That Time Carnage was a Good Guy

I may not be able to keep dodging the spoilers, but I'm probably not going to watch “Venom: Let There Be Carnage” in the theater. I'm just not a big Carnage guy.

I appreciate his existence since it led to the Maximum Carnage storyline, which led to the Maximum Carnage video game, which is one of the few video games I consider myself to have been good at. I beat that game a lot (and I didn't beat Super Mario Bros. 3 until my senior year in high school, a feat most of my peers accomplished in fourth grade).

I got the initial excitement of having a new symbiote on the block in the '90s, though that's hardly unique now. While a truly evil, relentless villain can make a great foil for a hero, I always got the impression that Carnage's brutality was supposed to be part of the appeal, and I just didn't see it.

But I do have a favorite Carnage story. Well, it's more of a moment.

The 2014 crossover Axis opens with the Avengers, X-Men and more coming together to stop the Red Skull, who stole the brain of the deceased Charles Xavier and evolved into the Red Onslaught. With a group of villains pressed into service to help save the world as well, Scarlet Witch, Doctor Strange and Doctor Doom cast a spell to invert the malevolent entity and bring Charles Xavier's essence to the fore. But multiple heroes and villains are caught in the spell, reversing their basic natures.

While Captain America (Sam Wilson), Iron Man, Thor and more break bad, villains like Sabretooth, the Absorbing Man, the Enchantress and even Carnage shift to the side of the angels.

Issue 8 (written by Rick Remender, drawn by Leinil Francis Yu) opens with Spider-Man, who was not among the inverted, desperately trying to defuse a bomb the magically villainous X-Men intend to use to wipe out non-mutants within the blast radius. Unable to defuse or destroy it, Spidey gets help from an unlikely source.

Carnage quickly determines the only way to stop the bomb is to contain the blast with his symbiote. It doesn't make sense to me even from a comic pseudo-science standpoint, but, hey, I'm not going to let it ruin the moment.

As Spider-Man leaves, Carnage asks for one thing in return, and, nice guy that he is, Spider-Man promises to do it. Then Carnage unleashes his demands:

It's a humorous scene that emphasizes something we often forget: Just because someone doesn't agree with us or think like us doesn't negate everything else about them. Here, Cletus Kasady comes across like a stereotypical country conservative, wanting to “own the libs” in death. Not a heroic sentiment, but that doesn't make his actions any less heroic.

Too often, people are vilified for being “conservative” or “liberal,” when human beings are more nuanced than their political affiliation, even if folks sometimes work hard to fit into one ideology and oppose the other.

Axis had more of good-guy Carnage, including a three-issue limited series (Axis: Carnage, cover to issue 1, at left, by Alexander Lozano) where he seeks out the guidance of a TV news anchor in his quest to be a hero. It's interesting because even though a magical switch has been flipped to make Cletus want to be a good guy, he doesn't really know how. And it doesn't help that his would-be Lois Lane is only concerned with her own career and how getting up close and personal to this notorious super-villain can benefit it.