—Venom Horse[source]Venom Horse (2024) is a five-page backup story running in the event book Venom War (2024). Every page shows the titular symbiote-controlled horse rampaging through a new location. During the mayhem, the horse keeps up a dry inner monologue refencing various cultural and academic texts. This absurd juxtaposition pokes fun at the one-dimensional nature of both the character and the strip. By the fourth episode, the repetitive structure becomes the joke--by the fifth, the comic has cannibalized itself completely. Before this narrative collapse, however, Venom Horse (2024) manages, despite itself, to hint at a deeper meaning. The comic quotes Oscar Wilde: "All art is quite useless." By implying that even such a useless thing as a mad horse made of goo can be, and is, art... the strip invites the reader to consider themselves as potential works of art. For deep down, aren't we all... Venom Horse?
History
Escaping containment at an Alchemax laboratory during the Venom War,[2] Venom Horse--a horse bonded to a sample of the Venom symbiote--rampaged and trampled the scientists while waxing philosophical by comparing Jean Baudrilliard's Simulacra and Simulation to the ongoing crisis of the Venom War, with the fourth stage--a pure simulacrum with no relation to the original reality whatsoever--embodied by itself.[1]
Escaping the Alchemax Building, Venom Horse crashed through the wall of the Metropolitan Opera House and disrupted a performance, maiming everyone it came across while discussing Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics, in particular his theory on the creation of art, before admitting that it was an example of superficial and superfluous art that served no purpose beyond meaningless spectacle.[2]
Venom Horse attacked a mob funeral, while musing on Oscar Wilde's commentary in The Picture of Dorian Gray: there are well-written works, and badly-written works, and any investigation into symbolism is done at the reader's peril. It itself of course remained, as ever, Venom Horse.[3] Venom Horse then got loose in a ball bit, where it wondered why we drove on a parkway but parked in a driveway.[4]
Venom Horse eventually reached the Madison Square Garden where the main action of the Venom War was taking place. There, it battled Zombiotes while assuring the reader that despite the absurd, self-referential nature of the story there was a deeper meaning behind it: if even the useless Venom Horse could be considered art, then so could the reader themselves.[5]Trivia
- This horse has been inspired by the inclusion of a similar horse in Venom: The Last Dance.
See Also
- 5 appearance(s) of Venom Horse (Earth-616)
- 1 mention(s) of Venom Horse (Earth-616)
- 7 image(s) of Venom Horse (Earth-616)
- 1 quotation(s) by or about Venom Horse (Earth-616)