When you're a character that started out as another hero's costume before revealing yourself to be a sentient black goo from outer space, you're forgiven for occasionally veering into WTF-ery every now and then.Â
For Venom, an alien symbiote that first appeared as Spider-Man's costume, that means popping up in weird places, attached to unexpected people and things. But which incarnation earns the right to be call the most bizarre and twisted?Â
"What if you gave Venom a bunch of guns?" is the most 90s comic book question ever asked. And someone answered it in a "What If?" story about the symbiote landing on Frank "The Punisher" Castle instead of Eddie Brock.
The strangest part is that the Punisher is such an intense, strong-willed dude, he got the symbiote to submit to his control instead of the other way around
The half-brother of Spider-Man 2099, Venom 2099 grew up to be a serial killer and all-around scumbag after his negligent parents left him in the care of a nanny robot that was mistakenly set to "veterinary" mode and raised the boy as if he were a dog. (Yes, seriously.)
This guy was so bad that the symbiote actually tamed some of his more disturbing tendencies once they bonded.
Peter Porker, the Spectacular Spider-Ham, regularly battles Pork Grind, a Venom parody who spoke in an Arnold Schwarzenegger/Hans and Frans dialect. Even by Venom standards, this one is really out there.
The Marvel series "Old Man Logan" was set in the distant future, where superheroes were wiped out and villains reigned for a time before all of society collapsed into a dystopian, Mad Max nightmare.
Logan not only battled a clan of inbred Hulks in the series, but he and Hawkeye also ran into symbiote that bonded with a monstrous T-Rex transforming it into a Venomsaurus Rex. The duo did the smart thing and ran.
In an alternate timeline, Peter Parker and MJ Watson had a daughter they named May (after Peter's beloved Aunt). May Parker had her father's abilities and mysterious sister -a half-symbiote clone created by Norman Osbourn.
This clone took the name April and briefly joined the Parker family before jealous drove her to become Mayhem.
Perhaps the strangest thing about the 1994 Spider-Man animated series is that Venom was voiced by The Simpsons' vet Hank Azaria. Which explains why Eddie Brock/Venom sounds so much like a reverb-heavy Moe Szyslak.
