Random Happenstance

Because it's been 100 years since I've played Maximum Carnage, I couldn't recall if Carrion was in the game--a brief aside--oh, who am I kidding, this whole blog is nothing but asides, maybe eventually it'll loop back around to a point--never get rid of old game systems! I should've horded my old ColecoVision, NES, Sega Genesis...Anyway, Carrion: out of Carnage's little found (Manson) family, he's the only one that hasn't got an action figure; which is mildly odd since he would complete the set and I'm pretty sure most of the parts are there for him. On the other hand, he's a creepy ghoul made creepier by his origin, which was retconned mid-stream and then again multiple times since! There's no hint of that here--or is there?--unless you count the title, which I thought was just a riff on a song I don't particularly like. From 1978, Peter Parker, the Spectacular Spider-Man #25, "Carrion, My Wayward Son!" Written by Bill Mantlo, pencils by Jim Mooney, inks by Frank Springer.

This was Carrion's first appearance, and he's already waving a Spider-Man mask around: I was mildly curious where he would've got that, since he couldn't just go to a store or anything. No shirt, no service! He's making a pitch to the Mafia er, Maggia; and maybe even wrote up a little proposal, to kill Spider-Man; but I'm not sure what Carrion actually wanted from them? Financial backing, maybe? Some goons? Lunches? The current Maggia boss, Big M, the Masked Marauder, votes no; but also that Carrion knew too much about their activities, and would have to die. Some of the aforementioned goons surround him, and probably could've destroyed Carrion if they had called his 'pouch' a murse instead. From that, Carrion throws "Red Death" dust at them, killing several, then also displays other powers, like seeming intangibility and levitation. (Carrion's carry-on bag seems familiar, like the Green Goblin's...) Big M thinks Carrion could be a threat to him, and Carrion disappears, "leaving behind the stench of brimstone--" Hey, don't steal from Nightcrawler!

Meanwhile, Spidey himself was having almost a midlife crisis, with all his usual problems like Aunt May in the hospital, Mary Jane turned down his proposal, he didn't graduate with the rest of his class, and there were new heroes on the scene (Nova!) that were the age he was when he started. How long could he stay Spider-Man, with no teammates to back him up like that scrub Johnny Storm? It feels like they might have been trying to either get him some back-up, or more likely spin-off another book, as White Tiger gets three pages next; before Big M, his "expendable" thugs, and his robot start robbing a bank. (Everyone knows the thugs are expendable, even the thugs; but don't tell them that!) Spidey is surprised by the robot's transformation from a bird-drone form to humanoid (not like a Transformer, more like it just changes) then gets zapped by the Masked Marauder's "opti-blasts," blinding him! To be continued...in some issues that are going to be tougher to find, since they guest-star Daredevil, and Frank Miller did the art for PP,TSSM #27 and breakdowns for #28. (Two odd coincidences: Daredevil #158 was Miller's first, and it featured Death-Stalker, another villian with intangibility; and both PP,TSSM #27 and DD #158 had Dave Cockrum covers!)

I think Carrion is pushed a bit to the side for the next two issues, like he spends them lurking about, or maybe monologues about how he can't kill Spidey yet because he wants him to see it coming. Or, he might have been punted out a couple more issues, since Marv Wolfman maybe pushed back on Mantlo's original plan for Carrion: he was going to be the desiccated clone of Peter Parker, using the gear of the then-dead Green Goblin! Well, his bag, at least. So, before it got that far, Carrion was changed to be merely a clone of Miles Warren, the Jackal. Fine. Except, a later retcon in Spectacular Spider-Man Annual #8 claimed that Warren never achieved true cloning, since how would he have transferred memories to the clones? Instead he had created a virus that could change a person to a genetic copy of someone else...oh, that's way simpler. I think the idea was that cloning would've been beyond Warren, and the virus story explains away the Gwen Stacy clone as an innocent girl who got 'jacked into it; but it creates other problems: were Carrion, and Ben Reilly, and Kaine, all people before getting altered? And none of that explains how Carrion, who looks like an angry corpse, got powers completely unrelated to anything: intangibility, flight, teleportation? He's a mess and of course there's been like three other versions of him, because comics.