Let's get some of this clear now as there's a lot of flak on this character.
I'll be playing Devil's advocate because, to be honest, I like the concept.
Knull: Venom #4 storytime
Jacob Hill
Jacob Thompson
fuck off Mysterio
Brandon Gutierrez
I'll be the advocate for everyone else: The concept is retarded.
Gavin Williams
This. Retcon him has Death fucking around just like Chaos King and Oblivion and move the fuck on. Primordial void entities don't fucking work in Marvel.
Luis Thomas
Notice there is no indication of time. We have no idea how long Knull has been floating in the void in a fetal position. Could have been millennia, could have been minutes.
Angel Perry
We know this happened in the Seventh Iteration, so the Celestials are simply doing what they presumably have done five times before. He can't know that, of course.
Oliver Reed
Knull - the god of darkness - draws a sword from his own shadow, cast on a Celestial. Magic? Shadow control seems obvious for a god of the dark. Also, does this mean the sword has Celestial-like abilities?
William Young
Forgot the pic
Kevin Cox
Knull apparently beheaded a Celestial. Did he kill it? Or did he just destroy part of its armor?
And is the suggestion that Celestial helmet became Knowhere? It doesnt look like it.
Notice he donned a loin cloth. Adorable.
If that Celestial helmet - empty, no organic remains - is to scale, Knull should be about 25 feet tall.
Is that the same sword now? He already had a sword, is he re-forging that?
Robert Thompson
Knull using Celestial tools, made from their own armor. So a divine being, possibly of the same substance as Marvel's own elder gods but more ancient than any of them, wielding a hybrid of his own dark god-magic and Celestial tech. Not too shabby.
Interesting retcon on the symbiotes being weak to fire and loud noises.
Jonathan Bennett
Knull wields his sword, which apparently also formed armor. This is the first time we see his symbol and that means we don't actually know where it came from.
He is fighting armored beings - but not Celestials, since they are too small and too uniform. They have never seen anything like him before, and he is massacring them.
He claims to have stained billions of stars with the blood of almighty beings, but it is not supported by what we are seeing.
Unreliable narrator?
Jack Long
Forgot pic AGAIN!
Jeremiah Thomas
I want a symbiote to cum in me.
David Gomez
Gorr takes All-Black the Negrosword from Knull.
Knull was defeated by a nameless armored being - not a Celestial, but how could he know the difference? - and had his primary weapon stolen by a mortal, so evidently his power is far from limitless.
Jaxson Nguyen
...Could and should have skipped that page. Oh well.
Jacob Sanders
Merging with organic beings makes Knull stronger.
Anthony Cook
>Notice there is no indication of time.
Time didn't exist before the big bang.
>We know this happened in the Seventh Iteration
And the eighth iteration since he's in the same situation in both iterations
>He can't know that, of course.
Well he could. There are cosmic entities that exist outside the parallel timelines and thereby carry forward knowledge between iterations of the multiverse. He arguably should be one if he existed before time, which Marvel claims he did. The "multiverse" in Marvel actually refers to two distinct things, the set of all parallel timelines (that being dimensions with exactly the same start and end point and parallel flow of time) and the set of all dimensions and extradimensional existences with easy access to those timelines. Things like the Mojoverse or the home of the Many-Angled ones or Limbo aren't part of the multiverse proper. They are not parallel timelines. They're more akin to the home of the Beyonders, just closer in proximity to the multiverse in the scope of the omniverse. The same is true of the void between, before, and after dimensions.
Landon James
He merged with endless numbers of beings, he got stronger and stronger, he became very powerful indeed. This, then, must be billions of years later, and he is at the peak of his power. He will never be stronger than he was at this time.
And then he made a mistake: he came to Earth, where aliens and gods come to get their asses handed to them.
Jace Wilson
Then time is irrelevant. Aside of which, SOMETHING existed, namely him. And if time did not pass, he could have no memory of it.
>And the eighth iteration since he's in the same situation in both iterations
I am not even sure the Marvel staff (except for Ewing) regards the Secret Wars as a reboot.
>if he existed before time, which Marvel claims he did
I disagree, but... Cates is even more ignorant than most comic book writers, knowing neither Marvel history nor real-life science very well.
Knull is a primal being, more animal than god; even if he could know, he wouldn't think to find out.
Hudson Stewart
Grendel/ Beowulf allusion.
If it were any other writer than Cates I would take this to mean it's going to reveal Knull has a mother out there somewhere. Death? Or is Knull supposed to be Grendel's mother himself?
Juan Rodriguez
>I am not even sure the Marvel staff (except for Ewing) regards the Secret Wars as a reboot.
Then Marvel is fucked because there's a different firmament and everything.
Jose Roberts
I like most things about Knull except for his name and design. He’s too human looking to feel convincingly like a god of Symbiotes, and the likely unintended double meaning of his name makes him seem like a joke. The rest is fine, the linking of All-Black to the Sybiotes, the explanation of symbiote’s fears, the reworking of Bendis’s lame continuity into something more conceptually cool, all that I like. But he should have gone through like one more draft before being published.
Christian Thompson
Thor has a power Knull had NEVER encountered on ANY world across BILLIONS of years?
Really? Because lightning exists pretty much everywhere there is an atmosphere, and most forms of life need that.
This is probably just Cates attempting to suck uo to Aaron, though. Go Thor!
