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Growing up with the great heroes and villains we’d already established—beloved icons backed by thriving toy lines and TV shows (sorry, the movies would come later)—the ’90s arrived like a seismic shift in the American comic book landscape. There was a palpable hunger for fresh stories, edgier characters, and bold innovations, and Peter was right there in the thick of it all: snatching first appearances off the spinner racks at his local shop, discovering trailblazing talents like Venom’s creators, David Michelinie and Todd McFarlane, and tracing the symbiote’s wild evolution—from its extraterrestrial debut in Secret Wars, to its chaotic stint in the Fantastic Four, to its star-making turn in The Amazing Spider-Man, and finally its anti-hero rebirth in Lethal Protector.
Peter and his mom turned toy store hunts into a ritual, dialing up shop after shop in a frantic quest for the first true three-dimensional embodiment of the beast: Toy Biz’s towering 18-inch Marvel Super Heroes Venom figure. From the moment of its inception, Venom had sunk its teeth into the comic book lexicon—and straight into the fevered imagination of Peter A. DeLuca AKAPAD.
