What Happened to Venom?

For no reason but curiosity's sake, I google searched Venom and to my surprise this is one of the first pictures that popped up in the images section:

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What has happened to Venom? What has happened to my favorite Spider-Man villain?

I've collected comic books since I can remember. Of all my comics, the issues I believe are the most valuable are The Amazing Spider-Man issues #298, 299 and 300. All three are significant. Issue 298 is Todd McFarlane's first work on what would be one of the most famous artist runs on Spider-Man. It also included an oh so brief cameo of a shape that would be known as Venom.

Cameo on the last page of TASM# 298.

This is where it gets tricky; depending on what comic book price guide you look at, Venom's first appearance was either Amazing Spider-Man #299 or 300, since I read Wizard magazine, they listed 299 as only a cameo and issue 300 as the first appearance. Honestly both have good arguments. Issue 299 has the first shot of him on the last panel of the comic.

Cameo/First Appearance on the last page of TASM#299.

The reasons why I assume that could be considered a cameo are due to the unknown factors that are present in this issue. For example, we have no idea who he is. We assume that it is the symbiote but the name "Venom" does not appear until the next issue, as well as his first encounter with Spider-Man.
Issue 300 is my pride and joy: It features a great Venom story and set the bench mark for how great of a villain Venom could be: which was pretty much a bigger, stronger Spider-Man with a mouth. Capable of avoiding Spider-Man's great "spider-sense", he is (or was at the time) the only villain that could sneak up or stalk Spidey. He could do literally everything Spider-Man could do but do it better. He had a one-up on him in every way except in the brains department. I wouldn't call Venom insane, just disillusioned; you're dealing with a man, Eddie Brock (also a reporter) that was on the verge of suicide due to what he believes is Spider-Man's fault. Then you also have the alien symbiote, which knows all of Spider-Man's secrets and has some serious separation anxiety  when the ol' web head used some church bells to stop what it wanted to be a "life-time partnership" if you get me. Venom was Spider-Man's ultimate challenge; I found him to be a "Spider-Man gone wrong": A sickly minded individual that is hypocritical and completely selfish in his actions. If Spider-Man's motto is "With great power comes great responsibility" than Venom's is "With great power comes great opportunity to kill Spider-Man". That's another reason why I love his character: He simply wants to kill Spider-Man. That's it. What greater foe could Spider-Man have than a dark doppelganger that has all his powers and can sneak up on him, and who's only goal in life is to see him dead?

Venom's back! TASM#316

Though he was defeated in issue 300, writer David Michelinie and McFarlane knew they had a gem of a character on their hands. Unfortunately, they would only work together on Venom for three more issues. But what issues they were. Not to spoil anything if someone is interested in picking them up but suffice it to say that they are the best Venom stories you can ever find. Amazing Spider-Man issues 316 and 317 are the BEST Spider-Man fights I have ever seen; Venom is once again shown as an unstoppable force, letting no one come between him and his goal of Spider-Man's death. He even assaults Black Cat more or less because she was at the wrong place at the wrong time.

Venom's only form of negotiation.

 What captures these fights the best is how we follow Spider-Man as Venom plays with him for a bit; He is in constant paranoia, whether he is fighting Venom or not. He even tries to find help from other superheros so he won't have to fight Venom. He really thinks he might die in the fight. And he almost did. I've rarely seen a villain put Spider-Man through such physical and mental torture.

Fuck.

Both issues end with Spider-Man pushed to the breaking point. It's so startling to see Spider-Man, truly one of the most lovable superheros of all time, snap; and the results are not pretty. However the climax of the story is fantastic and when you think about it, probably the smartest and only way it can end. This is what Spider-Man 3 should have been.
But then Erik Larsen came and screwed everything up.
Replacing Todd McFarlane as the artist for The Amazing Spider-Man was a tall order...and big shoes that Larsen, I would say, couldn't fill. This is shown no more than the change that he made to Venom that would so, so unfortunately stick with practically every other comic book artist and eventually pop culture: Venom's Tongue.

And to think he was so beautiful...

Ugh. Barely out of the gate and Venom has already been ruined. Images, of course, are always so important to comic-books; they go hand in hand with the words to create these vivid characters. Changing something on a costume is like changing the character entirely it would seem. (Just look at the Superman costume change in the early 2000s.) What the grotesquely long tongue did to Venom was put him on a road that would lead to a de-evolution of the character. Putting a tongue-a long one at that-already strikes up an image in your mind: a dog, panting and salivating for food, which, turns out, Larson added plenty of too for Venom!

