If you're not reading Axis, I understand. Big events are what they are. I still think they're fun so long as they're written by excellent authors. I especially enjoyed Original Sin, the Jason Aaron Nick Fury story-to-end-them-all. At any rate, I'm reading Axis and it's all right. Nothing outstanding, but it has its moments. Heroes become villains and villains become heroes. We've seen it before, but not in awhile in Marvel and not really on this scale. So, there's something there.
That said, the last issue has a really special moment. The Spider-Man villain Carnage -- the worst example of terrible 1990's Marvel villains -- has been turned by the Red Skull into a superhero. He's become self-aware of how terrible he is and the things he's done have been. In a moment of extraordinary sacrifice, he hooks himself up to a bomb set by Apocalypse to kill all humans, engineering the final triumph of mutants and his concept of evolution. Hilariously, in the moments before he dies he asks Spider-Man to plant a Confederate Flag in Times Square and pipe in Freebird 24 hours.
I guess it shows that Carnage, even a psychologically re-engineering version, is innately sociopathic. Even turning his basic identity from bad to good doesn't change his fundamental beliefs in the rightness of his antiquated and backward beliefs. Or, is it otherwise demonstrating that the villains didn't need to be entirely convinced to be heroes? Maybe the hero turn was more of a nudge, with the fundamentally psychotic creature still living just below the surface? It's hard to know. What do you think?
At any rate, I thought it was really funny, great writing, and the single moment of this character's pathetic existence that I care anything about. Well done, Rick Remender, well f'ing done.
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