King In Black is very much a Venom story guest-starring a bunch of other Marvel characters, as is of course appropriate, given that it is the culmination of writer Donny Cates and artist Ryan Stegman's years-long work on the character. I say that even though Venom Eddie Brock himself spends the middle section of the book unconscious on his deathbed; even while he's temporarily K.O.-ed, the story follows the rest of the heroes' attempts to deal with his villain and protect his son Dylan.
Despite all of the build-up in previous comics, and occasional references to events within them, the five-issue series is remarkably straightforward. Brock, through Venom, can feel the arrival of Knull, the titular King In Black, an evil space god responsible for the creation of the symbiote aliens like Venom and his ilk, and his giant army of black, slimy, Venom-like dragons. Venom calls Captain America, who calls the Avengers and a bunch of other heroes, and they prepare to fight Knull.
That's...basically the entirety of the story. Knull rains black goo on the Earth, covering all of New York City in whatever material Venom is made out of and, in short order, he encases the entire Earth in it, completely blotting out the sun. He takes over Captain America and a mess of other heroes with said symbiote stuff, temporarily turning them all evil. The familiar Marvel event series beats are all played; Captain America and Black Panther talk battle plans with the various leaders and brains. Iron Man and Mister Fantastic work on weapons and high-tech solutions. Thor acts divinely.* In a straight repeat of one of the weirder event series, Siege, The Sentry is re-killed, apparently torn in half as he had previously torn Ares in half. (Knull accomplishes this early in the series to establish his Big Bad bona fides but, oddly, is unable to repeat the trick when he gets his claws on Thor; presumably Sentry is uniquely vulnerable to him because of The Void within him...?).
Despite all this, Cates manages to keep the focus on Knull, Brock and his son Dylan, who has a special power over the black goo and is of special interest to Knull. The resolution to the conflict is ultimately a stray bit of Marvel trivia that Cates incorporates into the mythology of Knull, something that sounds a bit out of left-field when just laid out, but makes a degree of sense when one considers its host/symbiote aspects and how it compares to the basic idea of Venom (Sorry if I'm sounding vague; I'm trying not to completely spoil the series).
Structurally, it all works quite well, and is an extremely, even refreshingly complete story, with very little in here that suggests one even need to read any tie-ins at all, just two pages in the second issue suggesting that various plans are all going to be attempted to stop Knull (and likely play out in other comics).
Having little to no interest in Venom, and having not followed anything leading up to it, I wasn't particularly interested in
King In Black until I started reading it, but I ended up finding it a fairly satisfying read, providing the expected pleasures of a Marvel crossover series—that is, a whole bunch of Marvel characters in the same story, including a few that don't normally get much spotlight in these sorts of stories, like X-Men who aren't Wolverine and The Silver Surfer—and without any glaringly stupid or nonsensical moments, like, um,
some crossovers I could name.
I'm not a particular fan of Stegman's art style, but he draws it well, and the storytelling in this book is easy enough to read and get lost in. I imagine it was a blast for fans of his, especially those who have been following the Venom goings-on for so long now, getting to see him draw so much of the Marvel Universe.
I was quite impressed with one double-page splash, pages 10 and 11 of the collection, in which the Fantasticar and two Quinjets speed towards New York City over the black sea, the dark sky filled with dragons pointed like arrows down at the city. It's an apocalyptic image, and a nice use of the space to present the reader with arresting communication of what's going on.
I have no idea what the Hulk is doing on the cover. I don't think he appears in the story at all.
King In Black: Atlantis Attacks could hardly have less to do with the overall
King In Black storyline. In fact, it's main connection seems to be its title and the "King In Black" logo in the upper left corner of the cover. Literally only two if it's 100 pages has anything like a mention or allusion to the events of the series it's titled after.
On the very last pages of the five-issue series, Jimmy Woo is shown looking up at some holographic projections of the weird Venom dragons that serve as foot soldiers for Knull, and he says to his gathered allies, "Agents of Atlas...it's time to help a king..." and, then, on the facing page, which scans more like an ad than a part of the comic proper, his sentences concludes in a narration box, "...fight the King In Black." and we see Woo and his allies fighting shoulder to shoulder with Namor against the slobbery dragons.
And that's it, making this perhaps the most shameless "red sky"-style tie-in to an event crossover story I've ever seen. I can only imagine how disappointed and irritated anyone who picked up this series specifically because it was labeled as a King In Black tie-in must have been.
In reality, it is actually an Agents of Atlas comic, and it seemingly follows plotlines not merely from 2019's War of The Realms: New Agents of Atlas, which I did read, but also from that same year's later miniseries Agents of Atlas and several issues of Sword-Master and Aero, all of which I did not.
That said, writer Greg Pak's plot is easy enough to make sense of, even without the two paragraph of prose on the title page summarizing the set-up. The new Agents, which is composed entirely of heroes of Asian descent and who were more or less commissioned by Jimmy Woo in the War of The Realms tie-in series, are the protectors of the high-concept setting of "the portal city of Pan," an independent city-state with semi-magical portals that open up into various Asian cities and communities and was founded and lead by a shady tech billionaire type.
