On Eddie Brock, Flash Thompson, Peter Parker, and why Venom is the most complicated relationship in Marvel Comics.
There’s a reason Venom has outlasted nearly every villain-turned-antihero Marvel has ever produced. It isn’t the design, though the design is undeniably perfect – the white spider, the teeth, the tongue, the sheer physical menace of a character who looks like Spider-Man’s shadow given teeth and hunger. It isn’t the movies, though those have introduced the character to an audience that never touched a comic in their lives. The reason Venom endures is the same reason the best character studies endure: who the symbiote bonds with changes what the symbiote is. The alien doesn’t have a fixed personality. It inherits one. And every host it has ever taken has left a mark on it that the next one has to carry.
That’s not a gimmick. That’s architecture.
The One Who Started Everything – Peter Parker
Technically, the symbiote’s story begins with Peter Parker, and that beginning matters more than it sometimes gets credit for. During the 1984 Marvel Super Heroes Secret Wars crossover event – written by Jim Shooter with art by Mike Zeck – Peter acquires what he believes is a mechanical suit on Battleworld. The black costume. He brings it home. He wears it. And for a period of issues across Amazing Spider-Man, Peter Parker the Spectacular Spider-Man, and Marvel Team-Up, the black suit is treated as a straightforward upgrade. Sleeker. More powerful. Generates its own webbing.
The horror of what it actually is unfolds slowly, the way the best horror does. The suit is alive. It’s been taking Peter out while he sleeps, exhausting him, feeding on his adrenaline and his aggression and whatever darkness exists in the space between Peter Parker’s decency and Spider-Man’s violence. When Peter finally rejects it – with the help of Reed Richards, who identifies it as a symbiotic organism, and ultimately a sonic attack at the bell tower of Our Lady of Saints Church – the suit survives. It bonds to the church wall. It waits.
What it takes from Peter Parker is the template for everything. The spider symbol. The knowledge of his identity. The movement patterns. The way it thinks. When it finds Eddie Brock, it brings all of that with it.
The One Who Defined It – Eddie Brock
Eddie Brock is the host that made Venom what the world knows. Writer David Michelinie and artist Todd McFarlane introduced the fully realized Venom in Amazing Spider-Man #300 in 1988, and the issue remains one of the most significant single comics of its era – not just for the character debut but for what McFarlane did visually with the form. Eddie Brock was a journalist whose career had been destroyed by Spider-Man’s interference in a case Brock has gotten dangerously wrong. His hatred for Peter Parker was consuming him. He was in that same church – Our Lady of Saints – contemplating the end of his life when the symbiote found him.
The union of Eddie Brock and the alien produced something neither could have alone. Brock’s physical size and strength gave the symbiote a host capable of matching Spider-Man physically. Brock’s hatred gave it focus. And the symbiote’s retained knowledge of Peter Parker gave Brock the one advantage no other Spider-Man villain had ever possessed: he knew who Spider-Man was. He knew where Peter Parker lived. He could bypass the spider-sense entirely because the symbiote didn’t register as a threat – it had been part of Spider-Man. We are Venom. Not I. Not it. We.
That distinction – the plural – is the most important creative decision in the character’s history. It acknowledged immediately that this was a partnership, not a possession. Brock and the symbiote negotiated their shared existence. They had disagreements. They had a moral code, however warped – Venom famously declined to harm innocent people during his antihero years, a limitation that had everything to do with whatever residual human conscience Eddie Brock retained and the symbiote absorbed.
Michelinie and McFarlane’s creation was so fully formed that it spawned its own spinoff almost immediately. Venom: Lethal Protector, the 1993 six-issue miniseries written by Michelinie with art by Mark Bagley, relocated Brock to San Francisco and formalized his antihero status. It also introduced the concept of symbiote offspring – the seeds that would eventually grow into Carnage, Scream, Agony, Lasher, and the entire ecosystem of symbiote characters that Marvel has been cultivating ever since.
Brock’s run as Venom spans the better part of two decades across multiple series, and his relationship with the symbiote goes through ruptures and reunions that track like a genuinely complicated long-term bond. He sells it. He gets cancer. He bonds with other symbiotes. He eventually bonds with the Venom symbiote again. He becomes Anti-Venom. He becomes Toxin. He becomes, in Donny Cates’s landmark 2018 run, the central figure in a mythology that recontextualizes every symbiote that has ever existed. More on that shortly.
The One Who Elevated It – Flash Thompson
If Eddie Brock is the host who defined Venom, Flash Thompson is the host who deepened him. Rick Remender’s Venom series beginning in 2011 made a creative decision that seemed counterintuitive on its face and turned out to be one of the smartest moves the character had seen in years: give the symbiote to a veteran.
Eugene “Flash” Thompson – Peter Parker’s high school bully turned his biggest fan, a decorated soldier who lost both legs in combat in Iraq – became Agent Venom as part of a classified government program. The symbiote was kept suppressed by drugs and could only be worn for 48-hour windows at a time. Exceed that window and the symbiote’s influence over its host became uncontrollable.
What Remender built with that premise was a story about a man trying to do right with something that wanted him to do wrong. Flash Thompson had spent his whole life trying to be the hero he imagined Spider-Man to be. The symbiote gave him his legs back – literally, physically, he could walk again when bonded – and gave him the power to act on that heroism. It also brought out his worst impulses, his rage, his history of violence, the anger underneath the idealism. Every issue of Remender’s run is a negotiation between those two things.
Flash Thompson served with the Avengers and the Guardians of the Galaxy as Agent Venom and later as Venom during this period. The character’s expansion from street-level threat to cosmic-capable hero opened the symbiote’s story to a scale it had never operated at before. It also introduced a genuine tenderness to the bond – the symbiote, across its time with Flash, developed something that resembled loyalty. Not just hunger. Not just need. Something closer to care.
