Don’t Mind Stepping Into The Twilight Zone: Carnage USA #1 Review

EDITOR’S NOTE: This review contains spoilers. Because I’m a bad man! And I keep thinking bad thoughts! But since I live nowhere near a cornfield, all I can say is that you have been warned.

People talk about the Spider-Man Clone Saga as if it was the low point of comics in the 90s… and those people are arguably right. But the problem with designating something as the worst thing ever is it makes it easy to forget, and sometimes wrongfully forgive, other things that were also awful, just not quite as bad. After all, it’s hard to bitch about a stubbed toe when it happens on the way back from a botched colonoscopy.

The Clone Saga was the worst. That doesn’t mean that Carnage wasn’t also truly, truly horrible.

A knockoff of Venom introduced at the height of Silence Of The Lambs mania who was probably created at an old-school Marvel Summit (Two guys in a Manhattan nightclub men’s room saying, “Hannibal Lecter as a Venom whatchacallit!” “Genius! Let’s gack up another rail!”), Carnage was unoriginal on his face.  And he became so prevalent and irritating that it only took Brian Michael Bendis two issues of New Avengers to have Sentry not only drag Carnage into outer fucking space, but also tear him apart. For a writer of slow, decompressed, all-foreplay comics like Bendis, that was the equivalent of hatefucking Carnage and wiping his dick on his knee on the way out. It was awesome.

But being the comics, no one stays dead for long… particularly not when there might be money on the table (“How about the Venom whatsit comes back to Earth!” “What about burning up in the atnosphere?” “Good idea! SNNNNNORRT!“), so now Carnage is back in a miniseries written by Zeb Wells with art by Clayton Crain, promising an all-new exciting story! That all-new exciting story being It’s A Good Life.

We open in Doverton, Colorado, a small meatpacking factory town where kids play guns, the elderly while away their afternoons on a porch swing, and Carnage eats 4,000 heat of cattle. Why? Well, Carnage says, “We got hungry, heh heh. All this blood… just like home,” so apparently he’s there to jack up his review count on Yelp.

We slam cut to a cop running home to his family, screaming that “It comes through the sink!” before discovering what appears to be the Carnage symbiote coming through the tub drain, attacking a baby… because everything is automatically scarier and ickier when it involves a baby. Ask any porn producer.

So quickly the town falls off the grid, prompting the government to send in The Avengers, who bring along Mr. Fantastic’s sonic disrupter to destroy Carnage, even though that fucking thing hasn’t worked against symbiotes since Reagan was president and Carnage was just a glimmer in a lump at the bottom of a media executive’s eight-ball. They discover that Carnage has somehow taken over the minds of every resident of Doverton, causing them to mutter “big big smiles”. They encounter a half-naked Carnage holding a baby (Eww!), and attack, before apparently realizing that this is only the first issue of a five-issue miniseries and utterly fail within literally five panels. Man, that movie is gonna be awesome!

It might sound like I’m making light of this book, but that’s only partially true. Yes, I think Carnage is useless as a villain, and that will color my judgment on any book that carries his name. There are good things in this book, most of them entertaining, well-written character moments involving The Avengers. Seeing them banter about the hackneyed nature of The Thing’s constant catchphrases, while Spider-Man defends him is something I haven’t seen before, but makes total sense when I consider the number of times in my life I’ve read the phrase “It’s clobbering time!”

And Clayton Crain’s art is damned impressive. I’m not really familiar with his prior work, but I am looking forward to seeing more, because I’ve not seen very much like it. It’s got an interesting mix of sharp-looking lines and soft, fuzzy effects, with a unique, sometimes sharp, sometimes painted look, sometimes in the same panel. His Wikipedia pages says that he does it with something called “digital painting“, which to a word-based guy like me might as well be “scrotal sorcery”… which would make an excellent catchphrase for The Thing, but that’s not the point. The point is, Crain’s art is compelling. It’s unique, which is good, because most of the rest of the book just isn’t.

The entire conceit of someone with powers making an entire town think happy thoughts is straight out of The Twilight Zone. A cop running home to warn about the invading villain who’s taken over a small town? And someone being sent by the villain as a messenger to attract an ultimately impotent superhero team before being attacked by someone with similar powers (What, you think we’re not gonna see Venom and Toxin in a Carnage mini?)? That’s pretty much right out of Alan Moore’s run of Swamp Thing when he battled The Floronic Man.If Carnage gets googley-eyed toward that damned baby we can toss in a lift from A Serbian Film and then all Carnage has to do to hit the trifecta is jump a fucking shark.

Look: this book isn’t terrible. But its inspirations are worn on its sleeve, which is at best, distracting. It’s early yet in this miniseries, so Wells might be able to pull something compelling out of this. And I will probably pick up another issue, if only for more good character moments and Crain’s art. But unless it pulls away from it’s inspirations? I’m wishing it into the cornfield.