From Saved By The Bell-themed restaurants to new Crash Bandicoot and Spyro the Dragon video games, the 1990s are back in a big way. Now, one of that decade's biggest comic characters, Venom, is set to reclaim his place among Marvel's most popular antiheroes. With Venom, starring Tom Hardy, set to hit theaters in October and Donny Cates and Ryan Stegman's run on Venom getting buzz in comic shops, it's a good time to be a Venom fan. When David Michelinie and Todd McFarlane turned Spider-Man's alien symbiote suit into the monstrous Venom in 1988's Amazing Spider-Man #299, this dark reflection of Marvel's web-slinger was an instant hit with fans. As the symbiote passed down from Peter Parker to Eddie Brock to Flash Thompson and other hosts, Venom evolved into a dangerous force for good. Throughout his own adventures and Spider-Man's titles, Venom also developed a range of fantastic powers and abilities.

Now, CBR is counting down Venom's strongest powers. In this list, we'll be taking a look at all of Venom's most powerful abilities and how they've been used over the years. Even though most of Venom's powers are based on Spider-Man's abilities, the symbiote also has some unique powers that are far stranger than anything Spider-Man can do. We'll be combing through Venom's history in comics, TV and film and looking at some of Venom's most jaw-dropping accomplishments. While the symbiote momentarily had even more fantastic powers when it bonded with heroes like Groot and Captain Marvel, we'll be sticking to the powers that the suit has on a more consistent basis.

25 DIMENSIONAL POCKETS

Venom Pockets

After the Venom symbiote bonded with Peter Parker on an alien world in 1984's Secret Wars, he discovered one of the suit's most useful-but-boring features, pockets, once he got back to Earth. When he picked up small items like his wallet or his camera, the symbiote created "dimensional apertures" where he could store foreign objects while keeping a sleek, aerodynamic profile.

When Peter's friend, Flash Thompson, became Venom in 2011, he willed the symbiote to create more visible pockets to store weapons, ammunition and anything else he needed for his work as a government operative.

24 PREHENSILE TONGUE

Venom Tongue

Without a doubt, Venom has the most famous tongue in superhero comics. While it wasn't really part of Venom's early designs, Erik Larsen made it iconic on the cover to 1991's Amazing Spider-Man #347. Now, Venom looks incomplete if he doesn't have a giant tongue jutting out of his oversized mouth.

While Venom's tongue is usually just part of his visual flair, Eddie Brock's Venom took down the Fantastic Four's Thing from the inside with it in 2004's Venom #11, by Daniel Way and Francisco Herrera. After that battle, Venom's tongue was even used to clone a new symbiote, Mania.

23 FLIGHT

Venom Wings 2

During Donny Cates and Ryan Stegman's ongoing Venom run, Eddie Brock's Venom got several new abilities that are still being revealed. He got the new powers after encountering the hyper-powerful Knull, the God of the Symbiotes. After briefly merging with its creator, the Venom symbiote sprouted a massive set of red wings to save Brock and Miles Morales' Spider-Man from crashing to Earth.

Even before Brock's Venom got a power upgrade, he occasionally formed wings to glide through the air. But since he doesn't usually have any problems getting around by web-swinging, the wings are a bit redundant.

22 ALIEN HIVE MIND

Venom Planet of Symbiotes

While Venom initially seemed to be a unique symbiote, it's been linked to the Klyntar hive mind on a few different occasions. When Flash Thompson was Venom, he discovered that several symbiotes formed the Agents of the Cosmos in 2015's Guardians of the Galaxy #23, by Brian Michael Bendis and Valerio Schiti. Venom briefly joined these heroic warriors and shared their intelligence through their hive mind.

As Eddie Brock recently learned, that wasn't the first time the Klyntar shared a mind. After creating the symbiotes, Knull linked them by a hive mind that increased their overall power dramatically.

21 COSMIC AWARENESS

Venom Space Knight

After the symbiotes rebelled against their monstrous creator, several of them ended up bonding with noble warriors from various worlds. When those heroic symbiotes gathered together, they formed the Agents of the Cosmos to serve as an intergalactic peacekeeping force.

When Flash Thompson's Venom was working for the cosmic do-gooders in the 2015 series Venom: Space Knight, the "voice of the cosmos" gave him a kind of cosmic awareness. Essentially, it told him where his help or protection was needed. Once the symbiote left Flash and devolved into back into its feral, violent form, Venom presumably lost this ability.

