Spectacular Spider-Man: The Hunger-A Case study in Major Narrative Shifts (Long Version)

Note: There are two versions of this: a shorter outline view and more detailed one describing my logic. This is the longer version.

I’ve determined there’re two ways comics can approach a Big Narrative Change. There’s the unexpected and the out of character. And this has nothing to do with fandom response or the quality of the story but rather narrative justification. Does the Big Change flow logically from what we know of the story so far? And since any big change is going to have multiple story beats, you might have elements of both types over the course of the narrative.

The fandom-reviled One Day More storyline from Spider-Man is a great example of all these things. Peter is already stressed about the events of Civil War. Aunt May is shot as a direct result of revealing his identity. He and Mary Jane are both guilt spiraling, and he goes looking for anything to save Aunt May. Mephisto finds him in that desperate moment, offers him a way out in exchange for his marriage to Mary Jane, and they both agree. Peter’s already been shown to do stupid and desperate things when it comes to the safety of his family. You can reason out that they might take this measure.

What’s harder to swallow is that Peter and MJ, after experiencing this separation, would roll over and take it. Loopholing the devil is a storied narrative tradition. If it had it been a temporary separation or there was some other satisfying narrative growth as a response, it would be a much more palatable change to the Spider-Man canon.

In the Venom canon we have a very interesting one of these in Spectacular Spider-Man vol 2 #1-5 from 2003. The arc is called “The Hunger.” It’s a major tonal and narrative shift, and large chunks of the fandom consider it out of character or narratively unjustified.

I see it as a secret third thing: a shoedrop moment.

In the sense that, on the surface, it feels very out of left field, particularly when you’re a more casual reader. If you go back through the story, however, and do even moderately close reading, you can find a lot of things that you can interpret as foreshadowing. So not really an “out of character” change but rather “the hints were there, and we just took a direction you didn’t expect.”

Let’s examine some of the reveals of Spectacular Spider-Man: The Hunger focusing on the symbiotic bond between Eddie and the alien:

• Someone is attacking cancer victims, leaving them in critical condition but alive.
• Eddie is shown in confession saying that he feels like he’s being punished for his sins because he’s been cursed with a “demon.” We zoom out to find that the symbiote is nearby, but in a more detached state from Eddie’s body.
• In a fight with Spider-Man, we learn Eddie is no longer in control of the bond and mentally falling apart underneath it. He doesn’t consider himself Venom anymore in any real way.
• Eddie is caught between being dragged along by the symbiote’s whims and desperation that it doesn’t seem to want him anymore.
• The symbiote never stopped being obsessed with Peter, and that was the secret driver of much of their anger and vendetta. The symbiote wanted Peter, and Eddie was afraid of losing the symbiote to him.
• Eddie has had cancer for a number of years, and the symbiote was basically keeping him alive.
• The kind of cancer Eddie has produces excess adrenaline. This is part of what attracted the symbiote to Eddie to begin with. The people the symbiote is having him attack have similar cancers, and it’s feeding off their excess adrenaline.
• The symbiote is looking for a new host because Eddie’s body is degrading past the point of use.
• Spider-Man forces them to rebond because he thinks Eddie’s the only who can truly control the symbiote.

There are a few bits of fallout from this story that never quite get picked back up again, but that’s not a totally unexpected thing in comics. This story, however, lays the foundation for a lot of stuff going forward, including the first host transition to Mac Gargan. If you don’t accept this story as being cohesive to the narrative that precedes it, you’re going to have a much harder time accepting the twenty-five years of story that follow.

So if we try to analyze the Venom story from the start up to this storyline specifically looking for narrative justification, what does that look like?

What we learn during the Alien Suit Saga and up to the birth of Venom:

• The Venom symbiote responds to thought commands. (Amazing Spider-Man 252)
• There’s something inherently menacing about it (ASM 252)
• The symbiote copies and enhances the physical abilities of the host. (ASM 253)
• It can take over the host’s body without the host knowing. (ASM 258)
• It has enough intelligence and ambulation to escape imprisonment, get around on its own, and seek out Peter again. (Web of Spider-Man 1)
• It will attempt to bond against a host’s will. (Web of Spider-Man 1)
• It experiences some manner of human recognizable emotions. (ASM 300)
• It can have some manner of effect on a host’s behavior and personality (ASM 300)

The very first thing we learn about the “alien costume” is that it’s able to mimic and enhance the physical attributes of its host. That’s why Spider-Man continues to use it. The second thing is that the symbiote is also capable of doing things with and to the host’s body without their consent. That’s literally the first conflict: the symbiote used Peter’s body while he was sleeping. It doesn’t do anything malicious with Peter’s body, at the time, and we can really only speculate on how it would have escalated. It still turns out to be the most important element of symbiote physiology.

