The Batlord

Carnage U.S.A. #5 of 5

Alright, one little teeny, tiny nitpick that will probably mean absolutely nothing at all whatsoever to anyone but me. That hand salute is ****. There is a very precise way to perform a hand salute. First of all, you don't curve your hand like that. Your fingers are to remain straight, so that your forearm, wrist, and hand form a line, with your thumb tucked to the side of your palm, NOT UNDER IT. Plus, even from this angle I can tell he's holding his palm sideways. Not so. It should be tilted slightly downward, so that if someone is in front of you they can only see the back of your hand and not the inside of your palm. And his hand placement. Yeesh. If not wearing a cover (hat) with a brim, the tip of your middle finger should just touch the corner of your right eye. It should not be touching your goddamn forehead. ****ing redneck.

I'm just going to quit now before I start in on what he's doing wrong with his left arm.

So, I believe I mentioned a cripple fight last time. Well, a while back Flash Thompson/Venom, was a soldier fighting in Iraq, and lost his legs, but now he has, like... symbiote legs. And before the events of the first Carnage mini-series, some guy called sentry straight ripped Cletus Kasady in half at the waist (Sentry apparently has a bad habit about this).



That isn't from this series, but it's still pretty ****ing cool. Anyway, so they're both missing their legs, but their symbiotes have given them replacements. Except now Scorn's meat packing sonic doohickey has separated them both from their symbiotes... so they must cripple fight.




This is actually a pretty ****ing trippy issue. Zeb Wells obviously wanted to go all out with this one. He'd created some sick stuff for the earlier books, so I suppose he didn't want the ending to be overshadowed by being just another superhero fight. Having two uber-powered freaks with alien parasites fight each other without the use of legs has definitely gotta be a first in comic books.

Another first has to be the symbiote-possessed zoo animals the rest of the Avengers are doing battle with outside. Yeah. Not much to explain. The zoo animals that were chillin' at the private zoo got loose, and then when the symbiotes became separated from Flash and Kasady they found the closest living hosts (the townspeople having been freed when Kasady was separated from Carnage).




There's a rather delightful scene where a gorilla taken over by the Venom symbiote tries to get to the meat packing plant to help Flash, but is attacked by a Carnage-possessed lion. All looks hopeless until Spider-Man kicks the lion and the gorilla goes loping off toward the meat packing plant. I have a tendency to be oblivious to just how weird things can be the first time around, so I'm glad I'm going back over all of this, as the entire issue is really quite odd.




The ape has good timing too, as Flash is sort of hanging from a meat hook at this point.




And thus ends the cripple fight as Flash gets his symbiote back and grabs Kasady by the neck. Then the air force drops napalm on all of the symbiote-controlled animals and we're pretty much done. There's one last bit of niceness though. Not surprisingly, when the heroes defeat Carnage and capture the symbiote, rather than chainsawing him into several pieces and dropping them into various parts of the ocean all across the world, they arrest him. Cause that's what heroes do. Now, the whole "Why are we arresting him when we could remove this threat to the world forever?" trope has been done, but given the level of Carnage's depravity in this series it feels like a particularly relevant question this time around. He may not have almost destroyed the world, but I highly doubt anyone who would force over a thousand people to each remove one of their own teeth is worth saving.

While Kasady is being marched onto the Avengers' plane, the man whose wife and two children had been ordered to kill him by Carnage walks up with a shotgun. He fires one round at Kasady that accidentally hits (and bounces off of) the Thing, before being disarmed by Spider-Man. After a couple conversation bubbles giving the ol' "Do you want to become him?!" thing, the man shuts Spider-Man up by telling him that he'd had three children before Carnage showed up.




The thing that makes this scene ring true for me is that it just makes the heroes look so impotent. Most of them have just spent the majority of the series being forced to watch as this sadist had his way with an entire town. And now they have to put him back in his cage to wait for the next massacre. There's usually some moral that ends up justifying this though, at least to some extent, but when Spider-Man tries he finds himself speechless when confronted by the depth of this man's tragedy. Who knows how many people are dead, half the town has been destroyed, not to mention the psychological trauma on all of those still alive, and Cletus Kasady gets to fly away with a smirk on his face to three square meals a day in some prison. Again, not a terribly original concept, but it's very appropriate here.

God this series was fun.

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