Venom’s latest transformation is everything good about superhero comics

polygon.com:

The superhero genre contains many moods, but as I have written extensively before, one of its great joys is the unselfconscious juxtaposition of the sublimely meaningful and the totally ridiculous. Like the phrase “With great power comes great responsibility” and a teenager who dresses in no way like a spider to fight crime.

Or a deep, issue-length conversation about personal growth, doubt, the nature of good and evil, the pitfalls of detachment and attachment — capped off by a character growling, “I’m going back in… and I’m gonna kick my own ass!” followed by the caption “TO BE PUNCHTINUED!”

What else is happening in the pages of our favorite comics? We’ll tell you. Welcome to Monday Funnies, Polygon’s weekly list of the books that our comics editor enjoyed this past week. It’s part society pages of superhero lives, part reading recommendations, part “look at this cool art.” There may be some spoilers. There may not be enough context. But there will be great comics. (And if you missed the last edition, read this.)

In this week’s Venom, Eddie Brock had a conversation with a cosmic being — in the form of a severed floating hand that could answer one question for each of its fingers — about who he is. Venom, co-written by Al Ewing and Ram V, with this issue drawn by Cafu, has made that a central theme for Eddie, who is on a dark Everything Everywhere All at Once-style time-travel adventure meeting his future selves, realizing he’s already become a few of them, and earning the ire of the implacable Meridus, who claims to be his own ultimate incarnation.

It turns out Meridus isn’t Eddie’s ultimate incarnation — this floating hand is. And the King in Black, a cosmic role Eddie stepped into shortly before the series began,