Then Reed Richards is able to lock the symbiote away after blasting it with sound, and we learn that you can remove the symbiote from the host without killing either one. The next thing we learn is that the symbiote has enough intelligence, cunning, and motivation to break out of containment and seek Peter out again in order to rebond. So this isn’t a creature working purely on instinct. It has problem-solving and cognitive processing ability.

Then the symbiote meets Eddie, and what we get here is information via comparison.

Eddie is pissed off at Spider-Man for ruining his career. Whether it’s an objectively justified anger, if you put yourself in his shoes, you can see how a person could have this constellation of emotions. How someone might break a little. Eddie’s reaction, when left to his own devices, is to withdraw and try to work through the emotions with exercise. There’s a strong level of internalization there. When that’s not enough, his first reaction is to kill himself. To end his own suffering. In the way its originally written, he doesn’t go through with it because he’s Catholic and suicide is a Mortal Sin. Instead he’s moving from church to church, praying for forgiveness.

Then the symbiote finds him, and is attracted to him because of their “shared hatred.” So now we’ve learned the symbiote experiences human recognizable emotions.

But now we get to look at the shift in Eddie’s behaviour. A man who would not commit a mortal sin previously now, in his first full appearance, kills a guard while setting up a trap to kill Spider-Man. He laments the “death of an innocent,” in reference to the guard, but he still committed murder with the intention to do more.

While we know very little else about his background at this point in the story, the combination of rage and suicidality does indicate that Eddie was going through a mental health crisis. At the same time, he had still retained his faith-based code of conduct. He was literally praying to get through this. What flipped the switch?
The presence of the symbiote.

So now we’ve learned the most important thing about the symbiote going forward: they have the ability to affect the host’s personality.

It’s clearly not a full 180 or we would have noticed that in Peter, but it’s not nothing. You can kind of suss out that it’s probably an amplification of existing emotions and a reduction in inhibition. A man who showed no evidence of being a killer before, even in anger, is now willing to do so in pursuit of an object of hatred. While the exact parameters are still unclear, there is some manner of influence present.

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What we learn from Venom’s first tenure as a villain and the birth of Carnage:

• The symbiote still prefers Peter, even after bonding to Eddie. (ASM 317)
• Eddie and the symbiote actively communicate to each other as separate people and seem capable of sensing different things about their environment.
• Their shared vendetta tries to avoid harming “innocents,” but they’re not great at keeping to it consistently.
• Eddie sees the identity of “Venom” as a persona akin to putting on a costume. The symbiote is something he “wears” that turns them into Venom that he can take off whenever he chooses. (ASM 347)
• It reproduces asexually and doesn’t have family structures. (ASM 362)
• The symbiote can withold information from its host. (ASM 362)
• Eddie dropped his vendetta for Spider-Man after Spider-Man did him a great turn, but it’s unclear how (or even if) he convinced the symbiote to do the same. (ASM 375, Lethal Protector 1)

The next appearance of Venom, we learn that the symbiote still wants to be bonded to Peter, that it loves him, and is willing to leave Eddie for him. The already existing bond is the only thing that holds it back.

We learn a few more things as their appearances through Amazing Spider-Man continue. Eddie talks to the symbiote like it’s a separate person, and while we, as the audience, never “hear” it, the symbiote talks to him internally. It’s not instant communication; it’s still two brains working in tandem.

Venom’s “code of honor” starts to evolve. They’ll go out of their way to save a baby, but will still kill anyone in their way on their path to kill Spider-Man. Eddie’s one of very few people, period, who knows that Peter is Spider-Man (until his memory is later wiped), but apart from a little light terrorizing, he generally leaves MJ and May alone. This man could do a lot of damage to Spider-Man by just revealing his actual identity and doesn’t. It’s a personal vendetta, and that tells us a lot about this character and their combined intentions.

