‘Carnage Reigns’ as the king of a small hill, off to the side somewhere

Even if you aren’t interested in Carnage at all, this is worth the read for the artwork alone.

September 29, 2023

In general, symbiote comics are not a preference of mine, for varying reasons, but mostly, I just don’t care about most of the stories involving them. Recently, though, I ended up really liking Cody Ziglar’s Miles Morales: Spider-Man Vol. 1, which leads right into this event, along with Red Goblin (which I also enjoyed). Since they both lead to this, it felt unfair to just ignore it, and I’m at least somewhat interested in continuing to read them both, so why not see?

The good news is, this crossover does nothing to detract from my enjoyment of either Red Goblin or Miles Morales. Both series got to use the crossover to their strengths, and really weren’t diminished at all by it. The bad news is, as a whole, Carnage Reigns is just generally forgettable, standard superhero comics.

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Now, I’m fully aware that part of this is because I didn’t read Carnage, but I have a good reason for that: I don’t care about Carnage and I don’t want to read a book about him. My interest in Carnage Reigns had to do with the other two thirds of the books crossing over, so I skipped the year of Carnage story leading up to this. Which really, felt like a fine idea, because the Carnage stuff here was my least favorite stuff. The digital symbiote stuff felt like fun dumb comics at best, and just plain dumb comics at worst. I don’t really need the lead up, even if whatever’s going on with Kletus’ boyfriend seems fun. Alas, not fun enough for me to go read those comics.

Apart from the boring void that is Carnage, however, this crossover is mostly good. The stakes never feel that high (cmon, is Carnage gonna be the guy to kill Miles? As if) but it feels like the creators really had fun with this, and I’m not gonna fault them for that. Really, the greatest strength of the book is its art, which is just each artist going as hard as possible, and it looks fantastic across the story.

I already knew I was gonna love Vicentini and Bazaldua’s art here, as I’ve loved their art on Miles and Red Goblin, but it was great to add Galán and Ohta to the roster next to them. This book looks great cover-to-cover, and it actually coheres fairly well, too, which is pretty incredible given the number of them and how they’re not all that similar of artists. Mostly, it’s just that all of them were executing at their peak, and it ended up holding the book together better than anything else. The story may be empty in a lot of places, but the art carries, making the whole thing worth reading.

Normally, Carnage Reigns is the kind of book that signals me to stop reading whatever crosses over into it. The effort of reading a whole thing seeped in stuff I don’t care about isn’t worth it. I’d rather just follow things I actually expect to enjoy, sorry Miles and Normie. This is a case where I’m okay with not following my instincts, though. Sure, I’ll probably forget every detail about Carnage Reigns between now and January, and I’ll continue following my intuition by refusing to read any more Carnage. But I’ll also get to keep up with the aforementioned Miles and Normie, which is probably worth it, albeit barely.