20 INDEPENDENT HUMANOID FORM

Venom and Eddie

After Venom's first encounter with the Agents of the Cosmos, the symbiote developed the ability to create an independent humanoid form. While Venom still looks like a rough sketch of a human, the symbiote still has a body and a mouth full of teeth in this form, which can be sustained for 12 hours.

When Flash's Venom encountered Spider-Man during in 2016's Civil War II, Venom used this ability to separate from Flash and sneak up on the web-slinger. While hostless symbiotes are usually just globs of goo, Venom even took a humanoid form while searching for a new host.

19 SYMBIOTE CREATION

Venom Carnage Bagley

Like all symbiotes, Venom can reproduce by himself. Unfortunately, Venom and the symbiote's children haven't always gotten along. In stories like the fan-favorite 1993 crossover "Maximum Carnage," Venom and Spider-Man teamed up to battle Carnage, Venom's most famous child.

A few years later, the Life Foundation extracted several "seeds" from Venom to create the symbiotes Scream, Phage, Agony, Riot and Lasher. Other parts of the Venom symbiote were used to create Anti-Venom and Mania, and Carnage also has some scary, powerful children like Toxin. With all that in mind, Venom should probably skip the next symbiote family reunion.

18 WALL-CRAWLING

Venom Lethal Protector

When the Venom symbiote bonded with Spider-Man, it absorbed most of his abilities and passed them down to all of its later hosts. Since Spider-Man can do whatever a spider can, that means Venom can too.

While Eddie Brock's Venom can match Spider-Man's superhuman speed and agility, he can also copy Spider-Man's signature wall-crawling abilities. Like Spidey, Venom can crawl on walls by mentally controlling electrostatic forces on a molecular level. While other Venom hosts used this skill more irregularly, Brock's Venom crawled walls fairly often in comics and on-screen in 2007's Spider-Man 3.

17 DIGITAL CONSCIOUSNESS TRANSFER

Venom Surfs the Web

With one of his strangest powers, Eddie Brock's Venom was able to send his mind into the Internet. In 1995's Venom: Carnage Unleashed #4, by Larry Hama and Andrew Wildman, Carnage was hunting down people who played "Carnage Unleashed," a video game about his exploits.

Using their symbiote suits, both Venom and Carnage entered the Internet on a "molecular level" and traveled between hard-wired computers through Ethernet cables. After Carnage attacked several gamers in the real world, he and Venom had a final Lawnmower Man-esque showdown in cyberspace. Thankfully, Venom has surfed the web through more traditional means since then.

16 VENOMUS BITE

Venom Tom Hardy

Despite his name, Venom usually isn't billed as a poisonous character. While Venom's massive jaw is usually used to scare and/or eat people depending on his mood, Venom can deliver a toxic bite with his razor-sharp teeth when he feels like it.

In 2000's Peter Parker: Spider-Man #16, by Howard Mackie and John Romita Jr., Eddie Brock's Venom took a bite out of another one of Spider-Man's occasional villains, Sandman. After Venom managed to bite the seemingly impermeable villain in battle, Sandman was barely able to hold himself together and ultimately disintegrated after being exposed to Venom's venom.

15 SIZE MANIPULATION

Venom Mac Gargan

Depending on who's bonded with the Venom symbiote, Venom could be a slender figure with a sleek profile or a massive hulking beast. When Peter Parker and Flash Thompson were Venom's hosts, the symbiote was about the size of a regular human being. Since Eddie Brock was a weight-lifter, the symbiote exaggerated his bigger frame.

When Spider-Man's foe Mac Gargan, the Scorpion, bonded with Venom in 2005, his Venom changed sizes several times. While he looked mostly human on Norman Osborn's Dark Avengers team, he grew into a giant savage monster when he lost control over the symbiote's violent urges.

14 INVULNERABILITY

Venom X-Men

Between Brock's brawls with Spider-Man and the symbiote's intergalactic adventures, Venom has taken a lot of punishment over the years. Thanks to Venom's invulnerability, the symbiote's hosts usually haven't suffered too much. Venom is durable enough to absorb impacts from bullets, hi-tech weapons and some of the strongest fighters in the Marvel Universe without missing a step.

While symbiotes are famously weak against fire and high-pitched sonic weapons, Venom has occasionally demonstrated some resistance to those attacks. More recently, Knull revealed that these vulnerabilities are more mental than physical in nature, which could explain Venom's fluctuating resistance to them.

13 EXTRA-SENSORY PERCEPTION

Venom Todd McFarlane

While the Venom symbiote has most of Spider-Man's powers, it never absorbed Spider-Man's danger-sensing Spider-Sense. Despite that, Venom still has his own "Spider-Sense" in the form of extra-sensory perception. The symbiote can essentially "see" in all directions simultaneously, which gives its host advance notice of incoming threats.

