Fans of Marvel’s Guardians of The Galaxy film may be wondering “WTF is Venom doing in the Guardians of The Galaxy comic?!” Because, comics. And in today’s issue of Guardians of The Galaxy, Flash Thompson aka Agent Venom got a brand new look courtesy of artist Valerio Schiti.
Essentially, the new look Venom is the same alien symbiote that has been giving Spider-Man headaches since the first Secret Wars in 1984. But Flash got an upgrade of sorts during the Planet of The Symbiotes storyline.
While speaking with Marvel.com, Schiti explained some of the thought process behind the new Venom suit and the role that Guardians of The Galaxy writer Brian Michael Bendis played in the design.
“I suppose that the main reason for this change is the new readers — at least that’s what Brian Bendis said! The new generations of readers have a totally different idea of Venom; most of them don’t even know that once he was a bad guy. In this moment nobody perceives him like a monster, everybody knows that he’s a hero, a good guy with a super cool costume that can do amazing things so why don’t we concentrate on them? Brian noticed that new way of thinking about the character and imagined this totally different version. And everybody knows that if there’s someone with a great intuition for what is cool, that man is Brian Michael Bendis.”
Schiti noted that his new Venom design actually harkens back to Venom’s debut as a villain around Amazing Spider-Man # 299 and # 300.
“I wanted to do give him a brand-new look but somehow classic. My idea was that he should look more like he was in his first appearance. In effect I tried to make “my” Venom closer to the first Venom than to Agent Venom; ironically the new version should look like the oldest version…: I started reading Spider-Man more or less when they published that run here in Italy in 1992, so it was some kind of homage to what I used to love when I was a kid.”
You can check out the first appearance of Venom’s new look in Guardians of The Galaxy # 23, which is out in comic book stores now. But first, here’s a look at some of Schiti’s early designs for the new Venom costume.
