#FreeWillyFriday: Free at Last

Honestly? I don't know what was going on here.

We've got Willy escaping a net – a net I probably put more effort into drawing than anything else on this particular page and maybe in any of the others. There's a harpoon attached to a barrel, which I'm pretty sure I got from “Jaws.”

The hockey mask is also back, though it's flying off. Maybe that's symbolic of a heroic turn for Willy, rejecting the evil that mask implies. Or maybe I wanted to include it but hadn't thought far enough ahead to draw from an angle where you could actually see it. From this perspective, all we would have gotten is the ridiculously large strap.

...

Let's go with the villain-to-hero thing.

In comics, when a villain gets popular enough to carry his own book or limited series, the powers that be soften feel it's necessary to soften the image a bit. That slew of Venom limited series in the '90s started with “Lethal Protector,” so we could see that Eddie Brock wasn't such a bad guy. He hated Spider-Man, sure, but otherwise, he just wanted to protect innocents. Sometimes he accomplished that by killing criminals and maybe eating their brains, but the Punisher had his own series, several of them, so the bar for “heroic” was pretty low.

Sabretooth got a limited series too and ended up kinda-sorta joining the X-Men. He was their prisoner, sure, but he would sometimes do good stuff, like helping out in the Phalanx Covenant for, I don't know, reasons.

(This may be a fault of my memory moreso than the writing. If I crack open that issue, I'm going to want to read all four of the Uncanny/X-Men issues. Then I'll probably want to go on to “Life Signs” and “Final Sanction” and then, suddenly, I'm behind on CapWolf and there's just chaos. Chaos.)

Sabretooth got the hero treatment for real in the Age of Apocalypse storyline. Years later, he had a magically induced change of heart in Axis and joined the Avengers for five minutes.

I can be a little cynical about these changes when they seem to be made from a financial perspective rather than a story one. But I do find it interesting when villains try to be heroes and the change isn't easy or instantaneous.

Jim Starlin wrote and drew a Thanos series in 2003 that started with the Mad Titan deciding he would be a force for good. But he was still Thanos – arrogant as all get out and scaring the crap out of folks when he showed up to help. Alas, Starlin left after the initial six-issue arc, the direction changed, and the series ended after 12 issues.

Dan Slott got me to finally get over One More Day with Superior Spider-Man, which found Doctor Octopus inhabiting Peter Parker's body and trying to prove he was the superior hero. It didn't go well, which is exactly what made the series such a great read.

What are some of your favorite pop culture face turns?

Covers – Venom: Lethal Protector #2 by Mark Bagley, Uncanny Avengers (Vol. 2) #1 by Daniel Acuna; interior art from Thanos #2 by Jim Starlin