Trivia / Venom (Donny Cates)

• Ascended Meme: The joke about this series being better than Watchmen; the series got a variant cover by Dave Gibbons himself, homaging Watchmen #1's cover — replacing the Comedian's smiley face button with a Venom one and the pool of blood with the Carnage symbiote.
• Cash-Cow Franchise: Cates' run was exceedingly popular, outselling even Amazing Spider-Man itself. Not only that, but the title frequently outsold the Batman ongoing, a feat that is considered extraordinary in the comics industry.
• Content Leak: Web of Venom: Wraith was prematurely released on Marvel's official online comics-reading app in July 2020, despite the physical release having been rescheduled to September. When Marvel realized they'd accidentally leaked the issue, they quickly pulled it - though not before several people had read it.
• Creator Breakdown: Cates has admitted that the rather dark and introspective opening scene of Issue 9 was thanks to him being "in a dark place" at the time. Cates has also confessed to using the book as catharsis for his stress and anxiety.
• Lying Creator:
  • Early into his run, Cates boasted that he had at least forty issues planned and that he hoped to surpass Rick Remender and Cullen Bunn's 47 issue-long run, and when King in Black was announced he stated it was merely the conclusion of his first arc of Venom. When Venom #200 — the 35th issue of the series — was announced to be the final issue of his run, Cates stated in an interview with IGN that that was always planned to be the case.
  • When the super-villain Virus was revealed in the lead-up to the "Venom Beyond" arc, Cates stated he was a completely new character. Virus was ultimately revealed to be Mac Gargan, who briefly returned as a symbiote-augmented Scorpion before being imprisoned on Earth-1051... until he made an unexplained return to Earth-616 and his Scorpion persona in The Amazing Spider-Man (2018).
• Running the Asylum: Donny Cates has been a Venom fan since he was a kid, and got to canonize some of his own previously made-up ideas for the symbiotes — like Venom's drool being the symbiote's excrement.
• Similarly Named Works: One of the lead-ins to Absolute Carnage is Web of Venom: Funeral Pyre, not to be confused with the earlier Venom: Funeral Pyre.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Some of Cates' plans were kiboshed by Marvel's editorial department, with them refusing to let him kill off any major characters in Absolute Carnage. This, coupled with some of the later arcs seeming rushed, has led to speculation that Cates' initial claims that King in Black was Part II of a longer saga weren't a case of Lying Creator, and that his run was Cut Short by behind-the-scenes drama.
  • In the episode of Ryan Stegman's podcast commemorating the 200th issue of Venom, Donny Cates stated that he'd intended to make Miles Morales the next host of the Venom symbiote, but following Absolute Carnage he changed his mind and made Dylan Brock the symbiote's next host instead.
• Word of God: Donny Cates often uses Twitter to provide clarification for more obscure narrative points in his comics.