In attempting to gather my thoughts on the
conclusion of
Queen in Black, I’ve
found myself thinking about
The War of
the Realms. The 2019 event acted as the culmination of Jason Aaron’s
Thor run and is one that I rank is
fairly high esteem as far as events go. I bought the entire event, like
Queen in Black (this is the fourth event
I’ve bought in its entirety as it came out – the other two being
Avengers vs. X-Men and
AXE: Judgment Day), and, despite
thinking it was quite good, I’ve been wondering how much my enjoyment hinged on
reading Aaron’s
Thor run entirely
leading up to it. How much was the event itself and how much was the context?
I’d like to think it was the event itself – and that a good event should stand
on its own devoid of larger context – but maybe it was context. That’s the sort
of thought that creeps in any time I reflect on these three final issues of
Queen in Black, an attempt to push back
at my initial reaction, which is that this is a bad ending. Maybe if I had more
context. Maybe if I cared about Venom more. Maybe if this was the end of a long
journey rather than a standalone story. Maybe that would be more fair.
That’s not the case, though. I came into
this event not as a regular reader of Venom;
I came into this event as a regular reader of Thor. Considering that this was set up as a story where Hela,
Asgardian god of death, claims the throne and power of the Symbiotes as the new
Queen in Black and sets her sights on Earth, that seemed like a fairly valid
entry point. After all, over in Al Ewing’s Immortal
Thor/Mortal Thor/Thor run, the Midgard Realm (Earth and
its larger universe) has been cut off from the other Realms, rendering the
Asgardians myth like in our world. A big Asgardian threat, complete with a
couple of tie-ins explicitly referencing Ewing’s Thor work, and Beta Ray Bill as one of the headliners in Defenders of Light and Dark, made it
seem like that side of the event might be more important than it turned out to
be. Instead, this is very much the culmination and conclusion to Ewing’s time
on Venom, rendering much of the
impact somewhat moot to the likes to me. Whoops.
Despite that, I’m not sure that this ending
would land well even if I came into it as a fan of Ewing’s Venom work. As I said last week, the Knull/Hela conflict is largely
pushed to the side and rushed through here to lead into the Knull attacking
Earth, which is now taken over by Venom. Except, that conflict is also glossed
over largely in favour of Knull entering the Mindscape that links the entire
population of the planet where his power is so large that it threatens to kill
everyone. Except, somehow, the presence of eight billion people defeats Knull
because he’s the lord of the void and regular lives are something? For comics
readers, it’s a very Grant Morrison ending (in the sense that Morrison has done
this ending at least twice in their career) and is equal part cheesy and
nonsense. I’m somewhat stuck on how Knull goes from “Okay, I guess I’ll just
kill everything...” to “Oh no, too much everything!” because Mary Jane says
something. Beyond comics, it’s got some real Doctor Who energy to it, while lacking the weight or context that
makes that show work. (Though, it does make me wonder if Ewing approached Venom with the idea that the Symbiote is
the Doctor and the hosts are the companions, which... no, still doesn’t win me
over.) Like, why wouldn’t Knull just kill everyone as he promises? Because
there are too many voices?
It exposes a central problem to the
inclusion of Knull in the story: originally, he was defeated and lost his role
as the King in Black, which placed an emphasis on the role granting power. Instead,
he continually overcomes all obstacles to the point where he’s the power and
these roles are just accessories that he equips to give himself an unnecessary
boost. By the time he confronts Venomworld, he’s too powerful that a clever
sort of solution is required and this is it. It’s like a logical victory where
there are these overarching rules that everyone involved must adhere to that
make no sense to anyone else. At least, when Morrison did the whole “regular
people win the day,” they’re given actual superpowers. Here, Knull is defeated
by the same feeling I get when I go to Costco. He burst out of the Asgardian
god of death after she absorbed his power and essence... and he dies after
spending two minutes sitting on a bench in a crowded mall?
Thematically, this ending is sound and I
can see where it fits into what I know of his
Venom run and what he’s been doing in
Mortal Thor. The power of humanity and all of that. It fits with
how the core
Queen in Black series
tried to stay as Earth-bound as possible despite the real threats (Hela and
Knull) not being there. But, being thematically sound isn’t the same thing as
being good – or satisfying, let’s say. Looking at the whole, there’s a sense
that this event was structured like the inverse of every other event. The main
thrust of this was meant to be Hela and Knull both coming to either terraform
or destroy Earth – and, before that, they need to defeat one another. Yet, that
part of the story is barely included the core series after the first issue with
most of the space given over the sort of plots that typically get shunted to
tie-ins: Earth heroes fighting Hela’s invading multi-race Symbiote army and
character drama amongst the Spider/Symbiote characters. If you squint, you can
see how it’s all one and the same with how the disparate elements are pulled
together to get Venomworld, which is how Knull is ultimately defeated. Kind of.
Looking at Queen in Black, I don’t know why it was done as an event rather
than a six-issue story in Venom with
maybe Venom Unchained running
alongside it, aimed squarely at existing readers. While outside of the control
of Ewing, making this an event with a big marketing push, including blind bags
for the first issue, made this something that needed to work outside of ‘small
Symbiote story to wrap up a Venom
run’ and it doesn’t. Add this to the various delays that had the event launch
weeks late (which I’ll admit made the event read better in its first few weeks)
and the addition of Paco Medina to the art team as of the second issue, and
there’s a sense of nothing quite working as intended here, which is not helped
by an underwhelming ending.
It’s not helped that one of the tie-ins
running alongside the event is there solely to set up what comes next. As
Charles Soule said online, Venom
Unchained #3 is basically issue 0 of his Venom run. Set beside Venom
#262, we get the Symbiote having heart to heart conversations with both Mary
Jane Watson and Eddie Brock in quick succession, pointing out just how much
this isn’t only the ending of Ewing’s run, it’s the beginning of Soule’s. It’s
the awkwardness of the shared universe ongoing that never truly ends. At least,
most big runs get to end and, then, the next writer needs to pick up after.
It’s like the ending is pulling in two directions at once, one of which is not
an ending at all.
I’m at the point where I don’t know if the
story told here is so weak that I can’t help but notice all of the scaffolding
surrounding it – or if the scaffolding is so obvious that it overpowers the
story. I just know that
Queen in Black
was not a satisfying event to read. I could go on and on from the way
information captions in issues 1 through 4 became narration captions in the
final issue, or that nothing of much import is done with the idea that Knull is
the King in White, or the way that Iban Coello and Paco Medina have such
different and contrasting art styles... Or, how about how the resolution to
Hela’s story was actually shown in
Thor
#801 last week? It was a mess on almost every level, beginning with
organisation through structure through the resolution. And it all took place
between pages of
Mortal Thor #9.
Later this week, I
hope to put up my attempt at a reading order for the event.
