eyes and claws.
• Red Eyes, Take Warning: In the Free Comic Book Day 2021: Spider-Man/Venom preview, one of the symbiotes accompanying Eddie to rescue a space ship under attack from Skrull space-pirates sports glowing red eyes and stares ominously at him as he thinks to himself that he'll show the universe that it doesn't need to fear symbiotes anymore. It turns out this symbiote is being controlled by Meridius, who uses it to butcher the refugees Eddie was trying to save and then deliver an ominous warning that Eddie and all his loved ones are going to die in the near future and that there's nothing Eddie can do to prevent it.
• Remember the New Guy?: In Venom #2, Eddie's voicemail sends Dylan to California in search of an old friend of his from his days as a reporter, Archer Lyle... who has never previously appeared or been mentioned.
• Resolved Noodle Incident: Way back in the 90s, Darkoth the Death-Demon became ruler of Limbo (the dimension once ruled by Belasco). Some time after that, Margali Szardos was ruling the place with Darkoth nowhere to be seen. Issue #17 finally shows how Darkoth lost the job, with the narrator even pointing out how they'd always been a little curious themselves.
• Retcon:
  • Issue #18 reveals the true nature of the Kings in Black, and by extension re-contextualizes Knull. The Kings in Black are beings chosen by either the Celestials or their precursor at the beginning of each Multiversal cycle to maintain the Multiverse from within, as opposed to the Beyonders who are intended to do so from outside the Multiverse. Knull was chosen at the beginning of the Seventh Cosmos, but balked at the responsibility and "burned his draft card" in favor of trying to destroy everything.
  • Free Comic Book Day 2023: Spider-Man / Venom revealed the true origins of Flexo the Rubber Man, a World War II-era superhero from Marvel's golden age. Namely that he's actually a symbiote, and his original origin story from Mystic Comics was an in-universe fictional narrative.
  • #25 has Eddie, Bedlam, and Meridius crash-landing in the Late Cretaceous Period, where they're attacked by a Venomized T. rex that turns out to be Meridius in disguise. This means that there were symbiotes on Earth millions of years before their previously known earliest appearance, during the Hyborian Age, which itself was over ten-thousand years earlier than Marvel's official earliest symbiote arrival point: the Grendel and Big Mother's attack on Heorot in the 6th century CE.
• Retired Outlaw: Jake Yahkin used to run with a biker gang called the Renegades, but has lost his Rebellious Spirit — being too old, beat-up, and cynical to want to stand up against the Hell Hounds, a cruel rival gang who seized control of Baywater. His refusal to fight back gets him and his gang killed by the Hell Hounds in Issue #7, leaving Dylan distraught.
• Roaring Rampage of Revenge:
  • In the first issue, after Eddie is killed by soldiers working for the Absent Throne via the Life Foundation, Dylan bonds to the Venom symbiote and goes berserk while slaughtering them — unwittingly kickstarting the symbiote's corruption in the process.
  • While Dylan attacks the Gold Goblin as a proxy for his rage towards his father—who as far as he can tell has turned evil and is trying to torture and kill him—the Venom symbiote wants to kill Norman Osborn in revenge for what he did to Flash Thompson in Go Down Swinging.
• Samus Is a Girl: Only having a name to go by, Dylan assumes that Archer Lyle is a man and is dismayed when nobody he asks has heard of "him", only to find out at the end of issue #2 that Archer Lyle is a woman.
• Screw Destiny:
  • In Issue #18, the Eventuality explains that Knull embraced the power of the King in Black but rejected the responsibilities that came with it, seeking to destroy the universe he'd been charged with protecting. This resulted in the cosmos locking him onto a path that led to his defeat and the role passing onto someone else, despite Knull's attempt to ensure his victory via Mental Time Travel in Symbiote Spider-Man: King in Black. According to the Eventuality, Knull's responses to the responsibility were that it was not fair nor right, that he was "not the right guy," and demanded to know why it had to be him.
  • Meridius simply can't accept that he's reached the point where he will become the Eventuality no matter what choices he makes, and as a result is willing to do anything to break off the rails... and he doesn't care how much blood must be spilt to do it.
• Series Continuity Error:
  • The series treats Dylan bonding to the Venom symbiote in the first issue as being the first time it happened, ignoring that it already happened in Venom #35.
  • In the final issue of Venom (Donny Cates), Dylan Brock's chest/back-emblems as Venom were white dragons identical to Dark Carnage and Knull's, but Bryan Hitch and most of the variant cover artists draw them as the usual spiders. Bryan Hitch later commented on Twitter that at the time he was illustrating the FCBD preview, he was unaware that Stegman was going to be changing the symbiote's emblems from spiders to dragons, and decided to continue using the spider emblems for the first issue to symbolize Knull's influence over the Hive diminishing.
