Spider-Man: Maximum Carnage by Tom DeFalco
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I'm treating myself to a little Carnage. I kept seeing it around in bookstores back in the day and more recently here on GR and I even though I was insanely curious, I can't believe I never got around to it.

The good: Most of it! I really enjoyed how bats**t insane Carnage is and how he polarized past villains into helping out as heroes to stop the pure chaos he represented... or gathering them together to get the blood flowing. And it was pretty over-the-top. Shriek pulled in the insane from Carnage and gave it to the streets of New York, boiling blood everywhere, while Carnage did whatever Carnage wanted. Which was pretty damn random.

And all the while, Spidey teamed up with Venom and the big theme here was maybe overdone but not out-of-place. When is too much, too much? Is it sometimes valid to aim for an outright killing? We know Venom believes this, but then, there's Spidey. He's our conscience. When HE agrees with Venom, you know it's really bad.

I pretty much dug every little thing about this comic until ONE LITTLE TWIST. And then I was like... OHHH COME OOOONNNNNNNN.

Ignoring that. That one little hail-mary.

And I'm NOT talking about Captain America coming to the rescue fairly early on. Or Dagger.

That last one little thing was so outrageously meh that I wanted to tear up the funnies. But I didn't. I figure it would have taken an issue or two more to prepare THAT right, instead of as a, "oh, by the way" fix. *grrrr*

OKAY, ignoring that BAD, the rest was pretty awesome and I am very glad I read it. :) Classic Spidey.

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