Warning: Spillers ahead for Black Cat #2.
The latest Black Cat series kicks off with a bang as master thief Felicia Hardy is dropped directly into the King in Black crossover event. The series is only two issues deep and alreadyis proving to be a wile ride, with the latest issue hinting that in order to stop the Symbiote God Knull, Felicia may be forced to use a weapon of dark origin.
What began as a standard heist with Black Cat appropriating the Spider-Mobile, ended with Felicia encountering the destructive force of Knull head-on as his invasion of the earth begins. Caught unaware by Knull’s forces due to assuming the Avengers would handle it, Felicia found herself in dire straits and thrust into battle alongside earth’s mightiest heroes. Standing side-by-side with Captain America, Felicia watches in horror as Knull’s forces overwhelm the Avengers, their allies, and their countermeasures. Doctor Strange is captured by Knull’s dragon thralls, and Felicia is left to regroup with her team.
She finds Doctor Steven, a leading expert on symbiotes, after forming an unlikely friendship with Eddie Brock. Steven reveals he managed to obtain genetic materials from a lobotomized symbiote, a reference to the events of Absolute Carnage: Weapon Plus. Steven states the symbiote underwent a ‘viral lobotomy,’ breaking its psychic connection to Knull. Doctor Steven managed to recover these samples, and at least partially integrate them into clones of the Anti-Venom symbiote. Anti-Venom was essentially a zombified symbiote created from remnants of the original Venom symbiote still within Eddie Brock’s body. But Doctor Steven seems unaware of the dark origins of the samples he obtained.
In Absolute Carnage: Weapon Plus, Clayton Cortez is duped into battling a Knull-thrall Carnage to ascertain whether Carnage is truly Knull’s chosen one. The history stems back to the original Sym-Soldier Project, for which cloned portions of the Grendel symbiote were used to create a black ops Super Soldier project. Thanks to Knull’s influence over his spawn the experiment was a disaster, but the cosmic threat of Grendel’s existence sent Weapon Plus into a frenzy to develop a counter to the horror they now knew existed. The Sym-Soldier Project morphed into Weapon V, and new symbiotic suits were rendered psychically removed from Knull via ‘viral surgery’.
A plan emerges for Black Cat to don the new Anti-Venom symbiote and enter the biomass that traps Strange so he can get back into the fray with a powerful magical weapon. The good news for Black Cat is that her Anti-Venom suit is considered inviable by Doctor Steven, and will not last long once removed from its container. However in the world of Marvel where the next mad scientist is right around the corner, who’s to say that such a weapon could not be backward engineered and turned into a weapon of mass destruction? The Doctor’s employer Alchemax and shadowy organizations are always trying to get their hands on symbiotes - and what better subject than a cloned Venom symbiote uncontrollable by the King in Black?
The final pages end with Black Cat getting yet another cool new look, as she’s forced to use Doctor Strange’s magical weapon for herself. But the possibilities explored within Black Cat #2 are fascinating. As if mass-producing Anti-Venom suits themselves were not enough to at least give Knull reason to pause, severing the psychic link between Knull and his thralls could at the very least reduce his overall force significantly. Perhaps fans will see Doctor Steven utilize this weapon against Knull with future installments of Black Cat, or maybe even within the pages of King in Black itself. Besides that, one small detail readers may miss is that Knull chose to trap Doctor Strange rather than turn him into a thrall as he’s done with other heroes. Perhaps Knull fears Strange’s magical abilities and prefers to remove him from the equation rather than risk any confrontation with the Sorcerer Supreme.