Guide to Carnage - Cletus Kasaday (New for Patrons!)

I’m back with another new comic guide from the very creepy spooky ooky Patrons of CK, who picked this serial-killing symbiote in a tie for their most-wanted Marvel Guide in their last Patrons’ Choice poll. That’s right, after many weeks of promises in my Marvel New Releases posts as I review his series, I’m finally done my Guide to Carnage!

Guide to Carnage

This guide covers every Cletus Kasaday appearance from his debut to last week, plus all of the major mischief that the Carnage symbiote has gotten up to without its psychopath host. It’s all in perfect reading order, complete with suggestions on where to start, a “greatest hits” list of only the best and most-relevant stories, an easy reference for building a uniform bookshelf of Omnibuses or Epic Collections, and links read every series on Marvel Unlimited!

That means I just did a lot of Carnage reading. So, having just seen his every page and word balloon, what’s the true story of Marvel’s cruelest symbiote?

As with a lot of modern day popular Marvel characters, there are far fewer Carnage appearances than you probably think there are.

Carnage has had four major phases as a character, and all of them have been pretty tight with relatively few guest appearances until his explosion of popularity with Donny Cates & Ryan Stegman’s Absolute Carnage (which is saying a lot, since he’s always been a popular character).

The first phase of Carnage is simply Maximum Carnage, with a 6-page + 3 issue prologue in Amazing Spider-Man. If you assumed Spidey and Carnage had some long-standing feud prior to that 14-part early-90s epic, you’d be mistaken. Carnage was essentially invented as an even worse Venom so that Marvel could shift the Overton Window on Venom a little farther away from “deranged murderer” and closer to “redeemable vigilante.”

Carnage has an initial face-off against Spider-Man and Venom, goes away for a year, and returns for one of the biggest crossover events of the 90s. IT HAD ITS OWN VIDEOGAME. Take that, Knightfall.

The next phase of Carnage is the Prison Period, by which I mean every single story from 1994 to 2004 involves him breaking out of or being put back into prison. There are a few good ones in there, but nothing runs longer than four issues and they all start and end the same way. In fact, Carnage’s first two one-shots occur entirely inside of prison!

Brian Bendis put Carnage on ice at the beginning of 2005, having The Sentry rip him to shreds in the opening of New Avengers to help establish how truly badass Sentry was. That meant it took another five years to reach the third phase of Carnage – the solo phase. This is where we see Cletus Kasaday strike out on his own – going on a road trip, finding a new home, and facing off against a wider array of heroes and villains. This runs until 2014, with AXIS briefly turning Carnage into a good guy and meeting his widest array of Marvel characters yet – including Doctor Doom, Black Bolt & Medusa, and the X-Men!

Finally, we come to the modern era of Carnage, which I’d call the “Cosmic Horror” era. It starts with a very eldritch ongoing series by Gerry Conway and Mike Perkins, which I highly recommend. The book is like an X-Files season where Carnage is the big bad, which is a very different, very satisfying read. That rolls into Cates & Stegman’s Venom, where Carnage is one of two signature villains of their run. Here, he merits an even huger, even more unhinged event – Absolute Carnage – which mines every possible corner of his history (and the history of the Venom symbiote).

Yet, the scarier version of Carnage with an even bigger scope was still to come. When he manages to reassemble himself in the wake of Absolute Carnage, it’s as an aspiring god with universal, multiversal ambitions – which lines up well with Al Ewing’s run on Venom (2021) that transcends time and space.

For me, it’s that solo period into the start of the Cosmic Horror that remains the best read. I think we could have let Carnage rest for a few years more after the conclusion of Absolute Carnage. It was such a huge, satisfying story that I’m not sure I needed to be inundated with another 40+ issues of Carnage in the following half-decade.

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