Amazing Spider-Man/Venom: Death Spiral – Body Count #1 review

What is a villain without a compelling origin? Nothing more than a murderer with a weird fashion sense and a compulsive need to monologue at the least opportune moments. Fortunately for Torment, the latest (and perhaps, most terrifying) such character to make Spider-Man’s life all the more difficult, Marvel has now granted us a look into the twisted birth of the deadliest killer since Cletus Kasady. What kind of an upbringing could have forged such a monster? Let’s find out. 

*Mild spoilers ahead for Amazing Spider-Man/Venom: Death Spiral – Body Count #1*

Our story begins just seconds before Torment’s ends, with him having just been thrown from a rooftop by Venom/Mary Jane. A sentence that still feels weird to write, but that’s a conversation for another day. Anyway, with death imminent for him, Torment decides to think about (what else?) family. 

The issue then jumps back an unspecified amount of time to Vermont, where Torment meets with the last surviving member of a family he’s been slaughtering. Is he here to kill the man, eliminating the last piece of what he refers to as the “spiral?” Short answer: Yes. Longer answer: yes, but only after he does what every villain loves most: monologuing. 

Torment tells the man that family means many things, but that more than anything else, it means pressure. Pressure to be a certain thing or live one’s life according to the expectations of someone else. To illustrate his point, he takes the unfortunate man on a journey through his adolescence. A story that on the surface seems actually kind of wholesome. He seems like a pretty normal teenager. He’s got a loving family and a girlfriend that he loves deeply. Heck, his story takes place at a family reunion of all places. Hardly the type of environment that you’d expect to breed a super villain, much less one as horrific as the one who’s plagued  New York in recent months. 

As I was reading the issue, I kept waiting for some great tragedy to occur. After all, what’s the old line from another comic book serial killer? “All it takes is one bad day.” Could this be that day? The day that young, unassuming Graham would lose his humanity and start down a dark path after something terrible happens to his family?

Writer Charles Soule doesn’t take this well-trod route. Rather, he presents a much more terrifying type of origin: the one that reveals the monster was already there. When the story takes its turn, it comes abruptly, with no warning other than the knowledge of who this character is destined to become. Not only does it happen seemingly out of nowhere, but Soule adds to the horror by the way in which Graham reacts to the moment. There’s no remorse or guilt for his actions, just disappointment that others don’t understand that what he’s doing is meant to help them. 

It’s this twisted logic that led him to tell the man this story. He wants the man to understand him. To accept the warped thinking of his diseased mind as truth. Of course, being a rational person, the man doesn’t do either of these things. Torment isn’t angered by this, however, but merely disappointed once more. Before he can dwell on it for long, however, he’s given a distraction in the form of a text message informing him of a truth that would set the events of recent Spider-Man and Venom titles into motion. 

So there we have it. The origin story of Torment. The book was a bit of a slow burn, from the prolonged lead up to him actually beginning his story to the events of the story themselves. It also reads less like a true origin story and more like a manifesto, with Torment using the events not to explain how he became who he is, but rather to try to make others understand how he sees things. If anything, it just makes him that much more terrifying, as his actions and reactions to them only reveal that beneath the unassuming facade of a harmless, kind-hearted teenager, the monster was already there, simply waiting for an excuse to reveal itself. Not only that, but it begs the question of whether this is truly the first time he’s done so, or whether this is simply the latest death of his adolescence.

One thing in particular I liked was that the story felt as if it could have easily acted as a standalone title, despite its connections to a larger comic book event. Take away the connections to Spider-man and Venom in the title or build-up and it becomes a story about a masked serial killer revealing his motives and origin to his helpless victim. So many spin-off titles fail to do this, becoming little more than an addendum for the larger story that ultimately doesn’t add any information that truly increases the enjoyability of the event. 

An argument could be made that revealing the origin of a character such as Torment does exactly that, offering a peek behind the curtain that demystifies the character a bit. However, I don’t feel that’s the case here, given that what we receive is less a true origin and more an exercise in adding context to his actions. This by itself may not change how readers feel about the larger event (particularly as these things were already touched on in the pages of those issues), but it does perhaps serve to add to the terrifyingness of the character to see that he’s always been this way. A killer hiding in plain sight, simply waiting for an excuse to commit their heinous acts. What's more terrifying than that?

Amazing Spider-Man/Venom: Death Spiral – Body Count #1 is available now from Marvel Comics.