Carnage USA #2 – Review

By: Zeb Wells (writer), Clayton Crain (artist)

The Story: The calm before the storm.

What’s Good: This miniseries is beginning to me remind of the nineties Spider-Man crossover Planet of the Symbiotes, or rather, what that event should have been. Planet, while mostly remembered as a failure today, actually had some decent ideas. All of New York City, invaded by violent, parasitic aliens? After the success of Spider Island, you can’t tell me that couldn’t have worked. Plus, the possibilities of exploring the structure of a society made of symbiotic life forms really got my inner sci-fi geek revving. However, that series failed because of lazy and unimaginative writing, inconsistent artwork, and action that settled for schlock instead of reaching for real scares.

Carnage, USA by contrast, is actually attempting to be something more than a punch-fest. Zeb Wells and Clayton Crain sell the horror of a bloated symbiote bonding to nearly the entire population of a small town effectively, and the scenes featuring Cletus Kasady playing the “family man” with some of his hostages are outright chilling. Last issue, Crain’s work was uneven, but here he seems to have found his stride. Characters look and stand more naturally, the lighting is simplified, and the storytelling more streamlined. He plays up the motif of Kasady as a puppet master, and illustrates him conducting the madness. It’s outright insidious, and is a good contrast to the portrayal of the other symbiotes in this book.

The first symbiote we meet is Scorn, a spawn of Carnage.  Scorn, who first bonded to a prosthetic, never learned the difference between flesh and machinery. Subsequently, she can manipulate machinery in much the same way Kasady manipulates the townsfolk of Doverton. While Scorn seems to be stable, the military brass are wary of relying on symbiotes in general—and rightly so after being burned by Venom. So the other symbiotes, originally united as Hybrid, are traumatically torn from their host, partitioned from one another, and then trained to act as power-ups for the Green Berets. It’s frankly disturbing treatment, though logical when the symbiotes are viewed from a militaristic perspective. As a result, there is no threat of them bonding with their new hosts, and no threat of the hosts going AWOL. I hope that Wells follows up on this idea, and examines the ethics of using these creatures as weapons of war. Crain captures all the symbiotes well, painting Scorn as elegantly deadly, while the special forces symbiotes are pitifully incomplete, more like equipment than life-forms. I was concerned that the art for this mini would be a mess of tendrils, but Crain’s restraint here has restored my faith.