A great deal of what has made Venom such a major success over the years has been the design of the character that his co-creator, Todd McFarlane, gave the character back when he debuted in Amazing Spider-Man #299 (Venom’s other creator, David Michelinie, came up with both Eddie Brock and the concept of the symbiote bonding with another person to become a supervillain).
Now a new Venom film is due out in just a couple of weeks and McFarlane has some thoughts about the character’s design and in a Facebook Live video, the artist shared with his fans what he would change about the look of the movie Venom.
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McFarlane started the video by first pointing out that he thinks that Venom looks really cool and he is very excited about the movie. However, since this look is obviously near and dear to his heart, he had some tweaks that he would make to the design. What’s really interesting is that he really does not do that much alteration to the design and yet his small tweaks really do end up transforming the look dramatically.
LIVE: TODDY TWEEKS HIS PAL Venom!! For those folks who don’t know…I’m the CO-CREATOR of this dude!
Posted by Todd McFarlane on Friday, August 3, 2018
The first thing that McFarlane take aim is at Venom’s eyes. He notes that the way that Venom’s eyes are designed in the film, it appears as though he is looking down upon his own nose. So McFarlane redrew the eyes so that they curled upwards, more like McFarlane’s original Venom design. He also widens the space between the eyes.
The next change he makes is to Venom’s mouth, where McFarlane thinks that they should take a “less is more” approach.
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The artist blacked out some of the teeth to make the remaining teeth stand out more and give it more of a jagged feel. In addition, he also reduced the size of the mouth entirely to hide some of the bottom teeth and to narrow the mouth to give it to the feel that it is about to snap shut on the viewer.
The whole redesign took less than three minutes and it really did reshape the entire design of the character’s face. It goes to show that McFarlane’s sense of design is as sharp now as it was 30 years ago when Venom first made his debut.
Venom, starring Tom Hardy, Michelle Williams and Riz Ahmed hits theaters on October 5, 2018.