  • In Extreme Carnage, Sleeper secretly bonded to Hank and agreed to stay with him in case Carnage returned, but in the first and seconds issues — which are set after Extreme Carnage — he's still in the form of a cat and living with the Brocks. It's implied that at the time the issues were written, Ram V was unaware of exactly how Sleeper was involved in Extreme Carnage and the editors never corrected the continuity error, though Ram eventually Hand Waved an explanation that Sleeper created a copy of itself that it left bonded to Hank and can take control of, while the rest of it is in cat-form with Dylan.
  • In Extreme Carnage, Arthur Krane was drawn as a younger man with brown hair, but in Venom he's drawn as an older man with grey hair — making it clear he was originally intended to be Peter Krane.
• Set Right What Once Went Wrong:
  • In issue #9, Eddie tries to use Mental Time Travel to prevent the events of the series from happening, and is horrified to learn that this only sets them in motion: he travels back to write a letter to Archer Lyle asking her to look after Dylan and investigate the Absent Throne, which leads to her being caught and blackmailed into turning Dylan over to Alchemax. Upon learning this, he goes back to just before his death — taking over his own body while his past self's mind is fighting the Skrull space-pirates — to call Dylan and warn him not to bond to the symbiote, but forgets to warn him not to trust Archer. Just as Eddie assures himself that he'll tell Dylan everything when he gets to the motel and escape the helicopters sent to kill him, his past self's mind returns to his body and boots his future self out. Meridius then traps Eddie in Bedlam's body — making him watch Bedlam torture Dylan — and mocks him for trying to change his destiny.
  • In issue #25, Eddie begs Doctor Doom to help him stop them from travelling to France during World War II, as in doing so Eddie unwittingly prevented Flexo the Rubber Man from assassinating Adolf Hitler. Despite his hatred of Nazis, Doom refuses and even mocks Eddie for wanting to do so, as it would erase them both from existence.
• Shout-Out: Bren Waters' new Toxin form sports mandibles identical to the Predator's.
• Slowly Slipping Into Evil: After Dylan and the Venom symbiote witness Eddie's death, their shared rage and grief — as well as remnants of Dylan's half-human biology — catalyzes a change in the Venom symbiote that causes it to start to become increasingly scornful and vicious.
  Venom Symbiote: You know my name, boy. You know its meaning, deep within your bones. I am strife. I am glorious war. Wherever I go, the battle shall follow, like a shadow you cast over all those you hold dear and close.
• Spotting the Thread: During the Venom of Asgard crossover, while Thor has no way of knowing about Meridius, he nonetheless still deduces that this isn't the same Eddie Brock he and the Avengers fought alongside during King in Black. Specifically, Meridius slipped up by mentioning in passing that it had been centuries since he'd last seen Thor. More, Thor knows firsthand what it's like for a god to pretend to be a man — and he sees that same playacting and the accompanying tells in 'Eddie'.
• Stable Time Loop:
  • Eddie's attempts to change the past by "wrestling the storm" in the 9th issue only result in the events of the series he attempts to derail playing out as shown in the previous issues, just as Kang warned they would.
  • Issue #10 drives this home further, with Meridius spelling it out for Eddie that the other Kings in Black are his future selves, and that he's doomed to become each of them in a time-loop until he finally becomes Meridius and grows power enough to break the cycle.
• Start of Darkness: Issue #29 details how exactly Meridius became Meridius.
• String Theory: Archer Lyle shows Dylan a string-covered board full of articles about people and groups (like the Life Foundation, the Friends of Humanity, and the Beyond Corporation) that are all in some way connected to the Absent Throne.
• Super Mode: A variant cover for Issue #12 and the main cover for Issue #15 show Dylan becoming Codex after being "renewed and reinvigorated" in the depths of the Hive-Mind, and wielding what is implied to be All-Black in the form of a katana.
• Take That!: Towards the idea that Venom is a rage-filled monster. In Eddie's "The Reason You Suck" Speech toward Bedlam in issue #21 he speaks on how without Eddie's motivations, his nobler traits or even his connection with his symbiote, Bedlam can never be Venom and is nothing but hollow inside.
• Temporal Duplication:
  • This happens a lot to Eddie over the course of the series as a result of him being a King in Black and unstuck in time. An early reveal in the series is that all the Kings in Black in the Garden of Time are versions of Eddie. Later on the main Eddie bonds to a symbiote inhabited by his duplicate Bedlam, and they use a time machine to arrive at the Garden in person, for a grand total of eight Eddies in the same place and time.
