In 2018, writer Donny Cates and artist Ryan Stegman introduced some major cosmic horror elements into the world of Venom with their creation and introduction of Knull; a malevolent, god-like entity who created the alien symbiotes that Eddie Brock and other Marvel heroes and villains have bonded with. The threat of Knull escalated in 2019's Absolute Carnage, also by Cates and Stegman, where Venom and other heroes tried to keep Carnage and other Knull worshippers from releasing their god
That series ended with Carnage's defeat, but Eddie Brock had to let Knull escape his cosmic prison in order to save his son, Dylan. Since then, the god of darkness and his army of symbiote dragons have been on a collision course with Earth. This December, they arrive in King in Black, the next Marvel event and chapter in Cates and Stegman's ongoing Venom epic.
CBR spoke with Cates about the series, its tie-ins and its major players and has a preview of Ryan Stegman, JP Mayer, Frank Martin and Clayton Cowles' King in Black #1 and a first look at Stegman's art from King in Black #2 and Iban Coello and Jesus Aburtov's Venom #31, a King in Black tie-in issue.
CBR: In King in Black, the symbiote god, Knull, arrives on Earth. So, is this essentially a full-scale alien invasion story?
Donny Cates: Yeah, I hadn't really thought about it like that, but it totally is. It's so much different than Absolute Carnage, which was a bit of a hometown threat that primarily featured Eddie and other Spider-Man characters.
The King in Black is very much an all-hands on deck, end of the world, omega-level threat. It's going to bring together some allies that will have to put aside some ancient beefs and problems in order to come together.
My favorite stories of all time are when heroes look to other heroes for help. Some of the best Superman stories are the ones where the whole superhero world looks to Batman for help and Batman goes, “Eh! I don't know, Clark?” [Laughs] That's a great Superman story, and this story is really cool because in it the whole superhero community and some of the villains as well come together and go, “I don't know. Eddie?”
That puts Eddie Brock in this spot of being that guy whether he's earned it or not. Obviously, he hasn't, and he'd be the first person to tell you that. He's not Captain America or Iron Man, but he happens to be the guy on deck right now. He knows about Knull. He's the guy who ipso facto caused this thing and maybe has the key to solving it.
So, you have this whole world uniting around Eddie Brock, which is kind of a metaphor for how appreciative Ryan and I are of Marvel and the fanbase rallying around us. They've put us in a position where we can tell a story where it makes sense that the whole Marvel U would look to Venom to solve a problem. That's not always something that could have happened.
You've always written Eddie Brock as a down-to-Earth guy even with him having an alien “other.” So, I imagine he feels awkward being the center of that kind of attention.
It's not so much awkward at being the center of attention; he feels very regretful. He doesn't want to be the center of attention because he brought an ancient god to Earth to murder everybody. And even though he saved the day in Absolute Carnage, people still look at him as Eddie Brock. They don't look at him the way they look at Spider-Man, and it eats him up inside.
Eddie is a guy who's very put upon even going back to his origin. He didn't want this ancient, alien, symbiote to fall out of a church and make him into this thing. And once again, he's found himself in a spot where the world has seen fit to put him at the center of everything and dump this on top of him. It's a little different this time though. Because Eddie doesn't have time to care about any of that. We finally have an Eddie Brock that cares about something other than himself. He cares about his son.
So, what you're going to be seeing in this is him weathering all of the guilt, but through a lens of, “Yeah, that's true, but the only way out of this is through, and the only way for me to save my son and not pass this darkness down to him is for me to just pony up, and get it done whatever that means.” So, that's what he's going to do.
That idea of trying to better for the next generation is also a thread in your creator-owned vampire book, Redneck.
Absolutely. I guess it's a theme I continually come back to. Giving Eddie his son was something that was very purposefully done by all of us. Peter Parker has so many people in his life and he has so much to fight for beyond himself and outside of himself. I think that's something really important, and Eddie for so long has been somewhat of a selfish guy, admittedly. Either just trying to survive himself or having selfish, misguided motivations back when he was a stone-cold bad guy. Giving him something to come home to at night, and something to strive and change for was something that grounded him in a way that I really loved.
