Ruins of Ravencroft
OK, just based on the name I’ll give you one guess what Ravencroft is.
Did you get it? If you said it’s the Marvel Comics version of DC’s Arkham Asylum, with its full name being the Ravencroft Institute for the Criminally Insane, and that it’s a maximum security prison that houses a mixed bag of baddies and is run by some highly dubious “doctors,” then you win a prize! A prize to be determined at some later date.
Wilson (don’t call him Willie) Fisk, a.k.a. Kingpin, is now mayor of NYC and he has decided to rebuild Ravencroft after it got destroyed by Carnage in a previous comic, so this three-part miniseries provides a historical backstory for the demon-haunted place. And I mean demon-haunted literally. It seems it was built on the site of an ancient Indian cannibal cult that worshipped the dark lord Knull. That doesn’t seem to be the worst thing about it though, as they’re also stuffing the results of experiments in turning humans into vampiric monsters into a hole labeled “Unwanted,” where they’re fed fresh victims all the time so they don’t ever die.
This was an odd sort of a comic. The three stories feature an early incarnation of Carnage, though Carnage isn’t really present (ignore the cover, which, like a lot of the covers in this series, is quite misleading). There’s just an ancestor of Cletus Kassady here who gets involved in a Bone Tomahawk adventure in colonial days. Then there’s a story about Sabretooth, and finally we get Dracula himself (the Marvel Dracula, complete with pencil moustache) facing off against Captain America.
I found it all interesting, with good writing by Frank Tieri, but the flashbacks stayed pretty murky. The Journal of Jonas Ravencroft seems important for some reason, but Jonas himself irrelevant. And once again we’re in the world of a shadowy cabal or deep state star chamber pulling the strings. What’s their agenda? You’ll have to wait and see.
So it’s just an intro or origin story and I guess it does a fair enough job of setting the table, but that’s all there is.
Alex Good 
So these are all baddies?
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There are baddies in the asylum. And as the story develops there are baddies running the asylum. But there are some good guys (Misty and John Jameson) in sort of middle management. Except Misty doesn’t really have a job there.
Mostly it’s pretty dark.
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What about Kull? The conqueror?
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When is Kevin Sorbo week coming up on your site? I don’t want to miss a post.
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So are Krull and Knull two different dark-lords? Which one of the Jonas brothers is Jonas Revenscroft? is it the Waffle House/Cake by the Ocean guy?
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Krull is a cheesy ’80s movie. Knull is a demon lord. Totally different things. I thought the Jonas Brothers sang MMMBop but I guess I got that one wrong. Can’t stay on top of all things pop.
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I thought Carnage/Kassidy was just a psycho who got a piece of the Venom symbiote. Have they evolved his storyline now too? Because his ancestors would seemingly have zip to do with anything…
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His ancestor got sucked into the spiral Knull cannibal cult back in the 1600s, and Knull is somehow linked to Carnage. There’s a whole storyline dealing with this but I’ve only dipped into it a little way.
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so they HAVE evolved Carnage’s storyline then. Goodness, what a mess….
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Oh man, all the Marvel storylines are just a big plate of spaghetti now. Different worlds, different universes, characters dying and coming back to life and taking different forms.
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They are going to have to do what DC does every decade and just reboot the universe from the get-go.
That’s just poor management, that’s what that is…
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