There are people who shop in our store who are die-hard Venom fans.   They come in every week and ask if we have any new Venom books, if he’s appeared in Spider-Man lately.  They don’t want Spider-Man at all, unless Venom shows up.  These are the same people who want every Punisher appearance, because they love the way he has lots of guns.  These were not my friends in high school, and not the customers I most looked forward to seeing when I started working in the comic book store.  This issue is absolute porn for that specific type of customer.  And while, a year and a half ago, I silently judged them, I eventually fell in love with the Garth Ennis Punisher run, as well as the Venom/Anti-Venom run in Spider-Man Brand New Day.

So, while this wasn’t THE BEST COMIC IDEA EVER for me, I was looking forward to it.  The non-Spiderman Spiderman stories lately (such as Venom: Dark Origin, and Sinister Spider-Man)  have been much more fun for me than, say, Spider-Man 1602 or The Clone Wars.  What got me to pick up Sinister Spiderman was the Bacchalo art.  But there was no one on this title that I’m familiar with: Wells, Siqueira, Santos, D’Auria…weren’t they a boy band in 1998?

The first issue of this series intrigued me.  Eddie Brock has been steadily becoming more three dimensional for the last year.  And the way Dave Wells (sorry, he was a pitcher) Zeb, Zeb Wells is writing The Punisher is far superior to Remender’s recent take, in my opinion.  Untrusting, bad-ass, and with very very clear-cut black-and-white morality. Siquiera and Hardin’s Anti-Venom struck me as how Rob Liefeld would have drawn this character, if he’d spent more time studying anatomy.  It was disproportionate, but in a believable way.  I mean, he’s a symbiote not a person.  It also has “Liefeld teeth”; you know, always grimacing or with his mouth open threateningly.

At a time where I’m reading less and less Marvel titles (which makes me quite sad), I’m finding myself enjoying these minis a lot more than their major continuity counterparts.