Venom REALLY wants Spider-Man...to take him out to dinner.

When you put such overly animalistic qualities in a character such as this, not only are you changing the look and feel of a character but slowly but surely, the nature of the character as well. Like when one of your friends tells you to call them by a different name when you graduate from Elementary School to Jr. High: you think it might be a stupid change, but eventually you learn to live with it, almost forgetting that he or she was ever called a different name at all.
Maybe people didn't pay much mind to the change because Venom's original look was only seen in four issues before Larson added the tongue; maybe they almost fooled themselves into thinking that there was still room for improvement. A sadder possibility is that many kids didn't become comic fans until after McFarlane left Spider-Man and first saw Venom as this drooling monster. I've seen a fair share of blogs and comments of how people hated that Venom in Spider-Man 3 didn't have a tongue, which is funny because I'd say that was one of the few things that the movie actually did right.

What's wrong with this picture? Ugh.

But what is so bad about the tongue? Well, what do you think of when you see a character with jagged teeth and a protruding tongue with slobber everywhere? For me, I'm thinking the person is, frankly, a dumb ass. If he can't even wipe spit off his mouth, how can he ever plot to kill Spider-Man? How can he be menacing? It paints a portrait of ignorance to a once ruthless, menacing figure. Looking at McFarlane's Venom, I can see how he could hunt Spider-Man down and be smart enough to stalk him when he is at his most vulnerable. When I see Larsen's, I see a reckless animal that looks like he can't even operate a toilet properly, let alone properly set a plan into action that could lead to the death of a superhero.

Unfortunately, like almost every bad idea that comes along in the Spider-Man comics, the tongue stuck. And artists have had their way with Venom since, almost trying to one-up each other in turning the once threatening villain into a misunderstood anti-hero that was battling cancer and using the symbiote to keep himself alive, which turns out, needed brains to keep stable or else it would go out of control and transform into an animal like monster-complete with a tail and claws. That's what I got from the few issues I looked at post 1998-ish; I stopped reading Spider-Man during the infamous "clone saga" and from what I've seen since, I'm glad. I've never seen a superhero suffer such severe retcons as Spider-Man. It was reasons like this that made me give up comics for a while and focus mainly on movies and books. (I was never a Marvel or DC fan. I liked them both. I just wanted good stories, which, come late 90s, was very sorely lacking.)

What I hate in particularly is that apparently Venom is no longer the combination of Eddie Brock and the symbiote. Now, the symbiote has been named Venom, making Eddie Brock just a human for it to latch onto and use for it's own gain.

Ugggggh.

So now the symbiote is just being passed around so everyone can see different variations of Venom. Oh, what if the symbiote was combined with the Scorpion?! Etc. Etc.

OH, COME ON!

Recently, I have seen a new look that I am quite pleased with for Venom; he is now featured in his own comic book series with a neat twist. First off, it's not Venom, but the symbiote combined with an military veteran, Flash Thompson. (Who first appeared on the same page as Peter Parker waaaay back in Amazing Fantasy#15.) The catch? Flash lost his legs in combat but the symbiote can fix that-though he is only allowed to be in the suit for 24 hours or the symbiote will attempt to get another life-time partnership in the form of permanently bonding to it's host. So he does special black ops projects for the government. It's a nice twist. And so far, from the brief issues that I've read, I've enjoyed it.

Bringing some of that ol' McFarlane style back, aye?

But it's still not Venom. Not the true Venom, the one old comic book fans know of. I can only hope that, somewhere down the line, they will bring the character back to his original roots. Venom isn't just the symbiote, and it isn't after brains and it isn't a drooling animal. Venom was everything bad that Spider-Man could have become and worse. He was a predator that hunted a powerful superhero and wanted no more, no less than his death. Venom was a great representation of power being handled the wrong way; Eddie Brock accepted the power of the symbiote, not ruled by it. And, of course, most of all, he was a great challenge for a great superhero. Like The Joker does with Batman, Venom originally pushed Spider-Man to his limits, which were challenges executed with some of the best artists of the day. Hopefully we can see a repeat of that original intent go back to full-swing.

Yeah, we happy.