Flash Thompson’s arc ends in Amazing Spider-Man #800, in 2018, in a sacrifice that is genuinely earned by everything Remender and subsequent writers built. When the symbiote returns to Eddie Brock after Flash’s death, it brings that experience with it too.
The One Who Revealed Its True Scale – Eddie Brock, Again
Donny Cates and Ryan Stegman’s Venom run beginning in 2018 is the definitive modern statement on the character, and its central revelation is the one that changes every Venom story that came before it. The symbiote is not a lost alien. It is merely a parasite. It is a Klyntar – a member of a race created by a god of the symbiotes named Knull, the King in Black, who predates the Marvel Universe itself. The black goo that bonded to Peter Parker in a Battleworld machine room was a piece of a cosmic horror story that had been unfolding for billions of years before Spider-Man ever existed.
This recontextualizing is the kind of creative move that either destroys a character’s mythology or exponentially expands it. Cates and Stegman made it expand. Brock’s second run as Venom – older, harder, angrier, with a son named Dylan whose relationship to the symbiote carries its own complicated weight – unfolds against this cosmic backdrop without losing any of the street-level human story underneath it. The King in Black 2020-2021 event, which flows directly from this run, positioned Venom and Eddie Brock at the center of a conflict that involved the entire Marvel Universe. Eddie Brock, the disgraced journalist from a church in Manhattan, standing at the axis of a god’s war.
He died. He became a god himself, briefly. He came back. The symbiote and Brock have separated and reunited and evolved across this run in ways that continue to inform where the character sits in the current Marvel Universe – which is, plainly stated, more central to the larger mythology than at any point in its history.
The Ones in Between
The Brock and Thompson eras are the pillars, but the symbiote’s other hosts are not footnotes. Mac Gargan – the Scorpion – wore the symbiote during Brian Michael Bendis’ Dark Reign period, when Norman Osborn’s cabal briefly ran the Marvel Universe’s security apparatus. Gargan’s Venom was pure predator, unchecked by conscience, the version of the character that most nakedly expressed what the symbiote might be without a host capable of negotiating with it. It was effective horror. It was also deliberately unsustainable as a long-term character direction, which Bendis understood.
Patricia Robertson, Anne Weying, Andi Benton – these hosts each represent a different facet of what the symbiote becomes when it encounters a host with a different set of experiences and different relationship to its own darkness. The symbiote is not a fixed moral quantity. It it a mirror.
The Screen – Tom Hardy and What the Films Got Right
Ruben Fleischer’s Venom in 2018 did not attempt to be a comic-accurate adaption, and the critical conversation around it reflected that. What it did, largely because of Tom Hardy’s committed and genuinely strange performance as Eddie Brock, was capture something true about the Eddie Brock-symbiote relationship: the comedy of it, the codependence, the sense that these are two creatures who cannot function properly apart and drive each other insane when together. Hardy played it as a relationship drama wearing a superhero costume, and that instinct was correct even when the film around it was uneven.
Venom: Let There Be Carnage in 2021, directed by Andy Serkis, leaned further into that dynamic and was rewarded for it. Woody Harrelson’s Carnage – the Cletus Kasady symbiote, introduced in the comics by Michelinie and Erik Larsen in Amazing Spider-Man #361 in 1992 – gave the film a genuine counterpoint. Where Venom is a negotiation, Carnage is a merger. Kasady and the Kasady symbiote don’t argue. They agree. That’s what makes Carnage the more purely terrifying entity and the dramatically less interesting one.
Venom: The Last Dance in 2024 concluded the Hardy trilogy. The films collectively introduced Venom to an audience of hundreds of millions of people who will never read a single issue of the comics, and that reach matters for what the character means culturally in 2025.
Where It Stands
The current Marvel Universe has spent the better part of five years systematically elevating the symbiote mythology to a place it has never occupied before. The Venom War 2024 event – which put Eddie Brock and his son Dylan in direct conflict over the symbiote’s future – is the latest chapter in a story that Cates’ run set in motion and that subsequent writers have continued to build on. The symbiote is no longer a villain’s accessory or an antihero’s burden. It is one of the foundational mythological elements of the Marvel Universe, with its own cosmology, its own pantheon, and its own history that predates every hero and villain in the canon.
That elevation only works because of the hosts. Because Peter Parker’s decency and Eddie Brock’s rage and Flash Thompson’s idealism and every subsequent bond left something in the symbiote that the next host inherited. The alien is the sum of everyone who ever wore it.
Which is, when you sit with it, a genuinely profound idea for a character that debuted as a costume in a crossover event in 1984.
It earned every page that followed.
Sources referenced: Jim Shooter and Mike Zeck, Marvel Super Heroes Secret Wars #8 (1984, Marvel Comics). David Michelinie and Todd McFarlane, Amazing Spider-Man #300 (1988, Marvel Comics). David Michelinie and Mark Bagley, Venom: Lethal Protector #1–6 (1993, Marvel Comics). Rick Remender, Venom Vol. 2 #1 (2011, Marvel Comics). David Michelinie and Erik Larsen, Amazing Spider-Man #361 (1992, Marvel Comics). Donny Cates and Ryan Stegman, Venom Vol. 4 #1 (2018, Marvel Comics). King in Black #1–5 (2020–2021, Marvel Comics). Venom War #1 (2024, Marvel Comics). Venom, dir. Ruben Fleischer (2018, Sony Pictures). Venom: Let There Be Carnage, dir. Andy Serkis (2021, Sony Pictures). Venom: The Last Dance, dir. Kelly Marcel (2024, Sony Pictures).