AXIS: Carnage #1

A good indication of the direction of a society is how the bearers of privilege are popularly depicted. Always a tried and true foil, the elite, because of the toxic and deepening nature of U.S. inequality -- the 1% versus the 99% -- along with the attendant plutocratic capture of the political system, are now more and more perceived as worthy of slaughter.

What makes AXIS: Carnage #1 interesting is that it classes factotums of the Fourth Estate, in this case talking-head newscasters, with the 1%. Very timely given the professional difficulties of Brian Williams and Bill O'Reilly.

AXIS: Carnage is an AXIS crossover tie-in. The idea, as in AXIS: Hobgoblin, is that the bad are now good. Red Onslaught, née Red Skull, is using the super-powerful brain pilfered from Charles Xavier's corpse to spread hate telepathically around the planet. It apparently has the opposite effect on super-villains, making them perform acts of selfless heroism.

Carnage, introduced in The Amazing Spider-Man in the early 1990s, is serial-killer sociopath Cletus Kasady possessed by the offspring of the Venom alien symbiote. In AXIS: Carnage, Carnage, suddenly compelled to do good, locks horns with Sin-Eater, another super-villain with a Spider-Man origin.

Why Sin-Eater isn't reverse engineered to suddenly do good like Carnage is not explained. Unless the explanation is that Sin-Eater is doing good by blasting the heads off newscasters.

The Sin-Eater character seems to be heavily influenced by Marvel's original Foolkiller. Created by the great Steve Gerber, Foolkiller is an insane, homicidal vigilante that appeared in the pages of Man-Thing during the Watergate era. I loved those comic books as a kid. They seemed to capture what was really going on in the country during the demise of Nixon, the Ford stewardship and the confusion of Carter.

Below you will find scans of the first ten pages of AXIS: Carnage #1. The writing of Rick Spears, the art of German Peralta and Rain Beredo's colors are all workmanlike and adequate to the task at hand, which is to depict a world where heroes are villains; villains, heroes; and the people at the top of the pyramid keep getting more powerful.