McFarlane Says Venom, "Should Be Creepier!"

Todd McFarlane, who created the 'Venom' character in Spiderman #299, wanted to weigh-in on the new spin-off in development for Sony Pictures. McFarlane told Newsarama, "When I created him, he was a monster first, then a guy underneath." McFarlane added, "He should be creepier than what he was in Spider-Man 3." McFarlane who was approached by Sam Raimi for the vision of Venom for Spider-Man 3, said that he feels the character needs to be more scary in the spin-off, but also added that it is a tricky situation. "You don't want to scare the kids, because the kids love the character....But I think you could add a little bit of a creep factor. I mean, it never bugged me to watch Frankenstein as a kid, so you could have a little bit of it, as long as you have a good story backing it up." McFarlane also questioned just how the film will work. How can the studio make the viewer care about Venom if he is still a villain. "I'm thinking about how they want to make anti-heroes nowadays....Those don't work. The reason they're so cool as a bad guy is because they're bad. And as soon as you try to give too much humanity to them, then you go, no! Now they're not as good as a bad guy because you're trying to redeem them." McFarlane noted that villains like Tony Soprano or Tony Montana are human. Them being human allows the viewer to have compassion despite theri villany, but Venom isn't, making the script much harder to add niceness to him. "Can you bring that mentality to Venom and make it work? Or do you make him all bad?"



Thoughts on Venom spin-off? Do you agree with Todd McFarlane? Will Sony make Venom work? Who should play Venom?