Henry Harris
>Super-Ancient pre-Primordial Ultra-Mega-Gawd of Darkness and Void
>but weak to lightning bolts.
lol.
Wyatt Wood
Fully agreed. Why does he look humanoid if he predates all organic life in this universe?
Knull's link to the symbiotes he created - mostly animals without a conscious mind - is severed by a single bolt of lightning. Again: Go Thor.
The symbiotes instantly seek out new hosts and are immediately infected with new concepts - self-determination, freedom, concepts like 'good' and 'evil'.
Benjamin Myers
Yup. Maybe they mean 'divine lightning' but almost any inhabited world has gods.
Of course, Aaron 'established' that Mjölnir harbors the Mother Storm, a cosmic hurricane the size of a galaxy which was defeated and enslaved by Odin - so her lightning probably has a little more kick to it. According to Cates, anyway.
Knull is not as powerful as he thought. The moment he lost control of his own creation it turned on him, and rejected him (shades of Frankenstein, Ultron, the Vision, Machine Man, MODOK, Adam Warlock)... and, surprisingly, chose to be what we call 'good'. Lucky for us they didn't have Kree or Skrulls for hosts. That would have sucked.
They overwhelm their creator-god with numbers.
William Gonzalez
Knull is dismissive of the Klyntar, but since he is as evil as the Devil his hatred of them means they actually are what they claim - knights, heroes, agents of order.
Of course that all happened about 1500 years ago.
Lincoln Gray
Knull is understandably pissed off about being imprisoned by his own creations. Apparently they need him to sustain their hive mind, which means there's an interesting moral quandary here: if Knull is killed (probably with his own sword... who has that now, Thor? Or Loki?) , what happens to the symbiotes?
Jaxson Martinez
He seems to think everything is going to be all right if he manages to restore his Grendel - his primary symbiote - and draw it to Klyntar, and use it to free his physical form. I guess he assumes he will be powerful enough with his armor (part of the original Negrosword, after all) to overcome the symbiotes. And then attack Earth, because that went so well the last time.
He really is not very smart. A Neanderthal of a god.
Joshua Foster
Miles - the weakest spider-hero - laying the whammy on the Grendel with his sting-blast.
Samuel Thompson
Dylan Carter
Continued...
Thomas Rodriguez
Okay. Miles pulls himself and Eddie plus symbiote out of Grendel and drops to the Earth, but Venom has a new trick...
Carson Ramirez
Jordan Taylor
They've landed and Morales has skipped.
John Martin
Justin Powell
Christian Miller
Ignore the wings, it and the other powers are going to go away soon.
Liam Thompson
Brandon Clark
Celestials were created to job, and Knull isn't that important in the grand scheme of things, he's just a small parasite in-between cycles with delusions of grandeur. I like him.
Kayden Smith
Sebastian Miller
My point exactly.
Aiden Cruz
So... part of Grendel, Knull's primary symbiote, part of the same living weapon All-Black the Negrosword is, was forcibly separated from him by human scientists, put on a human and it hates him now and resists him with every fiber of his being.
Connor Martin
Ian Scott
Gavin Nelson
Bam, super-symbiote. After this, the powered-up Venom/Rex symbiote goes to a hidden arsenal and arms itself...
Parker Murphy
After they use the exotic weaponry - some of which was developed specifically to fight Venom with - to down the Grendel, Knull manifests directly and they duke it out.
Oliver Diaz
Angel Wright
Knull is incapable of taking control of the Venom symbiote, or of Rex, the Grendel-fragment, now that they have individual identities.
Connor Robinson
Technology. Knull, once again, shown to be a primitive, artless, no strategy, just brute force, incapable of foreseeing even a basic strategy like this.
Evan Garcia
And also, as before, radiant energy - Thor's lightning, Miles' venom blast.
Nathaniel Kelly
You know you're doing well when your enemy stammers "Are you a god?"
Benjamin Ortiz
Overwhelmed by part of his own primary symbiote, even this close to each other.
Carter Martin
Rex forces Grendel/ Knull into certain death.
Christopher Diaz
Eddie Brock, unprotected by a symbiote, leaning against the door of a red-hot furnace with Grendel pushing desperately against the inside.
Zachary Davis
Eddie Brock, barely protected by a symbiote, still leaning against the door of a red-hot furnace with Grendel pushing desperately against the inside.
Henry Martin
I dunno why but the last panel makes me laugh
Caleb Bennett
>RREEEEE!
Jace Reyes
Grendel, primary symbiote of the God of Darkness, forged in fire to destroy Celestials, who carried his gospel across the stars, just burned to death in a steel forge, courtesy of Eddie Brock (formerly of the Daily Bugle).
Alexander Turner
And that's it.
CONCLUSION: Knull ain't shit. is backstory is all right in my opinion and he is a mid-level threat.
Carnage will probably succeed in his mission and wake up Knull, he will come to Earth, lots of heroes are going to be Venomized, including Spider-Man and the Avengers but not the X-Men and in the end, he's going down like a bitch, because he IS.
Cates is a hack, but I still like this concept.
Jackson Carter
But Beowulf and Grendell already exist in the MARVEL U, Beowulf recently appeared with Hercules rag-tag band of heores on Civil War II: Gods of War book.
Grendell was a Dark Elf from Malekith's race
Dominic Ward
Hence 'allusion'. The Vikings were probably like "Oh no, he's back".
Angel Miller
Minor historic revisionism.