And of course, he couldn't just come easy to it. It wouldn't be an Eddie Brock story if he just fell in love, had a beautiful baby boy, and raised him. It had to come through this labyrinthine horror show.
Eddie's son, Dylan, has a unique role in King in Black because he could be a weapon against or for Knull. What can you tell us about his part in the story?
It comes down to one thing. What is more terrifying; god, or the thing that nature has evolved to defeat god? And we're going to see that play out. We've really gone out of our way in the book to explain some of the mythology of the symbiotes. We once thought that they spawned randomly and at will. Now we've shown that symbiotes spawn when they're in great peril. And what could be so big and bad out there that the symbiote hive had to create something as powerful as Dylan? And is he going to be enough?
More so than that, at what point does Eddie feel comfortable unleashing such a thing? Eddie knows all of this about his son, but what father in the world wouldn't fight those instincts as much as humanly possible and let their son face this thing? Even if your son was trained from birth to fight a dragon, if you're a father you don't let your son fight the dragon.
That's a contentious point going into The King in Black. Dylan is telling Eddie, “Hey, it's time! Everyone says this is what I'm here for.” And Eddie says, “I don't care! This is my problem. I caused this.” It comes back to that thing we've been talking about of Eddie saying, “I'm not going to pass this down to you. You're going to have a better life than me, I don't care what that means.”
We last saw your other major character, Knull, in action in your Silver Surfer: Black mini-series. That book took place a long time ago though. So, what can you tell us about modern-day Knull? What's his perspective? What is he after?
Every great bad guy needs a cogent point you can get your head around, and for Knull, it's galactic gentrification. He was there before there were stars in the sky and everything belonged to him. This was all supposed to be his, and then the Celestials came, light came, and life came. So, he created an army to try and push that back. Then his army of children rebelled against him and imprisoned him for billions of years.
Knull is a horrible wretched being, but his goals are pretty clear. He wants none of us to be here. [Laughs] He wants to go back to the dark, which in his mind, rightfully belongs to him.
Who are some of the other core characters in The King In Black?
Like I said, it's all hands on deck! You'll see the Avengers, the X-Men, Namor, the Fantastic Four, Black Cat, Doctor Strange. Pretty much everybody!
There's obviously a reason I've been threading the tapestry that I have been with books like Silver Surfer: Black and Thor. So, if you can think of someone they're there. No one is looking up at the sky, watching a billion dragons make landfall and going, “Eh! I'll sit this one out.” It's a big deal from Latveria, to Wakanda, to New York, and beyond. This is a non-optional fight.
Does that include Krakoa as well? Will the mutant nation be part of King In Black?
I can't wait for everybody to read issue #1 and see just how front and center Krakoa is! I have to give enormous props to Jonathan Hickman and the entire team. I also have to give them to Dan Slott, Jason, Aaron, and Gerry Duggan who kind of pulled double duty with his work on the X-Titles and the other books he writes. Also to Chip Zdarsky, and really everyone at Marvel.
About five years ago, I walked into my first Marvel summit ever as a freshman writer and when it was my turn to share my plans for Venom I sat there for an hour and outlined every single arc of the book. I went through to King in Black and beyond. Those plans have remained unchanged, and it was very ambitious and foolhardy of me at the time to assume that I would get that long of a run and assume that people would enjoy this crazy Knull story. But again I want to give as much praise as possible to my fellow creators and the editorial staff at Marvel. Because when it came time to plan for the King In Black we had a big summit and it was very much a Lord of the Rings, “You have my axe” situation, where everyone jumped in and played.
Sometimes, these events land and they can be a little cumbersome and get in the way of people's stories. That's kind of the nature of the beast, but everybody was really excited, and I think it shows on the page. When people start reading these tie-ins and the main event they'll see just how much the entire Marvel crew was down to play.
