This is "From a Different Point of View," a feature where I discuss a comic book series with other people. Ever since the pandemic began, I've been doing twice-weekly reader chats about notable comic book crossovers, storylines or miniseries. We started with Secret Wars and then we did Knightfall and now we're starting with Maximum Carnage!

Each time around, I'll share a chunk of our discussion. Before we even got into the discussion of Spider-Man Unlimited #1, however, we first discussed how Maximum Carnage came to be.

Flavio Sette opened us up with, "So this was all Danny Fingeroth’s idea, right?" I replied with, "Yeah, it was all his idea, but really, I think it was just clearly in the zeitgeist, right? This was literally the same month that Knightfall began in the Batman titles." Flavio replied, "It’s funny to think that this story was coming out around the time of Knightfall. While Bats was dealing with Arkham escapees, Spidey was gathering a team to fight bad guys who broke out of Ravencroft." I replied, "Exactly. The same principle that saw the Batman titles think that the time was right to do a line-wide crossover was the same principle working here. It just seemed to make sense in the wake of the massive success of both the Death of Superman AND X-Cutioner's Song. People remember the amazing sales of Death of Superman. But they sometimes forget that X-Cutioner's Song was doing, like, 5-600,000 copies a chapter!" Flavio replied, "Yeah, I certainly don't tend to think of X-Cutioner as a blockbuster crossover, for sure."

Flavio asked, "The only line-wide Spidey crossover before this was Kraven's Last Hunt, right?" I replied, "There were a few natural crossovers like that. There was one where Betty Brant joins a cult. There was a 'Powerless' story and yeah, the Cosmic Spider-Man stories were basically a shared story. However, nothing since Spider-Man launched. As 'Adjectiveless Spider-Man' was really its own thing until soon before this crossover started." Flavio continued, "But yeah, Kraven's Last Hunt and Maximum Carnage. Both crossovers starred two fairly obscure (at the time) villains. JM DeMatteis mentioned that before he wrote Kraven’s Last Hunt, Kraven was considered a z-list bad guy who hadn’t had a lot of appearances in the last few years before the storyline." Tom A. replied, "Carnage wasn't that obscure, all things symbiote were popular in the 90s." I concurred, "Yeah, Carnage was big at the time. The weird thing to me about the timing of the event. Is the fact that the Spider-Man books had JUST gotten rid of Venom in Amazing #375. And now, three months later, he's back for a 14-part crossover." Sean Whitmore added, "I really liked the first Carnage story, but mostly because Spidey and Venom teamed up. I was young enough to be impressed by the simple logic of 'Venom is stronger than Spider-Man and Carnage is stronger than Venom, so how can he beat him?' But Carnage’s shtick got old fast." Flavio continued, "This, however, is pretty much the story that established Carnage as a major Spider-Man villain. He had appeared in one arc the year before, so he was a very recent creation, I imagine most fans would never have expected to see him so soon or in that prominent of a role that soon." I replied, "No, people were REALLY into Carnage at the time. Were people prepared for a 14-part crossover based on him? Maybe not, but they were ALL in on Carnage at the time. His debut story arc sold EXTREMELY well."

Tom pointed out, "It's amusing how Venom was intended as an evil copy of Spider-Man, and then comes Carnage, an evil copy of Venom because now Venom had become less evil due to his popularity turning him into an anti-hero." I replied, "Pretty much. None of the higher-ups at Marvel editorial were thrilled with idea of doing a Venom series, but he was just TOO popular. So the compromise, of sorts, was that he would just have a series of miniseries and if it ever stopped selling, they could just not do another miniseries." Flavio replied, "It is interesting that Venom went back to being a villain pretty much because he wasn't selling comics as well." Tom noted, "Looking at how Eddie Brock was treated in the 2000s, you can tell that many editors and writers kind of resented him."

I noted, "The other notable part of this issue is that it was sort of the payoff of Marvel's great late 1992/early 1993 push to not lose all of their most popular artists to Image. After the Image founders left, Marvel replaced them on their respective series. But then Image expanded and took most of the REPLACEMENTS, as well. Marvel had to make some moves to keep their various remaining 'hot' artists. And gave good deals to Mark Bagley and the Kubert brothers. And part of their move to keep Ron Lim in their stable was to give him a brand-new Spider-Man series. That he could draw among other prestige assignments."

Sean noted, "I legitimately remember asking my LCD owner on the day Spider-Man Unlimited #1 came out, 'Is this an ongoing series?' I didn’t have a lot of dough in those days, so the prospect of paying $3.99 or whatever it was for a FIFTH Spidey title was a little heavy. But I did it for Ron." I continued, "Lim and Bagley also split the original Venom miniseries, which clearly sold a TON. So that was the big sales pitch - 'We'll give you a $4 quarterly Spider-Man series that kicks off a major crossover, so the the royalties should be quite good.'"

Tom asked, "I take it the title was called "Spider-Man Unlimited" because of X-Men Unlimited?" I replied, "Yeah, they launched around the same time." Sean added, "FF had an Unlimited too, but it proved to be quite limited." Flavio joked, "I get 'Unlimited' as a title, but what I don't get is Avengers Unplugged, or FF Unplugged. Such a weird way to name your title. What, are the Avengers going on MTV Unplugged or something?" I replied, "Sadly, that probably WAS the inspiration, Flavio." Flavio replied, "Yeah, I figured. Still, weird. Just picture Hawkeye covering old Leadbelly songs."

I ended by noting, "Tom DeFalco had left the Spider-Man titles in the late 1980s and was then Marvel's Editor-in-Chief, but Fingeroth got him to agree to return for this quarterly comic. DeFalco thought, 'Okay, I can handle a quarterly comic.' Not knowing he would then have to coordinate with four other writers and basically co-write 12 other comics!"

Next time, Maximum Carnage begins properly!