Surprisingly for the first time ever, the origin of the mysterious symbiote from space, better known as Venom, will have it's origin story told in the upcoming Guardians of the Galaxy comic.

How in the world has this story never been told?  When this news first broke, I sat back and had a long head scratching moment, pondering if this had already happened in any Spider-man comic or TV show.  I came up with nothing.

After Venom’s first appearance in Amazing Spider-Man #252 (May 1984), somehow none of the many many writers ever thought to explore just where the space symbiote came from.

“I looked it up and I was like no, there’s been a planet we’ve seen taken over by symbiotes, but have we not seen the planet of the symbiotes? I called [Marvel Senior Vice President Of Publishing] Tom Brevoort, I go, could it be that even in the craziness of the ’90s when it was Venom, Venom, Venom every five seconds, that this story has not been told? And he goes, yeah we’ve never been there. And I’m like, now I have to do it! It’s crazy,” Brian Michael Bendis said.

Readers first encountered the symbiote costume in the Secret Wars crossover that pitted Marvel’s greatest heroes and villains against each other as part of a cosmic game by the god-like Beyonder. During the story, Spider-Man’s costume got damaged so he went to what he thought was a “costume-making machine” and became covered in a new black-and-white suit. It turned out to be an evil alien symbiote, which Spider-Man rejected, only for it to wind up on bitter rival Eddie Brock, and thus Venom was born. Believe it or not, the purpose of the “costume-making machine” and why it contained a symbiote was never addressed.

“Exactly! We don’t know!” Bendis said when MTV News asked about the origin of the costume-making machine. “We don’t know. It’s so exciting, isn’t it? There are major questions about the symbiote that have never been touched upon. And it’s not even retconning it’s flat out conning, it was just not there. So it’s all additive and I just love that stuff.”

This story has been seeded in Guardians of the Galaxy by Bendis, who wrote a scene where Flash was on an alien world and got a nasty reaction from the citizens there because he was wearing a symbiote. As it turns out, that particular incident comes from Bendis’s personal life, and it’s something he wants to explore.

“I have a mixed race family and people react to us differently in different parts of the world,” Bendis said. “We went to Japan and there’s a different relation to people with brown skin than there is here in America. Thankfully, my daughters were younger and it didn’t really stick what was going on, but I certainly saw it. Including an old woman walking up to my 3-year-old and yelling ‘negro’ at her. …That kind of stuck with me as a feeling that Flash would have when people point at him and go ‘ew.’ [It] would be startling, and at the same time something he would need to figure out what it meant.”

I’m already reading the Guardians of the Galaxy comic and I’m enjoying it.  Now I’ll be taken to the planet of the symbiotes for the first time ever and I wonder what new and exciting things this could bring to the Marvel Universe.

Source: IGN