Comic Book Questions Answered – where I answer whatever questions you folks might have about comic books (feel free to e-mail questions to me at brianc@cbr.com).

Reader Easton P. wrote in to ask, "I saw a few of your posts and saw to email you with questions so, Hey, I was wondering if you knew, in comics I’ve never really thought about it but after watching the venom movie I was wondering, does venom HAVE to eat people? Will he die if he doesn’t? Or is it just a preference? "

Man, people really do seem to be interested in Venom and the whole eating people thing, huh? I've already addressed whether Venom literally has eaten a brain or not. I've also addressed what, precisely, happens when Venom eats someone. Well, now we have whether he eats people because he likes it or whether he has to.

The answer, like most things in this world, is a bit complicated.

The short answer is generally speaking, he is compelled to do so.

As I've noted a few times in these questions, in the early appearances by Venom, he just told people constantly that he wanted to eat their brains but he didn't actually do it. It was just a bluff, ya know?

Everything changed when Venom discovered that they actually had a specific desire for brains in Venom: The Hunger #1 (by Len Kaminski, Ted Halsted and Scott Koblish), he was disgusted...

Eddie Brock was separated from the Venom symbiote and he was thrown into a asylum. While he was trapped there, he still had his connection to the symbiote, which was killing people and eating their brains...

In the end, he reveals that the symbiote had an addiction to a chemical that was found in the human brain. The symbiote, thus, had a compulsion to get that chemical any way that it could, including sucking it out of a person's brain...

However, the key thing is that it was the chemical that he wanted, not the brains themselves. Therefore, when Eddie Brock figured out that the same chemical could be found in chocolate, he began feeding the symbiote chocolate regularly and that solved that particular compulsion...

So yeah, in one very specific context, Venom is compelled to eat brains. So is that the answer?

In a way.

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Eventually, Eddie Brock split from the Venom symbiote and after a false start when the symbiote didn't like the guy who got the symbiote next, the symbiote bonded with Mac Gargan, the supervillain known as the Scorpion.

Here's the issue. Gargan, as Venom, LOVED TO EAT PEOPLE.

Here he is in Sinister Spider-Man #1 (by Brian Reed and Chris Bachalo) chomping away at a bad guy during a point where Gargan was pretending to be Spider-Man as part of Norman Osborn's Dark Avengers team....

At the end of the issue, we discovered that there were loads of low-level villains who were getting their limbs bitten off by "Spider-Man"!

In the second issue of the series, we learn that Venom now loves to eat squirrels...

So I think the real answer is that it depends on who the host is. The Venom symbiote will gladly eat people if the host is cool with it, and when the host IS cool with it, then Venom will dig eating people. Otherwise, it is just a compulsion to get that specific chemical.

Thanks for the question, Easton!

If anyone else has a comic question for me, drop me a line at brianc@cbr.com!