The city runs on dragon power, and has an Atlantean dragon chained up against its will, its constant ARRROOOO-ing tickling Agents leader Amadeus Cho and the other heroes consciences...and eventually summoning Namor there to start throwing punches and leveling threats. Atlantis wants its dragon back, so Pan better figure out how to run on something other than captive dragon within 24 hours, or the cover of the trade paperback is going to happen. (Say, wait a minute. Namor wears black now, and he's a king....is he the "King In Black" mentioned in the title? No, that wouldn't explain the use of Knull's logo in the corner...)
To help Cho's team, Woo shows up with his team, the original Agents of Atlas (the team loosely based on 1978's What If? #9, the one that writer Jeff Parker and Leonard Kirk introduced in 2006). Contrary to the laws of superhero team team-ups, they don't do battle—Gorilla-Man does mention the possibility, though—although there is a distinct lack of trust between the two teams.
There's also another faction of underwater people, the Sirenas, who want to attack Atlantis, preferably with the help of some of the Agents of Atlas.
Writer Greg Pak juggles something like a dozen and a half superheroes, most of whom prove pretty unnecessary to the plot, only a half-dozen or so characters getting any substantial lines or panel-time. Still, he does an admirable job with such a huge cast (this is the sort of comic which labels each new character upon each appearance each chapter, and which does so necessarily), and with such a confused narrative, which seems to be the second half of an Agents of Atlas limited series that was instead advertised as a King In Black crossover, which, as stated, it most assuredly is not.
Ario Anindito and Robert Gill provide the artwork, and it is all fine and readable, but unremarkable, with a somewhat disappointing lack of distinction between the two groups of Agents, one of which is weird and dated, the other of which is exotic, slick and of the moment.
I ultimately liked the comic okay, but man, what an instance of the label not matching the contents...
King In Black: Avengers collects a half-dozen different one-shots that tie in to
King In Black. The word "Avengers" is here seemingly used as a stand-in for Marvel heroes, as only three of the heroes whose names are in the titles of the one-shots are technically current Avengers (Black Panther, Captain America and Iron Man), while a generous reading of the word might include The Hulk, who was a founding Avenger, and Hulkling and Wiccan, former Young Avengers who were on a New Avengers line-up before their current status quo. Also featured is Ghost Rider, but not the Robbie Reyes version who is currently on the Avengers; instead, it's the original Ghost Rider, Johnny Blaze.
The best of the stories is probably writer Al Ewing and artist Aaron Kuder's King In Black: Immortal Hulk, and, perhaps coincidentally, it is the furthest removed from the goings-on of the title event. A three-paragraph summary of the Hulk's status quo that prefaces the comic—each story has a similar paragraph or so explaining either the events of King In Black as they relate to the characters or the characters' status quos—explains that the Hulk's many historical personalities and forms have been whittled down to two, the child-like Savage Hulk and Joe Fixit, "the former gray Hulk who now manifests in Banner's body."
That's about all one needs to know to follow the story, which is completely wordless. On the snowy streets of an otherwise ordinary New York City (which differs sharply from the black goo-covered hellscape of the other stories set at the time), the Hulk, here drawn so that he is oddly tall, thin and elongated, encounters a symbiote-infected creature, distracting him from his interest in Christmas with horror. He then encounters policemen, who are infected by the creature, and they give chase to him.
As with the Immortal Hulk title, it's an effective bit of body horror, and the symbiote menace that is such a part of the King In Black storyline fits in quite nicely, as it involves ordinary people turning into horrifying monsters. Kuder's art is incredible, not only at rendering the wince-inducing transformations—the Hulk basically turns himself inside out when changing forms these days—but in the storytelling. As he would have to be here, or the story wouldn't work otherwise. It works, and does so quite well.
Of course, I said that those three paragraphs are all one really needs to know to follow the story, which is so far removed from the goings-on of King In Black that the reason there is a human-infecting black gooey creature isn't even relevant to the story, but that's not quite true; I mean, you'd still have to know a bit about Joe Fixit and the Hulk's multiple identities and so on, wouldn't you?
In that respect, none of the stories in this collection are completely self-contained, or written for brand-new readers (Not that there's much danger of a brand-new reader picking up this collection anyway, no matter what Stan Lee supposedly said about every comic being someone's first). They're all in media res, with most continuing from wherever the character was left off in some point of the overarching crossover: Captain America is still trying to shake off having been possessed by Knull and not letting his partners/replacements Falcon and Winter Soldier down; Black Panther is once again defending his unconquerable nation of Wakanda from an alien invasion set on conquering it; Iron Man has built a new armor out of a symbiote and his Extremis armor and is feeling sad about Eddie Brock, who he feels he let die.
Oddly, the remaining stories also begin in media res, picking up from ongoing storylines, but not from King In Black, and thus can be fairly disorienting, if you haven't been following the characters (and I haven't).
