King In Black #1 (Review)
By: Mithrandiel
THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS FOR KING IN BLACK #1! YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!
Well, after over 2 years of foreshadowing (quite a bit longer than that, actually, if you look to Jason Aaron's God of Thunder #6) the God of the Symbiotes, Knull, has arrived!
The event wastes no time. It hits the ground running, with a frantic pace that is all killer and no filler. Knull hasn't merely descended upon Earth alone after all. Oh no, he's brought a massive army of hundreds of thousands of symbiote dragons - each a formidable foe for any of Marvel's heroes - along with him.
The onslaught proves to be too much for the combined efforts of the X-Men, Avengers, Spider-Man and other notable heroes, including The Sentry. Indeed, poor Robert Reynolds, the Avengers ace-in-the-hole, and arguably the strongest among them (well, at least while Thor is MIA), is literally torn in half by Knull as payback for his previous encounter with the chaotic symbiote, Carnage.
While things go from bad to worse, we turn our attention to Eddie Brock, the current iteration of Venom, as well as his son Dylan - who commands a unique ability to manipulate symbiotes, though the extent of his power assumedly remains dormant.
Eddie has tucked Dylan away in an attempt to protect him from Knull - but when Eddie goes to confront The God of the Symbiotes, it feels very similar to Wolverine trying to fight Magneto - when your primary power is a symbiote, doesn't make sense to square up with the God of Symbiotes, does it?
So, it ends about as well as you'd expect: Knull rips Eddie's symbiote from his body, and drops him from the top of a building.
With the majority of Marvel's heroes overwhelmed, or completely dispatched, it seems to have only taken one issue for things to look pretty bleak. Those of us keeping up to date with Thor can only hope that the God of Thunder makes his way back to Earth soon in order to help his allies fight back the black wave of death.
Either that or we may find ourselves discovering more about Dylan Brock's latent abilities...
I really enjoyed this initial issue. The hype for it has been insane, with months and months of preparation and more variants than you could shake a symbiote at. Yet, despite the high expectations, it manages to clear the bar with room to spare. While the majority of the book was steeped in action, there were still a few moments of emotional affect, largely tied to Eddie's relationship with Dylan, and the lengths to which he's willing to go in order to protect him.
King in Black 2 arrives on 12/23, so make sure you've got the series on your pull list - as well as the various tie-ins that give you a peek at how other superheroes and teams are staging resistance against the horrific incursion from The King in Black!
