Venom: Funeral Pyre

We’re number 1! We’re number 1!

Venom! Like I said in my Maximum Carnage post, anyone can see right away that Venom is super fucking awesome. He’s like Spider-Man, except bigger and badder and deadlier. He has sharp teeth and green drool and he’s always threatening to eat people’s brains and strangling good guys to death with his alien costume tendrils. He’s what every 90’s kid wanted to be when they grew up. I, for one, couldn’t WAIT get my own symbiote when I got older. Ah to be young and have dreams. That's over for me now, but at least Venom is still awesome.

And you know what else is awesome? Issue number 1 of anything. In comic collecting, few things are as sweet as having the first issue of a series. A decent copy of the Amazing Spider-Man 1 will cost you thousands of dollars, if not tens of thousands of dollars, in 2020. 

Welcome to the chromium age!

In the 90’s, Marvel saw incredible success when they released the adjectiveless “Spider-Man” number 1, which had at least four versions (normal, silver, gold and platinum) in all manners of collectible poly bags (which shouldn’t be opened if you want it to be valuable, so you need to get a second copy to read, bitch). They sold over 2 MILLION copies of that SOB. I myself have at least 6 different copies.

And don’t forget there was also Jim Lee’s X-Men # 1 in 1991, which had a bunch of different covers and that turned into a majestic fucking tapestry when you placed them side by side. It was a model that was working, and brought in speculators to create a comic book goldrush of epic proportions. You can guess how it turned out in the end.

X-Force 1, another massively printed #1 issue is now nothing more than an inside joke in the collecting community. Everyone who was collecting in the early 90’s bought a long box of those bad boys, hoping it would pay for their retirement (along with their beanie babies and Disney VHS tapes, I assume.)

Fabulous (second) first issue!... and most definitely not the last first issue either!

Nowadays, Spider-Man gets a new number 1 every few months. I honestly don’t think it’s a stretch to say that the Amazing Spider-Man gets rebooted more often than my piece of shit computer. It must be a great sales booster, though I don’t know how many people are honestly excited about a Spidey 1 of any variety anymore. Being #1 has lost its magic in the modern age. Just another reason why volume 1 is the only one that really matters.

Consider this: between 1963 (ASM1) and 1998 (ASM441), there was only one number 1 (sure, there’s an “annual” number 1, but just shut up for a second.) so that’s 35 years of one continuous volume.

Since 1998, there have been at least 5 reboots. We are now on ASM volume 6. And consider now that volume 2 had a decent run (it ran from 1999-2014). That’s right, there were reboots, restarting the series at #1 in 2014, 2015, 2017 and 2018. And each of those had several variants of the number 1 issue. 

If you check out mycomicshop, you’ll see that there have been over 100 different Amazing Spider-Man 1’s since volume 1 ended. Amazing Spider-Man volume three seems to have been the worst of the bunch.

I just imagine some poor schmuck out there trying to get a complete ASM set who goes into cold sweats whenever he hears a rumour that they’re going to reboot Spider-Man again. Who could afford it?

Which brings us back to Venom. With an ongoing series, you could only have a single first issue, like some kind of amateur. With Venom, marvel outsmarted us all and broke up the regular, ongoing monthly releases into 3- and 4- part mini-series’, so they could have up to four number ones all in the same fucking year! Yeah, eat my brains, Venom, along with my wallet, my soul and my dignity. During the course of Spider-Man volume 1, Venom had 18 number ones. I consider them an important part of Spider-Man volume 1, and yeah I have them all, and yeah, the glow in the dark one is my favourite. Luckily, they also ended the Venom mini series’ series December 1998 along with the rest of the Spider-titles, so my OCD is happy.

The other silver lining is that variants weren’t yet in full consumer ass blast mode yet, so most Venom #1s only had a single version.  The first series I collected was the second Venom series, “Funeral Pyre”.

I love the Punisher perched on top of the van like a badass monkeyman.

Funeral Pyre is awesome, and it’s largely because Tom Lyle’s art is so great. His Venom is huge and intimidating. I never understood how he could talk, let alone breathe, given that his tongue took up all the space in his mouth, but that’s just another comic book mystery that enriches the whole experience.

"It's the 90's, so no matter what stupid shit I say, it will seem badass... as long as I'm pulverizing your face while I say it! EXTREME!"

The Punisher has never been one of my favourite characters. To me, he’s just a guy with guns, which isn’t very heroic or even interesting. In fact, he was one of those characters that my mom really didn’t want me reading about because it looked too violent (she felt the same way about Wolverine.) Little did she know that I had Funeral Pyre, which was three straight issues of Venom and Punisher screwing around in San Francisco and killing all of the gang members of every gang (they didn’t discriminate) before the gang members could kill each other. Seriously. It was the old classic “quick, kill those two dudes before they kill each other” kind of story. Why? The problem is solving itself! Venom was at least trying to save the kid (who becomes Pyre) while he was on his street thug killing spree. The Punisher was just wasting his own time.

The ending also involved Pyre (the one character that you’re kind of rooting for because he’s the only character that doesn’t want to kill anyone, but obviously does anyway) burning to death after being horribly disfigured and then crippled. Maybe my mom was right?