In addition to acting as an early warning system, this enhanced spatial awareness gives Venom a comprehensive understanding of its surroundings. For instance, Flash Thompson's Venom used his tendrils and ESP to precisely pick up, aim and fire weapons at attackers who were behind him in Rick Remender and Tony Moore's Venom #1.

12 TELEPATHIC RESISTANCE

Venom Spider-Sense

While the symbiote never absorbed Spider-Man's Spider-Sense, Venom doesn’t show up on Spider-Man's early warning system. This makes Venom one of the few villains who can sneak up on Peter Parker. Since Spider-Man is so reliant on his Spider-Sense in combat, it also makes fighting Venom much harder.

Due to the unique bond between the Venom symbiote and its host's mind, Venom is also resistant to other types of telepathic attacks. While the Ghost Rider's Penance Stare usually makes villains feel the pain of their victims, it knocked the supernatural hero out whenever he's tried to use it against Venom.

11 INORGANIC MATTER MANIPULATION

Venommobile

While the Venom symbiote usually only takes over living matter, Venom turned a rusty old car into the Venom-mobile in 2013. Flash Thompson's Venom found the car while he was chasing criminals in Cullen Bunn and Pepe Larraz's Venom #36.

Even though the car was missing wheels and other vital car parts, Venom essentially possessed the car and temporarily restored it, complete with its trademark tongue sticking out of the hood. When Venom left the vehicle, it returned to its previous state, but this moment hinted at some inorganic matter manipulating powers that the symbiote has rarely shown.

10 ENVIRONMENTAL ADAPTABILITY

Venom in Space

Whether it's in deep space or under the sea, the Venom symbiote constantly adapts itself to protect its host. Since the symbiotes aren't technically organic, they can survive almost anywhere, even in the vacuum of space. When bonded to a host, symbiotes like Venom are just as adaptable and can operate underwater, in toxic fumes or in open space.

On a slightly more grounded note, the Venom symbiote can make even smaller adaptations on the fly. In the Spectacular Spider-Man animated series, Venom sprouted a second mouth on his torso after Spider-Man webbed up his mouth.

9 ORGANIC WEBBING

Venom Webbing

When Spider-Man initially bonded with the symbiote, the first thing he noticed about it was that the suit could make its own webbing. Since Peter Parker usually relies on artificial webbing, this was a revelation for the hero. After the symbiote bonded with Eddie Brock, Venom kept his organic web-slinging powers, even though he didn’t absorb them from Peter.

Like Spider-Man's webs, Venom's webbing can hold about 125 pounds of pressure per square millimeter and dissolves after a few hours. However, Venom creates webs out of his own body and making too many webs can use up the symbiote's resources.

8 TENTACLES AND TENDRILS

Venom Tendrils

Even though most of Venom's powers are based on Spider-Man's abilities, the symbiote reflexively relies on tentacles and tendrils as an effective natural defense mechanism. When the symbiote needs a host or is especially angry, Venom usually has some kind of tendrils sprouting off of its body.

Flash Thompson's Venom used tendrils as another few sets of hands. Meanwhile, Eddie Brock's Venom made tentacles a cornerstone of his melee combat style in Capcom's Marvel fighting games. As the trailers for Venom have already shown, Tom Hardy's Venom seemingly forms tentacles to whip away would-be attackers without even thinking about it.

7 CAMOUFLAGE

Underwater Venom

Venom might seem more like a bruiser than a covert operator, but the symbiote can camouflage itself in almost any situation. When Eddie Brock's Venom hunted his prey in the 1990s, he turned invisible fairly often. Toy Biz even released a Stealth Venom" action figure made out of transparent plastic.

In David Michelinie and Erik Larsen's Amazing Spider-Man #348, Venom emulated the color and consistency of water to sneak up on Spider-Man. Venom even hid as a black stripe on the side of a train to retreat from a battle in Larry Hama and Andrew Wildman's Venom: Carnage Unleashed #2.

6 MATTER GENERATION

Venom Flash Thompson

While Venom might reflexively create tendrils, the symbiote can create all kinds of weapons and tools when given conscious guidance through its empathic connection to its host. For Eddie Brock and later Venom hosts, these weapons usually included razor-sharp claws and the occasional shield or scythe during the heat of battle.

When Flash Thompson, who was a double amputee, bonded with Venom, the symbiote generated a pair of legs that allowed him to walk and move with superhuman agility. Meanwhile, Mac Gargan's Venom sprouted a weaponized tail modeled after the one that he used for years as Scorpion.