CARNAGE

SPIDER-MAN: THE ANIMATED SERIES (TOY BIZ)

“Of all Spider-Man’s foes, Carnage is perhaps the most dangerous, the most feared! Criminal Cletus Kasady shared a prison cell with Eddie Brock (better known as the Lethal Protector, Venom) – that is, until Brock’s symbiote freed its human host. However, Venom left behind a fragment of his alien costume, which bonded with Kasady… creating the sinister menace known as Carnage!”

When the Spider-Man spin-off Venom had gotten too popular to suitably serve as a proper antagonist in the Spider-Man titles, it was decided that the spin-off needed a spin-off, and thus, we got Carnage.  He’s sort of the ur-example of the Marvel approach to new characters in the ‘90s, where they’d take a successful character concept and make it more violent, more edgy, and more extreme, and it’s further dialed up, because Venom was already kind of that to Spider-Man himself.  Carnage was Venom on steroids (which is funny, since he was always depicted as being much smaller and skinnier), and should absolutely not have worked in the long run, but…he did? Like, actually kind of worked within the larger universe, and has proven to have a life outside of the characters that spawned him.  It’s honestly a bit remarkable.  Two years after his 1992 comics debut, he got his first action figure, and I’m looking at that figure today!

THE FIGURE ITSELF

Carnage was released in the first series of Toy Biz’s Spider-Man: The Animated Series tie-in line, in 1994.  The line was more directly based on the cartoon designs (unlike a lot of the other Toy Biz Marvel “tie-ins” which trended more towards comic based), but in the case of Carnage, that was sort of a moot point, as he hadn’t really had enough time to develop distinctly deviations in his appearance the way some of the others had.  The figure stands 5 inches tall and he has 10 points of articulation.  His articulation scheme is pretty much the Toy Biz standard at the time, though he does get a waist joint, which wasn’t always a guarantee.  Said waist joint is tied into his action feature, as is his right shoulder; turning the figure at the waist moves his arm up and down, in sort of a chopping motion.  Carnage’s sculpt was all-new, and would serve as the basis of a few figures to follow, as it was scaled up for the 10-inch line, repainted for the “Maximum Carnage” tie-in, and ultimately slightly re-tooled for the later unmasked Carnage mold.  It’s a good sculpt.  It’s got the basic set-up down well, with good proportions and all of the important details.  His far more fluid symbiote design is handled via sculpted details, which feature a lot of texturing and “movement”.  The paint aids in this, using a relief style of black accenting to bring out the most from the sculpted texturing.  It does a surprisingly good job at replicating Carnage’s distinctive visual design from the comics.  Carnage was prone to creating a lot more constructs out of his symbiote than Peter or Eddie, so this figure showcases that with three different clip-on pieces, with an axe, a claw, and a more generic goopy symbiote thing.  They clip on easily enough, and help further sell the Carnage look.  The only sort of downside to them is that they’re totally smooth, rather than replicating the texturing of the main figure.  There’s at least some paint work to help sell it, but it’s not quite the same.

THE ME HALF OF THE EQUATION

As a kid, I had a surprising number of Carnage figures in my collection, but I seemed to have just missed this one.  Given how many others I had, I never really put the effort into tracking this one down, since he seemed rather basic.  As is the case with a lot of other “never put the effort in to track it down” Toy Biz figures, I wound up getting this one mostly because a complete loose one landed in front of me at work a few years ago, and given he had all three of the attachments, I didn’t really feel like I could pass him up.  While he mostly serves as a precursor to the figures that followed and would slightly tweak the formula, I gotta say, as a first figure, he comes out of the gate swinging for the fences.  There’s not really much you could do better, and he’s just a solid all-around figure.