Venom Vol. 4

This is Volume 4 of the Chinese edition of the Venom comic collection. Venom is one of Marvel's most iconic antiheroes: an alien symbiote with a consciousness of its own that must bond with a human host to survive long-term, and once bonded acts under the name "Venom." The symbiote copies its host's physical abilities, granting strength, speed, and healing far beyond the human norm, while also amplifying the host's emotions and desires—if the host is good, it helps them fight harder; if the host is evil, it pushes them deeper into darkness. For this reason Venom takes radically different forms in hosts such as Spider-Man, Eddie Brock, and Flash Thompson, and is both Spider-Man's classic archenemy and his most contradictory "lethal protector." Stories built around Venom often go beyond fighting to the relationship between a person and "the other self"—mutual dependence and mutual opposition: the symbiote whispers, demands, and conceals, while the host struggles between power and selfhood. This volume continues the series' dark tone and strong visual style, collecting the serialized content belonging to the fourth volume and best read in order to appreciate the gradual unfolding of character relationships and world-building. As the specific issues and plot of this volume could not be verified, please refer to the actual table of contents; reading the first three volumes before this one will make for a more coherent experience.