10 Reasons Why Donny Cates’ Venom Was So Great

Since his early appearances as a villain, Eddie Brock has been presented as a man of contradictions. He claims to be a protector of innocents, yet he was completely happy to do away with them if they stood between him and his Spidey vendetta. In 1993 he officially became an antihero, yet he still saw Spider-Man as a villain. And what was the reason again? Oh yeah, he revealed the true identity of a killer after Brock exposed the wrong guy. That’s a punishable crime, apparently.

Eddie has always claimed to be a guy that cares about justice, yet felt little remorse for his villainous actions. Donny Cates finally made sense of this in Venom #11, which revealed that this pattern of behaviour stemmed from a traumatic incident in Eddie’s youth. He was responsible for a horrendous injustice and felt that he needed to do good in order to make up for it, but the incident completely shattered his sense of what was right and what was wrong, who was innocent and who was guilty.

It suddenly made complete sense that Eddie would deflect blame onto Spider-Man instead of owning up to his mistakes, and that he would vilify him while seeing himself as the hero. It also makes complete sense that Eddie would want to genuinely try to better himself and make up for his mistakes after all these years.