All-New Venom kicks off a high-stakes Marvel mystery later this year

Renowned comic writer Al Ewing is just like us. He adores the Knives Out movies. He currently has Chappell Roan on rotation. And he’s constantly thinking about “cosmic entities battling in each other’s mindscapes.” Relatable.

But unlike us mere mortals, Ewing also spins epic comic book yarns with deeply psychological cores, as seen in Immortal Hulk, his tales in the Krakoan Age of X-Men, and his recent mind-bending run on Venom. The latter is about to come to an end(ish) with the recently launched series Venom War, which pits Eddie Brock against his son Dylan to avert what each former Venom host sees as a potential apocalypse. 

But some good news for fans of Ewing: He won’t be saying goodbye to Eddie and Dylan when the (Venom) war is won. Polygon can reveal that Ewing and artist Carlos Gómez will team up for a scaled-down, earthbound continuation of the Venom story in Marvel’s new ongoing series All-New Venom. The book arrives in comic book stores in December.

Minor spoilers for Venom War ahead: When the dust settles on Eddie and Dylan’s symbiote-heavy brawl, the Venom symbiote will have a new human to call its own. Who is under the goo is a mystery Dylan will have to solve in gumshoe mode. The book will introduce four suspects — Robbie Robertson, Madame Masque, Rick Jones, and Luke Cage. And as Ewing put it in an interview with Polygon, there are plenty of reasons why any of them could be the one slinging across New York City.

Ahead of All-New Venom, Polygon talked to Ewing about the new direction, the potential for all four suspects, and why there are still plenty of ways to rewrite Venom’s rules (and looks).

Polygon: This will be your third iteration on Venom since you picked up the character. What have you learned about Venom? What’s at its core that makes you want to keep playing?

Al Ewing: All-New Venom is where I pivot from being part of a writing team to solo writing, and I am bringing in what I’ve learned. I’ve come to embrace a lot of the fun of Venom, in that Venom is just a really fun character. The character brings a certain degree of chaos with him. When I started coming out of Donny Cates’ run, me and Ram V had this clear idea of epic scope, an epic time-travel story with elements of [Michael] Moorcock in there, The Dancers at the End of Time, things like that.

But the more I wrote Venom, the more that wild fun of the character started creeping in. And as I got to know the character better, and got to know Eddie and Dylan and the symbiote as characters, I started to enjoy myself more and more.

Not that I wasn’t enjoying myself back in issue 1, but in a different way, I started to really have a lot of freewheeling fun with it, to the extent that Venom War, which — back when me and Ram were planning it — was originally going to be this great father-and-son tale. And it is still that, but it’s happening in a wrestling ring, because Venom demands some degree of craziness and wildness and fun. And I think All-New Venom is going to embrace that even more.

You have written a number of epically sized, cosmic stories, including Venom, but Venom War begins a process of scaling down, and the new book sounds even more down to (literal) Earth. Does All-New Venom feel like a welcome departure for you in terms of scope?

If people have a strong hankering for something different from me, this is that. It’s almost more like a Spider-Man-level story. It is set on Earth, very much in the normal New York City. Everywhere we go in the story is a place you could go, or at least the type of place you could go. Obviously, when we go to a warehouse… well, I do have a tendency to look up actual warehouses, and then change them just enough to pass legal. So yeah, everywhere we go in this story is a natural place you can go in New York City. 

So we take a swing away from the big cosmic thing. The pendulum swings away from that and back into a much more intimate, character-based story, but also has a lot of that ground-level superhero action, where it’s less about cosmic entities battling in each other’s mindscapes, or mysterious zones beyond time, and much more on the street — slinging webs, slinging chains, doing the Venom thing. It’s almost like my return to an old-school sort of superhero comic, but with a couple of twists that we’re gonna have fun bringing in.

On paper, it sounds like we’re about to get the Venom version of a detective novel. Do you have genre touchstones that were at top of mind while you were writing the series?

A little bit. I’ve read my share of [Arthur] Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, as well as more recent things. I’m a big fan of the Knives Out films — I really enjoy what they do, how they tell the story, how they set things up. They never lie to the viewer of those films. That’s an important thing. They don’t reveal everything to begin with, but they never tell a lie. […] I think it is important that you don’t lie to the reader at any point. And I’m trying to do that as early as now, in this very interview! But I am a human being speaking with my human mouth, so please excuse me if I accidentally lie to you.

Let’s talk about the suspects. You have a soft spot for Rick Jones.

I do like Rick Jones! Has the sidekick now graduated to main hero? That is the question. [The suspects] have to work nicely as a group bouncing off each other, even if they don’t always meet. Each of them has to be a nice possibility, a group where the reader can’t point to any one of them and go, like, Oh, it’s that one. Hopefully we’ve achieved that.

It’s good writing a version of Rick that has come through a lot of stuff and out the other side. This is a much more laid-back, joke-telling, wisecracking Rick than we’re used to from me. No longer going through it… unless he’s now going through something else. Who can say…

Madame Masque is also in the mix, maybe the most ready to wield a symbiote in her day-to-day.

Madame Masque is another great suspect. She’s coming direct from the Gang War, which is where we last saw her in a Spidey context. She’s got plans. Do those plans involve commandeering a symbiote? Do they involve getting revenge on other gangs in an identity which nobody would ever suspect? The ultimate mask for Madame Masque? I couldn’t possibly comment…

Robbie Robertson is probably one of the nicer gents in Marvel continuity.

Robbie Robertson is somebody else who was touched by the big Gang War and Spidey. He’s never been tempted by power or superpowers. Has that changed after his son got so involved with the New York criminal underworld and falling in love with the Beetle? Does Robbie want to find a way to get things under control in a way that you know he can’t as a newspaper man? Is this one of the great secret identities, like Clark Kent, a newspaper reporter — or newspaper editor, in Robbie’s case — hearing about trouble, then going out and dealing with it?

The last suspect is Luke Cage, but he’s in a precarious position — he’s the mayor of New York now.

We’ve seen heroes get symbiotes to get a little more done. And we’ve seen that Luke Cage has had trouble hitting the streets and doing what he loves to do while behind the desk of the mayor. Would this be a way to do that? Would this be a way to pull on another identity, kick the ass that he knows needs kicking, but in a capacity where he’s not dealing with it in an official capacity? He doesn’t have to answer questions that he would if he went out on the streets in his mayor outfit and did what he used to do for the community. Maybe a symbiote is the perfect cover for him. Again, who can say? I’m merely saying words. These are all just possibilities…

In writing this new book, does gooey ol’ Venom still feel elastic? Does the mystery premise tee you and Carlos up to play with the character’s form in wacky new ways?

Carlos is absolutely wonderful. He’s the ideal old-school superhero artist for this project. Every page that comes in the inbox looks just fantastic. And I am throwing [out] a lot of new Venom configurations. Part of the “all new” of this All-New Venom is that Venom doesn’t fight like we’ve seen Venom do before. I’m just now writing some pages where Venom does extremely wild shape-shifting, using the gooeyness of the symbiote. 

One way the All-New Venom is different is that it has a more heroic-looking Venom. I won’t get into the visuals, I’ll just mention in passing that there is a new look for Venom. But previously, there’s been a lot of gooeyness, a lot of tendrils, a lot of, like, ooze and goop and slime and fangs and teeth. This is maybe a little bit more of a solid Venom. It gives us the advantage that we can pull off all kinds of exciting new tricks and fun new things, right from issue 1.