  • Kang pulls duplicates of himself seconds out of time to confront Eddie and Doom in issue 25. Doom views this process with disdain, finding it pointless due to robot doubles being equally effective and inefficient because there are entire timelines created with each copy. Kang justifies it after betraying himself by stating there are now more timelines for him to conquer.
• Tempting Fate:
  • At the start, Eddie definitively thinks to himself that Knull is dead and gone for good, and there's absolutely no way he can ever come back. He also thinks to himself that as long as he's in charge of the Hive-Mind the universe has nothing to fear from the symbiotes. He seems to be right on the former account, but very wrong on the latter.
  • Issue #29 ends with Meridius smugly assuring himself he knows everything, as behind him Eddie materializes in a time machine which is going to land on Meridius. Shortly after, he does it again by boasting about how powerful and unstoppable he is... just before the newly ascended Carnage butchers him.
• There Are No Coincidences: Outlined in issue #25 as one of the side-effects of Doom's Magitek time travel; you can change the past, but at the cost of "synchronicity". So if something goes wrong, you're likely to crash-land near an event relevant to your own timeline.
• Time Crash: In issue #17, time breaks when Bedlam throws down with Darkoth in the depths of Limbo — already a place where time behaves strangely. As a result, two separate outcomes of the fight occur, both being equally canon. In one, Bedlam kills Darkoth and returns to the Garden of Time to continue the time loop and eventually become Meridius. In the other, Darkoth impales Bedlam through the heart with the Soul Sword, jettisoning Eddie's codex into the depths of the Hive-Mind and leading to the events of the 2022 Free Comic Book Day Spider-Man/Venom issue. Meanwhile, the symbiote Eddie had been controlling latches onto Darkoth and goes berserk, leading to the events of Thor (Vol. 6) #27.
• Timey-Wimey Ball:
  • At the end of the first issue, Eddie's consciousness is jettisoned into the far future, and in the eighth issue he briefly manages to project himself into the past in an attempt to prevent his own death and assure his son will be looked after by his old colleague Archer Lyle... only to lament the complexities of time travel when Dylan blindsides him with the reveal that Archer Lyle sold him out to Alchemax and multiple versions of him have been walking around delivering conflicting informations to his son. Eddie's further attempts to change the past only serve to set in motion the events of the series, just as Meridius intended.
  • Issue #10 hits Eddie with a doozie, with Meridius revealing that the Garden of Time is a bizarre time-loop wherein Eddie is doomed to become each of the Kings in Black — Finnegan, Bedlam, Wilde, Tyro, and finally Meridius — and kill his own son. Eddie refuses to believe it until he runs into his own past self as "Finnegan" and is mauled by Bedlam — his rage-fuelled future self — in a repeat of the events of the second issue.
  • Issue #13 explains that time behaves strangely in Limbo, the past and the present blending together in bizarre ways. This comes to a head in #17, where Bedlam is attacked by demons infected with the Transmode Virus before being accosted by Darkoth, who preceded Magik and Madelyn Pryor as the ruler of Limbo before disappearing under mysterious circumstances. The issue reveals that Darkoth's fight with Bedlam broke time, resulting in one version being killed by Bedlam and another being infected by Bedlam's symbiote and sent into the future — from his perspective — to attack Asgard.
  • Issue #25 has Kang explain the convoluted time-loop Eddie's become embroiled in to Doctor Doom, who grumps that it's just a particularly complex application of Gruenwald's First Law of Time-Travel,^note A reference to Marvel writer and editor Mark Gruenwald, who came up with strict rules for time-travel that have since largely been disregarded. and then insults Kang for wasting his time. Kang's diagram of Eddie's timeline is a loose squiggle, which has only been doubled by his attempt to change his past.
• Token Evil Teammate: Bedlam, even after siding with Eddie, is still a bloodthirsty monster who likes eating people, and misses the days when Eddie was a revenge-obsessed cannibal hellbent on killing Spider-Man.
• Took a Level in Jerkass: Invoked. As part of their plans, Meridius and Carlton Drake manipulate the Venom symbiote and Dylan into suffering various traumatic events so that their shared grief and anger — plus the Dylan's own half-human biology — will slowly corrupt the symbiote's mind. This manifests as the symbiote becoming more and more dangerously scornful, aggressive, and unsympathetic towards others at time goes on
• Toxic Friend Influence: Dylan presents himself as a friend to the lonely, isolated Normie Osborn. He bonds him to a symbiote, probably the last thing a troubled kid, let alone one from that family, needs. Especially since the symbiote pushes Normie towards violence.
• Tragic Time Traveler: Eddie Brock. His attempts to travel through time causes him to get stuck in a time loop, where he discovers that he'll be so broken by the knowledge of what's to come he'll attack his son, work under Meridius, become Meridius, and eventually put his past selves through the same pain and agony just to try and escape. To add insult to injury, every time he attempts to avert the time loop, it just ends up perpetuating it.