We see two things during the “I’m gonna kill Spider-Man on this Island” arc. The first is, even bonded, the symbiote has the ability to take on a level of corporeal aspect on its own in order to take turns on “guard duty.” This affirms some early hints that the symbiote can sense things Eddie can’t, and they require discrete, active communication.

We then get this line when Eddie believes he’s killed Spider-Man

“The madness is over. No longer is there a reason for Venom to exist.”

This implies that Eddie sees the identity of “Venom” as a persona that he can take off and on at his leisure. He can just stop being Venom. This aligns with Eddie retaining his name and general suit-based language. Eddie thinks of the alien, mostly, as a costume at this point in the story. Venom is the person he becomes when he “puts on” the symbiote, and he doesn’t need to do that anymore.
With the birth of Carnage we learn a bit about alien reproduction, but we also discover that symbiotes can withhold information from their host because Eddie didn’t know anything about this spawning. This aligns with Eddie’s earlier surprise that the symbiote still wanted to return to Peter. The symbiote can hide information and their own personal motivations and thoughts from the host. If this is the case, can they go so far as full-on deceive or fabricate information?

When we get to the end of Venom’s first tenure as a villain and his final appearance in Amazing Spider-Man, we learn more about Eddie from his ex-wife, Anne. She affirms he was never a violent person, but he did suffer some kind of mental break after the Sin-Eater situation. Then we have the moment where Spider-Man saves Anne’s life, and in exchange, Eddie decides Spider-Man can’t be all terrible and agrees to leave him alone. He moves to San Francisco and starts a new version of his life as Venom as the Lethal Protector.

This raises some questions. Namely: why?

Meta-textually, it’s because they gave him his own book. But let’s see if we can determine the textual reasoning for this shift. Was Eddie’s lingering affection for Anne enough to sort of break him of this single-minded pursuit of Spider-Man? Did that allow him to push through these other, overwhelming emotions? What does that say about what is left of pre-symbiote Eddie that he still loves her that much?

Why continue being Venom?

Previously, when he was done fighting Spider-Man, he gave up the mantle. If the mantle only existed to serve his hatred; why keep it? The fact that he doesn’t wasn’t to fight anymore definitely indicates that Eddie, at least, has has some kind of character altering epiphany. Is that enough to shift him into full good-guy mode? Or is it possible that crime-fighting is part of a negotiation with the symbiote? Eddie wants to change but the symbiote desires some kind of focus of violence or action. There’s a lot of room for speculation on how much the symbiote wanted the move that we just don’t have access to the answers to.

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The Venom mini-series hero era leading up to Planet of the Symbiotes:

• It is unclear who’s actually in control of the symbiotic relationship and that there must alway be some kind of power imbalance. (Venom: Madness)
• The symbiote can be affected by outside physiological forces. (Madness)
• Eddie resisted the bond, initially. (Venom: Separation Anxiety)
• When separated from the symbiote, he regrets his actions to the point of suicidality. He genuinely doesn’t know who was in the lead during all the murdering. (Separation)
• While separated, he starts to see the symbiotes as a threat. (Separation)
• As per the Life Foundation hosts, communication with their symbiote is difficult and a massive force of will. (Separation)
• One Life Foundation host describes the symbiotes as “evil,” but she may also be suffering from a delusional disorder. It’s unclear how those two things resolve, but it does point to the a symbiote’s ability to enhance mental health issues. (Separation)
• Being unbonded is physically painful for the symbiote, and they have a preferred host. (Separation

In his own books, now, we start getting expanded and more detailed information about Venom, Eddie, and symbiosis.

Lethal Protector moves through a pretty standard transition of a villain to a hero, giving them something to fight for. Then we get to the first page of Venom: The Madness. We’re met with this quote:

There is no such thing as true symbiosis. There is only usury. One of the two always has the advantage….Do you not feel by its grip which one of you is in control?

This is our textual confirmation that something not quite right is happening in the bond. That we as the readers and Eddie as a character are not being told everything.

The other personality changes presented in The Madness are due to a virus. So while this doesn’t show us a lot about the symbiotic bond we didn’t already know, it does show the symbiote can be affected by outside psychic and physiological phenomenon.

