After spending a couple of weeks getting my nose rather brown by writing about Kevin Smith, it's time to move beyond him and my "hung like a wookiee" comment and back into the realm of geeks.
I absolutely need to address something that has everybody stirred up: Spiderman's black costume.
Anybody who is a fan of Spiderman knows that Venom is his main foil, his antagonist. He basically has the same powers as Spiderman but uses them for evil instead of good.
Everybody figured Venom would be a villain at some point along the way, but "Spiderman" director Sam Raimi has said time and time again that he didn't like Venom and didn't want to use him in a Spiderman movie.
Why is the black costume such a big deal? In the 1980s, Marvel Comics did a story arc known as "Secret Wars," which brought every big Marvel superhero together in a battle of epic proportions.
While the comics weren't actually that good, the one significant thing that came out of the story was Spidey's black costume (or alien symbiote costume, if you want to get technical). Alien goo gets on Spidey and it actually enhanced his superpowers for a time.
One day, the black costume, which was a living entity, decided it didn't want to behave anymore and rejected Peter Parker. Instead, it found new life in rival photographer Eddie Brock, who embraced his evil side and became Venom.
Surprisingly, Venom has only been around since 1989.
Spidey's black costume was one of the only times in comic book history when a major superhero changed his costume and fans actually embraced it.
The look is extremely sleek and stealthy, which is a great reflection of the character of Spiderman.
Fans started speculating that Venom might be the villain when the next two villains were cast.
Thomas Hayden Church ("Sideways") and Topher Grace ("That '70s Show") were the villains. We've known for a while that Church is playing Sandman, but everyone wondered what Grace was doing there.
There were some rumors that he was playing a villain called Elektro, but there was nothing to confirm that.
Many speculated that what Raimi wanted to do was make Grace into the anti-Peter Parker, a kind of what-if character to show what would have happened to Spiderman if he made some different choices.
Kirsten Dunst, who played Mary Jane Watson, Spidey's love interest, in the first two movies, "accidentally" mentioned that the villains for "Spiderman 3" were going to be Sandman and Venom early on.
However, fans kind of wrote her off as a ditz who didn't know anything about the comics, so they didn't take it seriously.
Plus, "Spiderman 3" wasn't even in production when she said that.
Now we still don't know if Grace is indeed playing Venom, but we do know for certain that Spiderman has a black costume in "Spiderman 3."
The first poster has come out, and while the suit looks exactly the same as far as texture goes, it is definitely black, and Sony has confirmed this.
Since then, fans have used computer programs to make the suit look more like the comics or to put Tobey Maguire in it, but these are fakes.
I hope everyone is up to date on this so when "Spiderman 3" comes out next year, you can all say, "Ben Leach was right!"
