In The Middle of The Ocean, No One Can Hear You Scream
Written By: Gerry ConwayArt By: Mike Perkins, Andy Troy, Joe Sabino
Cover Price: $3.99
Release Date: June 22, 2016
Publisher: Marvel Comics
*Non Spoilers and Score At The Bottom*
Back in the late 80's and throughout the 90's symbiotes were all the rage and it seemed like any Spider-Man fan of either the comics or the cartoons were all about getting themselves something Venom or Carnage and to my astonishment, here I am twenty years later looking at a Carnage book and hoping I can get as much enjoyment out of it as I did my Carnage action figure from the Spider-Man Animated Series....... because goddamn that figure was cool as hell. Besides for having a basic knowledge of the character..... like knowing his origin, playing Maximum Carnage on the SNES and playing with my action figure of course, Carnage was never a character who I was really drawn to and because of that I never really payed attention to what the character was up to throughout the 2000's, but hopefully that all changes with this series by it giving me something with this lunatic that I can't stand to be without....... Yeah, that's a tall order, but when comics are concerned, I never say anything's impossible. Let's jump into this issue, where the Anti-Carnage Task Force is on the trail of Carnage as he makes his way with the leader of a old religious cult: Brother Gregori to an unknown island to find an alter, where Carnage can bring about the end of the world. Yeah, we've got some strange ass mystical shit going on with this alien imbued murderer and hopefully it's not too strange to follow. Let's check it out.
Explain It!:
Our issue begins in a strange way, especially for someone starting out with this comic, but don't worry, it's easy enough to understand what's going on throughout this story because the exposition is brutal. So we start out five days in the future, where the events of this book have already taken place...... and where we find out that our team's efforts to capture Carnage have turned out to be a bust because of it. There we first meet a young woman named Jubilile, who apparently helped out a man in a life boat, but this man turned out to be Cletus Kasady so the moral of the story is...... never help anyone..........ever. Even though we don't get to see this woman's epic confrontation with the killer, apparently she blew up her boat and was eventually found by the Anti-Carnage Task Force hot on the trail of their prey. One of our leads, Claire Dixon is talking to the woman and after they shake hands, Claire's eyes turn red and she begins having terrible visions of the future....... or the past....... So let's find out why that's all going on.
Back to our present day, we see our team catch up to the freighter that's taking Carnage and Brother Gregori to their secret island destination and when they get aboard the vessel...... Well, it seems that long boat rides aren't really Carnage's thing..... what with the boredom and all that so when our heroes get aboard....... well, they find a massacre. Not only a massacre either, they find that Carnage is trying to use the power of the Darkholm to infect people with the symbiote and as we learn here, the massacre was the fun part because as they go deeper into the ship, they find people who's bodies didn't reject the infection and out of nowhere this book really feels like it turns into Aliens. We've got a group of people in an isolated spot and a bunch of monsters coming out of the darkness at them........ Hell, we even have people who are begging for death like they have an alien embryo inside of them ready to burst out........ which may be the case, only Carnage style. The only thing we're missing from making this full blown Aliens in my mind is the sound of the "ping" from some motion sensors. After blasting a shit ton of these infected people and having no effect on them, Eddie Brock, who's apart of this team because of his need to kill anything symbiote nowadays is begging for Claire Dixon to activate her symbiote......... activator, so that he can go all Toxin on the situation, but she's not letting that genie out of the bottle.
In the end, Clair Dixon gets away from the onslaught and finds Brother Gregori all chained up, since Carnage is forcing him to decipher the Darkholm book that he stole, that prophecies that he'll bring about the end of the world by releasing an old god and even though Clair is all about telling Gregori how she plans on ending Carnage, she really should have been paying attention to her surroundings because Carnage knocks her out. As our issue closes, Clair awakes to find herself chained and strung up above the Darkholm about to be infected by her sworn enemy.
That's it for this issue of Carnage and maybe it's because I only read a few issues before this so I could feel caught up....... or maybe it's because there isn't much of a actual story going on, just our team catching up to Carnage each issue only to get spanked so our villain can get away again, but I wasn't really into this issue. Yeah, I love Aliens and feel that this issue tried to mirror that experience a bit, but because of the exposition that was forcibly driven into us so that I guess everyone could go into this issue knowing what was going on and really just the slow nature of the entire issue, all the fun of Aliens was kind of taken away so that main characters could go on and on about why they hate Carnage. The art in this issue was decent though and the dark atmosphere worked to heighten the horror and tension of the situation, but it was kind of a let down that all the action of the book was restricted to the end of the issue, with Carnage only getting a page of play time. While I'm not one of the biggest fans of mystical situations placed on characters who usually aren't in that environment, I will say that I look forward to this series going forward because while this issue didn't exactly hit the mark for me, I am interested to see where the creators take it.
Bits and Pieces:
This issue of Carnage might not be the rip roaring or the rip arming issue that some fans might have hoped it would be and sadly even though this issue takes the majority of its pages to set up a creepy environment........ it didn't really pay off too well...... even with some decent art backing up the story's progression, but it did do an excruciating job of making sure that anyone jumping on here will understand what's going on...... and while that's not really a terrible thing, it forced a lot of this issue to be boring as hell. Don't get me wrong though, there's still some fun here, it's just not as much as I would have liked.
5.8/10
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