This conflict of self continues into Venom: Separation Anxiety. This is the first time they’re separated after Eddie has his heroic change of heart.

Here, we get a much clearer understanding of how Eddie perceives his actions while bonded. He acknowledges they “killed for the joy of it.” He admits that he resisted the bond, at first, until he realized they had a common enemy. Now that they’ve separated, he’s experiencing the horror of what he’s done. He doesn’t recognize himself. He even hopes that one of the people guarding him will kill him and put him out of his misery.

The thing that shakes him out of that moment of depression is that the Life Foundation symbiotes and their hosts arrive. He views them as a threat and immediately aims to kill them. And in further conversation with them, it’s textually confirmed you have to work to keep control of the symbiote and that you can lose yourself to it very easily. That’s the primary conflict these people are facing.
We also get Donna’s/Scream’s reaction to being bonded. She calls the symbiotes “evil.” At the same time, however, it’s implied she’s already dealing with a psychiatric issue before symbiosis ever took place.

The symbiote, for its part, also reveals that while its primary goal is reuniting with Eddie, it still has a lingering something for Peter. Whether it’s that initial attraction or the hatred, the symbiote still isn’t over him. We also learn that being separated from its host hurts. And while it finds people to bond with as it escapes, its goal is to get back to Eddie. It wants Eddie. Eddie is special to it.

When the symbiote and Eddie reunite, Eddie immediately casts the symbiote and off and says to it “I need to know how much of what I’ve done in the past was because of you and how much of it was me.”

This doesn’t get resolved until the end of the Planet of the Symbiotes storyline.

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New information from the Planet of the symbiotes storyline:

• The symbiote comes from a species of conquerors. They feed on strong emotions, and use up their hosts to the point of death.
• They’re also adrenaline junkies and force their hosts to take huge risks.
• The symbiote says they’re different from the rest of their species and favors unity over domination, but it’s questionable how much we can trust that claim.
• Eddie is still unsure whose thoughts are whose.
• The symbiote is capable of psychic manipulation on a large scale.
• Eddie still sees the unbonded symbiote as a threat.
• Eddie’s perception of the symbiote vs reality may be compromised.
• There’s an inherent horror to symbiotic bonding.
• Eddie and the symbiote go through a new stage of bonding, but it’s unclear what that actually means and remains so through the story to follow.

Despite some of this being retconned much later, in the Planet of the Symbiotes storyline, we learn about the alien homeworld for the first time. We find out they are a species of conquerors that are addicted to strong emotions and will use up hosts and move on. The Venom symbiote claims that it’s different, that it wanted to live in harmony with hosts, and that’s why it was thrown in prison (where Peter found it). The symbiote never shared that information before because it was ashamed of it. But does that claim align with its actual actions, so far? Because it forced itself on both its hosts. It’s hidden information from both of them. How much do we trust that it’s telling the whole truth around its own intentions, now?
When Ben Reily brings this specific point up, Eddie insists that the symbiote would never lie to him. But even he’s not entirely sure.

Because when you break the story down a little more, there’s some extremely suspicious stuff happening.

It starts with this panel from Amazing Spider-Man Super Special #1:

Eddie is already in crisis mode concerning how much the symbiote has changed his personality. With the text in this panel you could go two different directions: Eddie’s thought process has changed or the symbiote’s gaslighting him. Either way, the symbiote had an influence there.

Spider-Man brings this up again, asking Eddie if he’s maybe not the victim, after all. Yeah, Spider-Man is trying to get under his skin, but it’s hitting something close enough to home that it brings Eddie pause. Enough that he casts the symbiote out.
Upset, the symbiote does a psychic scream that not only makes everyone in the world depressed, it summons a nearby ship of its people. This raises the question: did the symbiote know this would happen? It also puts a little more form on some of the hinted-at psychic abilities. And if it can affect emotions across the globe with a subvocalization, what’s it actually capable of in terms of mental manipulation through the symbiotic bond?

Again, Eddie’s separated reaction is, “I have to kill this symbiote.” When they run across a new symbiote (who they believe to be Venom, at the time), the host inside begs Eddie for help. That they’d rather die than be bound again to the symbiote that has them.

