It’s beginning to feel like the ’90s all over again, what with all the new Venom content Marvel has been pumping out. The good news is that the current ongoing Venom series sets a strong example for other books to follow. Not to mention that the changes Donny Cates and Ryan Stegman have made to Venom’s mythology have opened the door for all sorts of new spinoffs and flashback tales. That’s basically the gist of Marvel’s new Web of Venom anthology series. And with Cates scripting this first spinoff issue, Web of Venom: Ve’Nam #1 captures some of what makes the main series so special, though it does face some major hurdles along the way.
The amusingly titled Ve’Nam flashes back to the ’60s to explore the early days of Rex Strickland and his platoon of symbiote-enhanced soldiers. Unfortunately, this issue’s biggest flaw is that it doesn’t actually focus a great deal on these characters directly. The story picks up after Rex and his team have been let loose in Vietnam and gone AWOL. The focus is instead on Nick Fury as he recruits a familiar hero to help him clean up a growing mess of SHIELD’s own making.