With Venom having pissed off the local crime lord, Lord Ogre, he’s had quite a few assassins trying to take him out. It might look like overkill to some, but Venom is a special kind of hero and can deal with hte fallout from this. That is, until it strikes a little too close to home.

In the last issue we saw that Jack O’Lantern had decided to make things personal and attack the father of Andi, the girl next door and murder him in cold blood. When he was getting ready to add Andi to his kill count with poison, we see Venom expand his symbioate over her to save her from it.

That’s when something new happened.

The symbioate apparently spawned just at that moment or had a piece of itself fracture off and Mania was born. Yes there’s another new symbioate wearing spider-type person in town and she is understandably quite angry that her father is now dead and the killer is right there before her.

Let’s just say that she adapts to the symbiote faster than most and wants nothing more than to take down Jack O’Lantern. He of course finds a way to get loose and they chase after him. When she finally has a chance to cut him down, Flash is able to talk her out of it.

I’m sure it helps that when they finally get the mask off of him, we find that it wasn’t actually Jack O’Lantern at all but someone being mind controlled to think and act like him.

How convenient.

The issue closes with Flash having tasked himself with properly training Mania to be a hero and not give into her symbioate’s desires. While he pushes for this happening, we do see a few scenes of her out and fighting crime on her own, so how well will that work out remains to be seen.

Flash thinks his one chance at getting her to be able to work with the symbioate involves him sitting down and having a long conversation with someone. This thought comes to the foreground as he’s sitting and staring what his symbiote is being held in.

The big question, of course, is how is her symbiote so easy to control and work with? It seems to naturally have all of the skills one would expect from being joined for quite some time. Is it truly its own symbiote or is it really an extension of Venom itself? (She did feel a pull from him when he tried to take the sybmiote back into himself so it could very well end up being the Venom symbiote split in two.)

As the series is slowly drawing to a close, in the next few months I look forward to seeing how this will all play out. Will Mania stay in the Marvel universe or will her symbiote be absorbed back into Venom? Hell, for that matter with the series ending, will Flash retain the symbiote himself or will it pass on to a new host (or even back to Eddie?).

Either way the art as always looks beautiful and has me wanting more. It’s never been a better time to be drawn with a symbiote on in Marvel.

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‘VENOM’ #39
Writer: Cullen Bunn
Artist: Kim Jacinto