Maximum Carnage

MAXIMUM CARNAGE. MAXIMUM EXCITEMENT. MAXIMUM SPIDER-MAN.

Don't forget "Maximum Venom" and "Maximum Doppleganger" and "Maximum FOMO"

As with most collectors at the beginning of the hobby, there is an absolutely mad scramble to figure out what the fuck is going on, who the fuck all these characters are and where the fuck I’m going to get the money to buy all the issues I need to read the story. And in the 90’s, long gone were the self-contained stories, or the occasional two-parters or (epic!) three-parters. No, we need a wallet-molesting FOURTEEN-parter that pushes your allowance and your sanity to the absolute limit.

Amazing Spider-Man 378 was my third comic book ever, so I was still completely lost when it arrived in the mail. I had no idea that there even WERE other Spider-Man books out there. Obviously, the “Part 3 of 14” caught me off guard. But, understanding that reading comic books involves a shitload of “just going with it”, I dove in and just went with it.

Epic as all hell.

And I was rewarded. I knew that Venom was awesome by the second page. It was also the first book I had where Mark Bagley drew the interior, and I knew right away that he was next level. If you disagree, I politely invite you to shove your opinion up your ass (and I'm sure you'll tell me to do the same, which is all part of collecting comics, as I found out.)

I've always wanted to randomly scream that in a bus terminal.

A short while in, "Cloak" is crying because "Shriek" killed "Dagger." Okay, okay, just go with it. Just go with it. I bring it up because, importantly, this was my earliest encounter (that I distinctly remember) with “the asterisk.” 

The asterisk is basically a footnote that references a different comic book that is important to the story, so that you can go out and buy that book too, in case you wanted to, say, understand what the hell was happening? Dagger died in Web of Spider-Man 101, you may want that in your collection, biotch. You don’t want to miss out. It’s important enough to include a formal reference. From a marketing perspective, it’s ingenious. What better way to pump up sales of all the books than to give your obsessive compulsive fan base a nice big helping of FOMO and an impossible bibliography to acquire?

Then there’s more characters. Carnage (need ASM 361-363 for him.) Doppleganger (cripes, you’ll need Infinity War, which is a 6-parter, which then referenced Infinity Crusade, which is a 6-parter, which all started with the Infinity Gauntlet, which is a 6-parter, which references the Silver Surfer, Adam Warlock and Thanos quest books. Once you put together that mini-library, you can come back to Maximum Carnage with a full appreciation of the story of “Dopple.”) Half of Marvel eventually shows up, both good and bad, some old, some new—Carrion, Demogoblin, Morbius, Nightwatch, the Black Cat, Deathlok, Firestar, Iron Fist... even Captain fucking America. Don’t get me wrong, crossovers are cool. I love them. But I’m trying to paint the picture of someone who was just trying to understand what the hell was going on before the internet had all the answers and before the Avengers were a household name.

Starting with Amazing Spider-Man 381, things seemed to go back to normal. Spider-Man fought the Hulk in an understandable, easy to read 2-parter. I was basically thinking “I don’t know what that Maximum Carnage shit was, but I’m glad it’s over.” But was it over? NO. 

The stores had these posters promoting Maximum Carnage, taunting anyone without the whole set. They kept them up for years. There was a Maximum Carnage video game with a red cartridge on super NES and Sega. Even the writers couldn’t stop congratulating themselves for Maximum Carnage and referenced the name in their “Maximum Clonage” story years later. Even in 2019, Marvel is still trying to capitalize on Maximum Carnage with “Absolute Carnage”, some modern storyline that I am half tempted to look into.

The more I tried to convince myself that not having the complete set wasn’t a big deal, the more that Marvel seemed to be mocking me. The industry was designed to make me feel like I missed something big if I didn’t have the story. Cripes.

I stopped collecting in 1996, largely out of frustration about the whole affair, even though it was three years after the 14-parter was published. Eventually, I did get all the parts. Spoiler alert, the story is completely half-assed. The fights are cool though. But that was 90's comics for ya. 

But you know, once I had tracked down those 14 parts a full quarter century after their publication, it still wasn’t done. There were still those pesky-ass footnotes, creating a web of important shit that I was going to need if I wanted to understand anything. Yes, there were still asterisks pointing to shit I hadn’t bought yet... including what is probably the most asterisked book of all time: Amazing Fantasy 15. 

Those bastards had me.