Eddie decides this can’t be Venom because his other “would never join with a host who didn’t want it.” This is just inaccurate. The Venom symbiote has joined or attempted to join someone who didn’t volunteer as host multiple times. So either this is a writing snafu or Eddie’s perception of the symbiote isn’t totally correct, maybe even altered.

Then there’re a number of small, very peculiar happenstances that you could absolutely read with enough skepticism to start questioning whether the symbiote isn’t playing a little bit of double-agent. All the way up to the point where it utilizes another psychic scream to orchestrate a self-genocide of its own species for the sake of the human race. It’s all just a very interesting train of logic that ends with Eddie and the symbiote joining in “and irrevocable linking of the spirit.”
But even after this “becoming,” we don’t really get an actual resolution on Eddie’s inner conflict. He ostensibly decides it doesn’t really matter which of them thinks what or who’s in the lead as long as their job of protecting the innocent is fulfilled.

So we still don’t really have an answer on what the balance of power in this relationship actually looks like.

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How things unfold through the end of the mini-series era up to the “death” of Venom:

• We immediately see uncertainty in what their new bond actually means because the text gently contradicts itself. (Venom: Sinner Takes All)
• Affirms the symbiote is able to move a host to immediate gruesome violence with the suspicion it can overwhelm the human element completely. (Sinner)
• Anne describes the bonding process as being “seduced” and “evil.” (Sinner)
• Eddie is concerned about the symbiote’s ability to control its own killer impulses. (Sinner)
• The more the bond continues, the more Eddie is starting to experience a degradation of self. (Venom: The Hunger)
• The symbiote can completely change a hosts perception of reality down to taste. (Hunger)
• The symbiote requires phenethylamine, a chemical found in brains (among other things). (Hunger)
• The symbiote is able to overwhelm Eddie’s control in pursuit of eating brains and separates when Eddie refuses to accommodate brain-eating. (Hunger)
• Their level of psychic connection, even while separated, might be the ramifications of the aforementioned “becoming.” (Hunger)
• While separated, Eddie’s primary concern is that he’s the only one who can control it. (Hunger)
• Whatever the underlying reason, the symbiote presents a massive threat when denied a neurochemical is requires or desires. (Hunger)
• The symbiote can be sedated with dopamine. (Venom: License to Kill)
• The vendetta against Spider-Man is still under there somewhere. (Spider-Man: The Venom Agenda)
• The symbiote temporarily dies due to a dopamine overdose. (Venom: The Finale)

Now, after making such a big deal of this “becoming,” the narrative doesn’t really seem to remember it. The very next comic, Venom: Sinner Takes All opens with:

“We don’t need much, my symbiote and I.”

Which doesn’t play great with:

“There will never again be a true Edward Brock, a true second self.” (Web of Spider-Man Super Special #1)

They also actively choose to separate three more times before the Venom symbiote’s “death” in Venom: The Finale. So in order to reconcile this dissonance, we have to presume that some kind of incredible new link does arise, it just maybe doesn’t read on-page or immediately look like you expect. Otherwise we have to hand-wave it.

In Sinner Takes All, Anne, Eddie’s ex-wife, becomes temporarily joined to the symbiote to heal her wounds. She objects, at first, before falling asleep under its influence. When they find themselves under attack, she becomes extremely violent immediately. It’s in defense, but it’s to a degree that even surprises Eddie. And he seems very concerned that the symbiote still hasn’t mastered self-control over killing things. You’re getting the sense that he views the symbiote, at least in part, like a petulant child.

Anne describes the experience as being “seduced by something dark and evil.” And despite having just gone through this massive back and forth of his own, he blows her off a little. He tries to downplay the effects of the symbiote.
Venom: The Hunger is one of those keystone miniseries and the thing that our Spectacular Spider-Man arc that we’re working toward is referencing.

Compared to the comics on either side of it, this one takes a very dark tonal turn. We meet a version of Eddie who is losing himself under the symbiotic bond. Nothing feels right, nothing tastes good, and he’s rising to violence on very little provocation. But it also hints at what that “becoming” might actually look like, and properly introduces that romantic angle we all know and love.

This is also the comic, however, where the brain-eating actually starts. Like Eddie says, they had threatened to do it a number of times, and now the symbiote has forced them to deliver on that promise. Eddie does not want this. He doesn’t agree to this. He is disgusted by this, and won’t do it despite the symbiote’s physiological need.

