Welcome To The Symbiote Showdown Smackdown — Reviewing ‘All-New Venom’ #7

Sometimes the best laid plans of Venoms and Anti-Venoms are thrown awry thanks to government agents and superiorly intelligent octopi. One of the best superhero series on the shelves continues, as Al Ewing, Carlos Gómez, Frank D’Armata, and Clayton Cowles begin to bring the puzzle’s pieces closer together with All-New Venom #7.

I stand completely firmly beside the fact that there are good superhero books and then there are great ones. Such as this series.

There is something so charming, wondrous, fun, and classic (but in a very modern way) about this whole series. It taps back into the things that used to make a lot of Marvel (and other companies’) books click so much. It contains a solid supporting cast, compelling heroes, swashbuckling action, plenty of humor alongside the seriousness, and a true sense of wonder.

Gómez draws the absolute hell out of this book.

It’s just truly perfectly executed swashbuckling superhero with a heart of gold and tough social life aesthetic going on here. From start to finish of each issue so far, it’s only getting better by the issue, tapping into every single tiny bit of emotional depth and energy of the characters and concept. This also lets it spill across the page with glorious depth and detail. Fluid action scenes are rife with dynamic quality and weight that can be tangibly felt at every turn.

It delivers grounded authentic feeling situations and characters that are given a perfect turn of the whimsical dial, allowing there to be room to really go wild with the color palette range and implementation.

This is pulled off all so masterfully by D’Armata here. I’ve poked at D’Armata’s colors in the past on other books, mainly because they didn’t feel right for the given book or character. They feel extremely right for this book.

The palette is glossy, slick, vivid, and full of personality, really seeping into the pages and blasting back out at the highest of levels. As there is a baseline built with the setting space, it allows the rest of the space to really feel vibrant beyond belief. There are stunning reds, thick yellows, bold greens, and calming blues. Putting both aspects together creates a world familiar and connectable for our eyes and mind. It feels familiar, yet fantastical at the same time.

One thing I love about Ewing’s writing is the absolute seemingly endless range. He’s able to tell so many types and genres of stories as easily as the next. Sometimes writing multiple books in the same universe which feel utterly nothing alike outside of some structural features. This series is very much an old-school superhero story with the right modern sensibilities. Showing, once more, that some of the ways to approach comics are still the same outside of how to bring them onto the page.

Another facet is the great character development. There’s so much rich emotional depth to mine here between MJ and the Symbiote, Flash’s connection to them both, the machinations of SCAR, and even what Sleeper is up to. I love that despite the mystery being over, we still are getting plenty of Rick Jones and Robbie Robertson who are both underutilized characters.

Ewing not only “understood the assignment,” he ran circles around it and delivered something even better in the long run.

Bringing it all home with a flourish is Cowles, who allows the myriads of voices present here to have their moment and their individual power. His letters allow things to shift enough that the personality and energy are always clear with every letter that hits the page, bouncing it off one another to flow around the page while dropping in colors and shifts as necessary. He makes sure the voices created in a reader’s mind never fades away, growing substantially with each issue.

All-New Venom #7 is now available from Marvel Comics.