• Two Lines, No Waiting: Al Ewing tells the stories featuring Eddie Brock as the new God of the Symbiotes, while Ram V pens Dylan Brock's struggles as the new Venom, with the two writers infrequently alternating — and sometimes sharing — issues.
• Unstuck in Time: The first time Eddie leaves the Garden of Time, he constantly feels the timestream pulling him back in. Kang anchors him in place for a while, but after Eddie leaves he has to keep focusing to keep himself where he is.
• Villainous Breakdown: Tyro absolutely loses his mind when Eddie proves that you can indeed Screw Destiny and that it's not even hard, meaning all the evils the Kings have committed and indiginities he in particular has suffered were meaningless as they could've just left whenever. He proceeds to attack Eddie and rants madly that he won't allow everything he's done to be for nothing.
• Visual Pun: The narration for issue #17 begins the issue by recapping how Eddie is in desparate need of help but so far nobody has given him any. At the end the narrator says "Eddie needs a hand. And here I am." As the Eventuality, in the form of a disembodied hand, floats before him.
• Wham Episode: Issue 30. Carnage—having ascended into a King in Black at the end of ''Death of the Venomverse—takes over as Big Bad.
• Wham Shot: Issue #9 ends with a cliffhanger showing Bedlam is none other than Eddie Brock himself, taking the form of Eddie's original flattop and stubble appearance from his supervillain years.
• When You Coming Home, Dad?: The first issue opens with Dylan bitter and angry about Eddie spending weeks at a time hooked up to the Symbiote Hive-Mind, surmising that his father finds him boring and doesn't love him anymore.
• White and Red and Eerie All Over: In Free Comic Book Day 2022: Spider-Man/Venom, Dylan gives Normie Osborn an sample of the Carnage symbiote mutated by Anti-Venom, turning it red-and-white. While Normie is initially terrified of it, he bonds to it to become a red, black, and white version of the Red Goblin.
• Would Hurt a Child:
  • Bedlam impales Dylan Brock through the heart on Meridius' orders, almost killing him.
  • The No One agents of Noname are perfectly willing to kidnap and murder the children of Alchemax employees in order to get the MegaCorp to publicly confess to covering up a toxic chemical leak that killed their loved ones. In #26 it's revealed they've gotten their hands on anti-symbiote weaponry and use it to separate the Toxin symbiote from Bren, capturing him.
• Wound That Will Not Heal: Dylan manages to inflict these on Bedlam with All-Black, removing his hand and one eye, though Meridius "kindly" supplies some symbiote matter to patch him back up.
• You Already Changed the Past: Eddie tries to go back to shortly before he died to explain to Dylan what is going on and tell him not to trust Archer Lyle, as he had just learned she'd betray them. This just sets Dylan up to meet her.
• You Can't Fight Fate: In Issue #9, Kang the Conquerer warns Eddie that his crusade to Set Right What Once Went Wrong is likely to backfire unless he's careful about it. Eddie ignores him, and in his desperation to change the past he ends up causing the very chain of events that leads to Dylan bonding to Venom and Archer Lyle getting blackmailed by Absent Throne into betraying Dylan; with Meridius mocking him for trying to fight fate.
  • In issue #18 it's explained to Eddie that, in spite of the myriad choices and alternare timelines he could make, once he bonded to a symbiote he got set on the inevitable path to becoming a King in Black and assuming the full responsibility of the throne. This is why his post-Meridius self simply calls himself The Eventuality.
  • In the same issue, it's also elaborated that the situation is less that he can't fight fate and more that he's progressed far enough down a certain series of potential paths that he's more or less locked himself into one logical outcome. Eddie could escape it by decoupling himself from symbiotes entirely and letting someone else begin the paths to becoming the Eventuality (which is what Spider-Man unwittingly did when he broke his bond with the Venom symbiote in that church all those years ago), but once he became a King in Black and especially once he died in the hotel explosion, he's pretty much hit the Point of No Return. Meridius is essentially a version of Eddie that won't accept the consequences of his life choices and seeks to use his immense power to "burn his draft card" in a different manner than Knull did. The fact you can indeed fight fate, and do so quite easily at that, is affirmed in issue 30 when Eddie and Carnage both casually obliterate the entire Stable Time Loop. Wilde realizes as this happens that there never was a "cage" keeping them trapped in the Garden; the only thing making them stuck was their own personality flaws and unwillingness to accept their duties.
• You Don't Look Like You: Arthur Krane is clearly meant to be his father Peter Krane, with the name being changed at the last minute when it was revealed that Peter Krane was killed in Extreme Carnage.

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