So the symbiote leaves because Eddie won’t play ball.

Eddie’s concern, then, is to get the symbiote back as fast as possible because he’s the only one who can control it. Like a mirror to other separations previous to this one, he sees the symbiote as a danger when left to its own devices. It’s just another repeat of that cycle.

And even though that does get resolved with fuzzy feelings and chocolate to fight the phenethylamine craving, what happens the next time Eddie can’t provide something the symbiote wants?

But also consider the symbiote’s reaction to not having this chemical available. At a minimum we’re looking at a being that got so hangry, it lost its ability to control itself and left its host to seek out food. Akin to a binge eating disorder or a drug addiction. And on the surface the narrative is really trying to push that this is some kind of bestial primal instinct.

But this is a species that has the technology and advanced intelligence to build stargates. The symbiote was smart enough to know that the chemical they were craving was found in brains, so they were probably smart enough to figure out this problem existed and find a non-violent solution if they wanted one. It feels highly probable that the symbiote knew exactly what it was doing and knew that Eddie wouldn’t approve. So it started pushing boundaries and didn’t like when Eddie fought back. Yes, they came back together at the end, but we also know that being unbonded from its preferred host hurts..So is this an actual resolution or is the symbiote manipulating the situation to get what it wants?

As we get through the last of the 90s mini-series into Venom: The Finale, we see Venom working for the government (in exchange for not going to prison for murder) and very occasionally in conflict with Spider-Man again. This is also the first time we see the use of dopamine to subdue Venom instead of just sound and fire.

At some point they lose their memory of Spider-Man. When they regain it, their first impulse is to return to their “you ruined my life” vendetta, so that clearly never really went away deep down.

The Finale ends with the symbiote appearing to die, and we end up in a weird transitional phase somewhere between hero and villain.

There’s also a very interesting comic from this era as part of the Uncanny Origin series. It’s an expansion on the origin story. It affirms most of what we already know and does add a little bit of extra weight to Eddie’s anger. However, it also contradicts a some minor timeline points. More interestingly though, is a line Eddie says while in the church just before the symbiote approaches.

…I know suicide is a mortal sin, but unless you can show me something—some kind of sign from above.

We end up seeing a little bit of a narrative parallel to this later.

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The final lead-up to Spectacular Spider-Man: The Hunger:

• The symbiote still has a thing for Spider-Man and pursues him first when it returns to life. (Peter Paker: Spider-Man Vol. 2 #9)
• Eddie does not want to rebond and goes so far as to jump out of a window to prevent it. (Peter Paker: Spider-Man Vol. 2 #9)
• The symbiote forces the rebonding to create a version of Venom closer to their villain origins, all the internal work from the Lethal Protector era disappearing.
• Anne is traumatized enough by her time as Venom that she commits suicide, and Eddie doesn’t seem to realize him and the symbiote’s roll in this. (ASM Vol.2 #19)
• A clone of the Venom symbiote that hasn’t had Eddie’s influence on it acts like we’ve been told to expect from their home species: violent, using up hosts. (Venom Vol. 1)
• We properly affirm that the host has some manner of control over the symbiote (Venom Vol. 1)

When the symbiote returns, the first person it looks for is Peter. This is a continued trend. Peter fights it off, and it goes for Eddie next. Eddie does not want to rebond. He is so terrified, he tries to jump out a window to avoid it. Then the minute the symbiote forces itself to rebond, he’s totally okay with it, sorry buddy, don’t know what I was thinking.

All of the Lethal Protector mental work he had done is just gone. But why?
Two of the previous times this major separation happened (Separation, Planet), he wasn’t exactly eager to rejoin the symbiote. Eddie really struggled with it. That was kind of the point. But since the symbiote was out there in full power, the psychic link was maintained. He always knew that it was out there waiting. Now, Eddie presumes the symbiote is dead, and we can guess it’s been a longer period of time. So maybe he’s been able to shake more of the symbiotic influence and see his life with more clarity. Either way, while in his right mind, he’s extremely vocal about not being Venom again.