King In Black: Ghost Rider opens with the title character dragging Mephisto from the back of his bike—Mephisto, who I last saw in the pages of Avengers, where he was the bad guy behind all of the various sub-plots—and basically has him getting distracted from his mission of rounding up escaped demons from hell by the events of the crossover. The second Ghost Rider, Danny Ketch, shows up in a weird new costume that looks like a medieval Daredevil costume and asks to be called "Death Rider"; he speaks in hard-to-read white-on-brown dialogue bubbles. A handful of other name characters are with him; this seems to follow on the heels of whatever miniseries the characters last appeared in, although it is mostly confusing here (Surprisingly, a fairly big development occurs, as Blaze relinquishes the crown of hell to Mephisto.)
King In Black: Wiccan and Hulkling finds the characters where Empyre left them (and I did read that one!), as the kings of the new combined Skrull/Kree Empire. They try to go on a honeymoon, but it is rather immediately interrupted by a swarm of the giant Venom dragons and a few Venomized astronauts. Oddly, this is the final story in the collection, although, sequentially, it would have had to be the first to happen, as the dragon swarm was on its way to Earth when it invades their honeymoon planet.
All of the stories in the collection are competently written and drawn, the only real weakness evident being that a reader needs to have a pretty good idea what's going on in the Marvel Universe, or at least with the characters concerned, to make sense of them. This is a problem with Big Two super-comics in general, though.
Beyond the Immortal Hulk special, my favorite were probably King In Black: Iron Man/Doctor Doom and the Wiccan and Hulkling special. The former is written by Christopher Cantwell and drawn by Salvador Larroca, the latter by Tini Howard and Luciana Vecchio. The Iron Man special quite randomly has the two armored characters confronted by a symbiote-possessed Santa Claus and eight oily reindeer. Those are fun characters anyway, and while I think Cantwell dropped the ball on a line or three of Doom's, he more than makes up for it with this delightful bit of comic book-iness:
As for Wiccan and Hulkling, I've never been terribly fond of either character, but Howard writes them both well as down-to-earth, sincere young people in love and with intact senses of humor, somewhat overwhelmed by their current stations. There are lots of fairly effective jokes riffing on an invention of their fellow former New Avenger Roberto Da Costa's, and superior superhero art by Vecchio, whose style is my favorite of the half-dozen who contribute to this book, even if Kuder's is, perhaps, technically the best-told story in the book.
King In Black: Planet of the Symbiotes collects the three-issue anthology series by that name, plus
King In Black: Black Knight #1, because it had to be collected somewhere, and
King In Black: Avengers was already all full. Each issue of
Planet was split in half, telling two ten-page stories of what one of several extremely minor characters were up to during the events of the crossover series, with some of them seeming to set in motion events that seem like they must be important elsewhere.
The characters featured are Scream, (some of those associated with) Ravencroft Institute For the Criminally Insane, American Kaiju**, Hornet, Cloak and Dagger and Toxin.
Of these half-dozen short stories, the most personally appealing was probably the American Kaiju story by writer Marc Bernardin and artist Kyle Hotz. Bernardin admirably lays narration over the events in an attempt to make the story about something other than a extremely-spikey Godzilla variant screaming "YEWWWW- ESSSSS- AYYYY!" in red, white and blue font over and over while killing Venom dragons—about how U.S. foreign policy is like a clumsy giant monster trying to do good but doing lots of bad in the process— but I don't think he succeeds; it's hard to counter-program against such monster-on-monster violence, particularly when drawn with the gusto Hotz approaches the subject matter with.
Other than that, I'm afraid nothing in these short stories really spoke to me. I suppose artist Guiu Vilanova managed a horrifying variant of the symbiotes in the Scream story, after four symbiotes—Riot, Agony, Lasher and Phage***—Voltron into one big, vagina-mouthed composite symbiote, and the Ravencroft story is interesting in that I guess astronaut-turned-werewolf-turned star god John Jameson is in charge of Marvel's Arkham Asylum for some reason ("What do ya think of Jameson?" one guard asks, to which his fellow replies, "I dunno. He seems like a decent enough guy...werewolf stuff aside.")
The Black Knight special seems to be the most potentially important story in this collection by far. Written by Simon Spurrier and drawn by Jesus Saiz, it features the on-again, off-again Avengers character—referred to as an "Avengers adjacent" hero by the characters in the story itself—battling against a Venom dragon, which should be right up his alley, then losing his Ebony Blade somewhere in Shanghai (I'm not sure how fast those dragons are supposed to fly, but this one gets the Black Knight from the skies above England to Shanghai in the space of about two pages).
There he meets newer heroes Aero and Sword-Master, who kinda sorta attempt to help him retrieve his blade, while he reels with a revelation about it and his bloodline that Knull offers him in his head. Spurrier does a pretty good job of making the character interesting while simultaneously making him appear like a crazy person.
I reviewed King In Black: Thunderbolts in this post, before I read King In Black proper, but I thought I should at least include a link to it here for the sake of completeness. If you don't click over to read or re-read it, jus let me say here that it is excellent, and stands on its own without having to read King In Black.
*Captain Marvel, oddly enough, is all but MIA. She appears in a few panels, but just standing by the other Avengers. She doesn't get any lines, and doesn't seem to take any sort of leadership position the way that many of her fellow Avengers, including Blade, do.
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