So, those tie-ins are a chance for creators to do character driven stories against this back drop, and to show in detail some aspects of this massive invasion that you might not have space for in the main book?
Absolutely. It's hard to talk about without spoiling, but in the first two issues, we introduce so many concepts. Plus, in Absolute Carnage, the heroes were caught unaware. No one was prepared for Carnage's return from the dead. This time though Eddie has had time to fill everybody in. He's had to go and face up to Captain America and the Avengers and the superhero community at large and tell them, “This thing is coming, and it's my fault.”
So as a result, the superheroes have had time to plan. It's a very multi-faceted and global plan that allows us to do exactly what you're talking about. People can set their story in places like Latveria, New York, Wakanda, Japan or Krakoa.
You can kind of compare it to War of the Realms in that regard. That was such an earth-spanning event that allowed people to deal with the ramifications of the war in certain sectors while the main force is doing something over there. It all counts. It all has a serious threat. Everyone is kind of establishing their own beachhead.
What sort of action will you focus on in the Venom tie-in? And will Thor tie into King In Black?
In the Venom tie-in, we're going to do something insane that's probably the most top secret of all of this. Our Venom run has focused on eldritch horror and otherworldly themes, and we're going to push that to its absolute extreme in a way that I can not say anything else about whatsoever.
As for Thor? No comment.
So, if you're reading this story for Eddie Brock's journey you want to read both King in Black? and Venom?
Yes, you'll want to read King in Black #1 and then Venom #31, and so on. In a lot of ways, they are the same book. One book will of course focus on the giant threat and the different facets of Knull. The Venom issues will specifically be about what Eddie is doing in regards to this grand thing and his lone quest, which is very weird and out there.
I imagine the other joy of this is the chance to continue your collaboration with artist Ryan Stegman who has drawn Absolute Carnage and quite a bit of your Venom run.
Absolutely! When you look at the publishing schedule it looks like Ryan and I worked together for the first two Venom arcs and then we got back together for Absolute Carnage and then for King In Black. The truth of it is we never stopped working together. He left after the second arc of Venom because we were starting on Absolute Carnage. Then literally a week after he finished Absolute Carnage, we started up on King in Black.
So, Ryan and I have been working together non-stop and we definitely have a language. He's one of the creators I feel most comfortable with. I think that level of trust makes great comics. I think you can tell when you read a book by Ryan and I that we're both having fun. Also, there are definitely things Ryan and I learned from our first outing as event creators. We loved Absolute Carnage, but we saw ways in which we can definitely improve and we're employing what we learned here.
With the success of Absolute Carnage came an increased level of trust from both the fans and Marvel as a whole. So when Ryan and I went into our King in Black summit at Marvel and pitched what we wanted to do, we assumed they'd say yes to about 80 percent of it, but to our shock and utter joy they came back into the room and said, “Man, that' so cool! Go do all of it!” So, on a daily basis, Ryan sends me pages where he's like, “I can't believe they're letting us do this! This is insane!” There's a moment in every single issue of King in Black where readers will scream and go, “Oh my god! I can't believe that really just happened!”
Ryan and I were talking the other day about how since we can't discuss the specifics of what happens in this book, really, the only thing we can do is undersell it. [Laughs] Nothing we can tell you guys in interviews will be bombastic enough to truly express just how epic this is going to be.
Finally, the day we're doing this interview you announced a new project that's sort of a perfect gateway for fans of your Marvel work to try some of your creator-owned stuff. What can you tell us about The One You Feed?
It's available right now from Panel Syndicate. It is a collaboration between myself and Dylan Burnett who I did Cosmic Ghost Rider with. He did X-Force, Ant-Man and a lot of other things. Dean White is on colors and John J. Hill on design.
In a very weird way, it's set in the same world that God Country is set in [Cates' 2017 Image comic series with artist Geoff Shaw.]
It's a pay-what-you-want model on Panel Syndicate. So, you can get it right now and pay whatever the hell you want. It really is our way of saying thank you to a community and a fan base that has supported us for so long.
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