In their next few appearances, Venom returns to most of the same patterns from the original Amazing Spider-Man run. In the process, we also learn what happened to Anne after her brief stints as a host. She’s paranoid. Afraid. She doesn’t want the symbiote near her. The PTSD is enough to drive her to suicide when faced with the symbiote again. How terrible must that experience have been?

We also have another instance of Eddie not understanding her fear of the symbiote. She’s very very explicit as to what’s causing her fear, and that it’s his presence as Venom. He, instead, shifts blame to Spider-Man for wearing the black suit again. Every time someone else suggests, even someone he trusts, that maybe there’s something sinister happening with the suit, he reverses and denies. It happens over and over again.

The Daniel Way Venom run starts a few months before our Spectacular Spider-Man story, goes three times as long, but looks like it takes place, chronologically, before SSM: The Hunger. In this story we’re dealing with, mostly, a clone of Venom. This symbiote does all the things we’ve been told and shown the Klyntar natively do. It’s violent. It jumps from host to host, using them up and leaving them for dead. This doesn’t contradict anything we’ve already seen. We’ve already established that the symbiote has an aggressive influence on Eddie. The way the clone acts also affirms something vaguely hinted at before: that perhaps, Eddie is also an inhibiting factor on the symbiote. What might happen if Eddie lost that ability or the symbiote could overcome it, long-term?

And then we reach Spectacular Spider-Man: The Hunger.

Let’s review what we know about this story, but now with some references to previous story beats with a similar vibe:

• Someone is attacking cancer victims, leaving them in critical condition but alive.
• Eddie is shown in confession saying that he feels like he’s being punished for his sins because he’s been cursed with a “demon.” We zoom out to find that the symbiote is nearby, but in a more detached state from Eddie’s body. (Separation Anxiety, Sinner Takes All, ASM 347, with a narrative parallel to Uncanny Origins)
• In a fight with Spider-Man, we learn Eddie is no longer in control of the bond and mentally falling apart underneath it. He doesn’t consider himself Venom anymore in any real way. (ASM 347, The Hunger)
• Eddie is caught between being dragged along by the symbiote’s whims and desperation that it doesn’t seem to want him anymore. (Separation Anxiety, Planet of the Symbiotes Prt.1)
• The symbiote never stopped being obsessed with Peter, and that was the secret driver of much of their anger and vendetta. The symbiote wanted Peter, and Eddie was afraid of losing the symbiote to him. (ASM 317, Separation Anxiety, Peter Parker Spider-Man #9)
• Eddie has had cancer for a number of years, and the symbiote was basically keeping him alive.
• The kind of cancer Eddie has produces excess adrenaline. This is part of what attracted the symbiote to Eddie to begin with. The people the symbiote is having him attack have similar cancers and it’s feeding off their excess adrenaline. (Planet of the Symbiotes Prt. 3)
• The symbiote is looking for a new host because Eddie’s body is degrading past the point of use. (Venom Vol. 1)
• Spider-Man forces them to rebond because he thinks Eddie’s the only who can truly control the symbiote. (The Hunger)

All the major beats for this story exist somewhere else in the narrative, sometimes multiple times. It’s not just about citing sources, however, but rather synthesizing the story and viewing the comics as being in conversation with each other. But now imagine someone who’s read 90s Venom comics, but none of the one’s I’ve cited. Imagine a reader who started with Flash Thompson from the mid-2000s then started working backward. A reader who previously had only seen the movies and started with Venom Vol 1 and SSM: The Hunger. Someone who started with All New Venom.

Every single one of these readers is going to have a different perception on SSM: The Hunger and how they think it fits with the overall character narrative. With all those readers in consideration, it makes such a huge shift, even if technically justifiable, extremely difficult to do. Because fan reaction can be so strong.

But also inconsistent.

The Cates Venom run is extremely well-regarded. He also completely rewrites Eddie’s cancer to suggest that the symbiote was manipulating Eddie’s memory and faking medical tests. This does not play smoothing with SSM: The Hunger but also retroactively borks the Anti-Venom storyline wherein Eddie’s cancer is cured by Herman Li. Cates tried to justify the choice meta-textually, but it is not clean. Despite this and some other small but notable retroactive continuity questions, you do not see commiserate complaints about the run as a whole.

Because in the end, it’s not the story itself but varying fandom perceptions of it that speak to how a major narrative change is interpreted.