VENOM

The host order everyone knows is wrong. For decades it seemed settled: the symbiote bonded with Peter Parker on Battleworld, then Eddie Brock — with a retconned Deadpool fling shuffled in even earlier. Then Venom: First Host #1 (2018), by Mike Costa and Mark Bagley, rewound the tape much further: before Battleworld, the Kree Empire captured the young symbiote on its homeworld and bonded it to a soldier named Tel-Kar — a man genetically engineered to control it completely, including erasing its memories — as a weapon in the Kree-Skrull War.

Tel-Kar wore the symbiote as sleek military armor and worked as spy, saboteur and assassin: impersonating individuals, impaling enemies on tendrils while probing their minds, even extending the symbiote into starship navigation systems to fly ships as extensions of his own body. Captured by the Skrulls, he was separated from it; the symbiote fled, was later corrupted by another host who used it for genocide, and eventually washed up on Battleworld into Spider-Man's life — with its memories of Tel-Kar wiped. The black suit wasn't born evil, and it wasn't born with Peter. It was born a soldier.

Decades later, Tel-Kar came to Earth to reclaim "his" symbiote — and kidnapped Venom's newborn spawn, Sleeper, to force the reunion. It backfired completely: Sleeper bonded with Tel-Kar instead and lobotomized him for what he had done to Venom, then carried his mindless husk off into space. The first Venom ended as a passenger in his own body, ridden by the child of the symbiote he once enslaved.