Venom: Separation Anxiety #5
☆ Be the first to review + Add to your collection — Join freeIssue #5 is the finale of David Michelinie's third consecutive retro Eddie Brock miniseries, capping a 2024 arc that reunited Venom's original co-creator with the character's earliest continuity and pit him against a novel threat: Purple Man slowly leeching the symbiote away, inverting the familiar separation-anxiety premise so that the villain grows stronger with every touch. As the concluding chapter, it resolves the high-stakes question of whether Zebediah Killgrave — now augmented with symbiotic powers — can be stopped before his mind-control reaches a global scale, giving the story a world-threat scope rarely assigned to this particular villain. The issue also underscores Marvel's deliberate editorial project of using Michelinie to expand Eddie Brock's early-days mythology in a retro-continuity lane distinct from the mainline present-day Venom titles.
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Marvel announced the five-issue miniseries on February 7, 2024, positioning it as a direct successor to Michelinie's two back-to-back Venom: Lethal Protector runs. Michelinie has described his creative challenge as finding a fresh angle on a story beat already well-worn in Venom's history — Eddie separated from his symbiote — and landing on the concept of a parasite villain who drains the symbiote incrementally rather than forcing a clean separation. Artist Gerardo Sandoval, who had previously drawn Death of the Venomverse, was paired with Michelinie, and cover artist Paulo Siqueira carried over from the Lethal Protector series, maintaining visual continuity across the retro trilogy. The series was subtitled 'The King in Purple' in collected form, invoking the classic 'King in Black' branding while signaling the Purple Man's central antagonist role.
Trivia · 8 facts
- Issue #5 of 5: the series finale, published September 11, 2024, by Marvel Comics.
- Written by David Michelinie (Venom co-creator) with interior art by Gerardo Sandoval and cover art by Paulo Siqueira; colorist Romulo Fajardo Jr., letterer VC Clayton Cowles, editor Thomas Groneman.
- The central conflict: Zebediah Killgrave (Purple Man) has been siphoning fragments of the Venom symbiote throughout the series, growing stronger in symbiote-enhanced mind control while Eddie Brock's bond with his 'other' progressively weakens.
- Supporting and antagonist cast across the miniseries includes Ghost, Sunturion, Rhino (who appears multiple times), Kingpin (Wilson Fisk), Joy Mercado, Arthur Dearborn/Sunturion, and Aleksei Sytsevich/Rhino — characters who populate the same early-1990s Marvel timeframe the story is set in.
- The series is set during Eddie Brock's earliest days as Venom, functioning as a retro-continuity story that fills in gaps rather than advancing the present-day Marvel timeline.
- Not to be confused with the 1994–1995 Venom: Separation Anxiety miniseries by Howard Mackie, Ron Randall, and Sam de la Rosa — this is an entirely new story sharing only the title concept.
- The full five-issue run was collected as Venom: Separation Anxiety — The King in Purple, a 128-page trade paperback published January 14, 2025.
- The #1 cover by Paulo Siqueira was explicitly designed as a homage to Charles Vess's Web of Spider-Man #1 — the issue in which Peter Parker separated himself from the alien costume, the foundational act that led to Eddie Brock bonding with it and becoming Venom.
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Reprints
Reprinted in Venom: Separation Anxiety - The King in Purple #[nn] (2024), Venom: Trennungsängste #[nn] (2025)
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