Although Marvel’s Axis event doesn’t begin for another two months, the upcoming November solicitations means that certain plot points were bound to get out anyway. To get ahead of that, Marvel held a telephone press conference in which they revealed one of the big twists of Axis: Act II and explained what that meant for Marvel’s heroes and villains.
Naturally, there are some big spoilers ahead for Axis!
Via Comic Book Resources, Marvel announced that the battle with the telepathic Red Skull (or Red Onslaught) leads to the “Inversion,” which finds Marvel’s heroes becoming more like villains as their moral outlook is flipped. At the same time, villains like Sabretooth, Hobgoblin and Carnage suddenly find themselves with a moral compass and a desire to do good.
Regarding the upcoming Carnage and Hobgoblin Axis tie-in miniseries, Marvel editor Tom Brevoort said “this will be a morally upstanding Carnage and a Hobgoblin who is perhaps a good businessman rather than a bad businessman. It gives you a totally different Hobgoblin and a totally different Carnage to do a story about as part of this. This will be different than any Hobgoblin or Carnage project you’ve seen up until now — for good or for ill.”
Axis writer Rick Remender followed up on that thought with “I don’t think I’m spoiling anything by saying that Carnage on a redemption arc still ends up with a lot of bloodshed… I think what (writer) Rick Spears has cooked up with that Carnage mini is something really special.”
Longtime Wolverine villain Sabretooth is particularly affected by the inversion according to Remender. “In a broad sense, if you’re Sabretooth, you’re no longer going to kill someone to achieve your goals, you’re going to save someone to take the hit. He’s still the same person, but his moral alignment is giving him different information. His character is now aligned in a different way. He’s not capable of killing — at least he’s not capable of killing the way he used to. Imagine if you’re an amoral sociopath and you wake up with a conscience and a moral compass.”
Related: Comic-Con 2014: Marvel’s Avengers/X-Men Axis Panel
As for the heroes, Remender indicated that Luke Cage, Storm, Medusa and others will be part of the Axis of Evil, “a new band of people who are up to no good.”
“Luke Cage is part of it,” continued Remender. “As is Medusa, so are a few of the others that we’ve seen. The Cap, the Odinson, the Kluh [the Hulk’s evil incarnation]. Luke’s inversion plays a sizable role in the second act, a huge act in the third act — Luke and Nova get big setups and they flow off into the crossovers. I highly recommend reading those crossovers.”
The new Superior Iron Man series was announced last month and it appears that Tony Stark’s new outlook on life begins in Axis. And it appears that Iron Man won’t be the only hero whose changes remain in place after the storyline.
“Flipping [Tony Stark’s] alignment turns him back into who he was,” said Remender. “Which shows the growth the character has had since his first appearance… [Tony will find] an interesting new use for a consumer version of Extremis, which will make [him] quite rich.”
Remender also indicated “Axis will lead to a whole new book that I am writing that will have a lot of characters that are very changed from the story. I don’t want to give anything away, but the Inversion isn’t going to be completely wrapped up. There’s not going to be a perfect bow on the story. There’ll be some really interesting aspects of the Inversion moving forward in the Marvel Universe in a handful of titles.”
On top of everything else, the newly released cover images reveal that the classic X-Men villain, Apocalypse is coming back in his original form.
“At a certain point, I didn’t even know this would be an event,” noted Remender. “As it built and the X-Men had a larger role, the Apocalypse beat blossomed into something really wonderful that I think people are going to have a lot of fun with.”
Axis # 1 will be released on October 08. The Axis: Act II storyline will begin in Axis # 4, which is scheduled for a November release.
