Review: Spider-Man: Maximum Venom “Web of Venom”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Weeks after defeating Vulture and Octavius’s sacrifice, things have calmed down at Horizon High. But to Peter’s surprise, all of his friends are looking at colleges, which he forgot to do. Instead, he finds Max Modell is still experimenting with symbiotes, though not the V-252, but a synthetic one that can be used in all the ways they had planned for the V-252 before discovering it was a living being. Also, he now knows Peter is Spider-Man based on what happened in the last finale. Peter thinks this all might be dangerous, but a chance comes for practical testing when Grady Scraps (a new student at Horizon who Peter had met previously), unleashes a forgotten experiment called Technovore on the school, which eats tech and absorbs its abilities (kinda like the robot in the last episode of FLCL). Peter makes use of the new symbiote to stop the beast, but he and Max decide to keep testing it to make sure it’s safe.

Said testing starts off pretty well, with the symbiote enhancing just about all of Peter’s abilities, but with an odd aversion to electricity, which could be problematic, especially since Spidey’s next thing to save is a runaway Stark train with a busted Arc Reactor. Yet when Peter gets rid of the reactor, the suit doesn’t have any reaction to the energy, confusing him and Max. They’re also starting to get weird looks from Dr. Curt Connors, who now works at Horizon, because he sees them coming out of an abandoned part of the campus. What they don’t know is that Connors is working for a secret organization to uncover Modell’s research, eventually finding the V-252 in Modell’s secret lab. He confronts Modell and Peter about this, but drops the symbiote, allowing Venom to take him over and flee. Spider-Man chases after him, but the artificial symbiote is absorbed into Venom and flees to the site where it was first found when it landed on earth, taking some sort of “egg” and using it to launch a beacon into space. Spider-Man is able to defeat Venom again, possibly once and for all, not knowing that the beacon has alerted even more symbiotes in space to their location.

OUR TAKE

One of the benefits of being on lockdown for months at a time is getting to binge through 50+ episodes of this current Spider-Man show to get caught up with this! I remember starting this show back when it started in 2017, and while it was certainly a step up from the low point that was the Ultimate Spider-Man series, it lagged behind the higher notes in the franchise like the much beloved but short-lived “Spectacular Spider-Man” or the fondly remembered 90’s animated series, leaving this one languishing right in the middle of that scale. Still, as I pressed on through the first two seasons, I did notice some improvement as the storylines got darker and character relationships became more complex, which is fitting for a Spider-Man series.

Now we come to this new season, which will be released in six one hour episodes instead of the traditional 25-26 half hour episode season. This is a pretty odd way to handle a season, but it’s been said that this was because the stories they wanted to tell couldn’t be contained in half hours, apparently not even through multi-parters. But yeah, here’s “Maximum Venom”, whose name is a reference to the “Maximum Carnage” storyline from the comics, even though the character of Carnage has yet to appear in this series and might not even be in this season despite the appearance of more symbiotes. It’s kinda like making a Venom movie but without any reference to Spider-Man, but they’d never do that, right?

Anyway, it seems the first move with this season is thinning the Spider-Herd a bit, as Miles, Gwen, and Anya look to be written out for the time being as they go look at colleges and Harry Osborn is nowhere to be seen. In their place, we have more Max Modell, who acts as Peter’s scientific mentor with the added bonus of now knowing his identity as Spidey, along with Curt Connors (previously The Lizard) also taking a lead villain role when before he was a bit player. We also, inexplicably, get more Grady Scraps, which is odd mainly in that he is a bit of dumber, happier Octavius in terms of design, and oddly also voiced by Scott Menville (which, based on things that happened last season, gives me a feeling that this is just a way to bring back Doc Ock in a new body). Not the most thrilling combination of characters, but at least we know they aren’t the only ones we’ll see, considering Felicia Day will be joining the cast as this show’s version of Mary Jane Watson.

As for the episode itself, it’s not a BAD way to start things off, but it feels more like a prelude to the fun that is hopefully to come than much on its own. The new symbiote suit feels like a naked attempt to sell more toys but currently doesn’t add much to the show other than that, while the drama unfolding at Horizon is currently up in the air for how it plays out. Maybe we’ll have more to chew on in the next part, which currently has no set release date. Overall, it’s a serviceable start, but hopefully leading into something better.