Greg's Blog of Clue-By-Fours

May 6th, 2014 at 9:58AM

Anonymous asked: When Flash Thompson was anounced as Venom I thought that it wouldn't last long and Eddie Brock would become Venom again because status quo and classic usually prevails. However Flash endured for 4 years, he had a great series, he's been in 3 super teams, done a bunch of guest apearances, shown up in a Videogame and will be in a cartoon . Why do you think Venom Flash has succeeded where other replacements of classic characters have failed?

brevoortformspring:

I think making Flash into Venom was a master stroke, a brilliant idea from Dan.
One of the problems with the classic Venom, love him or hate him, is that Eddie Brock, for all of the many, many pages devoted to him, was a fairly thin character. Nobody ever truly made him into an individual that you much cared about. So you were reading VENOM for Venom, not for Eddie.
But Flash has 50+ years of investment built into him. We’ve seen him in a bunch of different roles over the years—tormenter, friend, accused villain, romantic rival, amnesiac football coach—and all in context to Peter Parker. So making Flash into Venom gives that character a concrete hook into the world and life of Peter Parker in a way that was never possible with Brock. And especially after Guggenheim’s story about Flash’s service and the loss of his legs, he was in about as sympathetic a position as he’d ever been in from a reader point of view.