We Need to Rehabilitate Max Lord
I yield to none in my love of Ted Kord, but let's face the facts. He's not the only one who got shafted. Why oh why, did it have to be Max who went whacky and shot Teddy in the head? I LIKE Max, dammit.
Max was always a rather ambivalent character, and therein lies his charm. Yes, he was manipulative, not to mention machiavellian, and he had that whole mind-whammy thing going on, but by and large, he WAS on the side of the Angels...mostly. Max was interesting partly BECAUSE he was a bit on the shady side. And he was funny as heck. I loved his interaction with Oberon, and later with L-Ron. Speaking of whom, what ever happened to L-Ron, anyway? Because I miss him too.
Is there a way for Geoff Johns or somebody to go and figure out a way to rehabilitate poor old Max? Maybe make it Captain Atom as the one who went bonkers...and DISGUISED himself as Max! Or he pulled a Max from an alternate Earth or something, since he seems to have been spending so much time bopping around the Bleed and the Multiverse. For an odd reason, I can find it much more believable that Capt. Atom turned into Monarch and lost his marbles than Max.
There are so many, many good Max Lord stories. I can't really say the same about Capt. Atom, because I always found him to be something of a jerk from the beginning. In fact, he was even more annoying than Guy Gardner, at least to me, and that's saying something.
Maybe EvilMax was a clone! That would be nice. I can accept that. Just bring him back, rehabilitated and as morally ambiguous as ever.
posted by SallyP @ 8:23 AM
11 Comments:
Hey, I'm all for having Capt. Atom be the bad guy. I say we petition DC about it right now. :-)
You've reminded me of an old story where Capt. Atom and Hal Jordan went head-to-head in a big, nasty battle and essentially tried to "out chump" each other. I remember it as being kind of a funny story. I'll have to go dig it up. :-)
Hmm. I'm not sure how'd I'd feel about a rehabilitated Max Lord; I'm getting a little tired of the companies hitting the "character re-set" button all the time.
Oh, and L-Ron had some cameos in recent issues of Metal Men!
He's a Skrull. Give it time.
See, I'm in the "We need to rehabilitate Captain Atom" group myself. I think he holds some sort of distinction as a character who was *never* written right outside his own book.
I'm all for rehabilitating any character that wasn't bad or evil to begin with.
Sea, it isn't easy to out-chump Hal Jordan, but to me, Capt. Atom is one of the few people who could do it.
It's not a question of rehabilitating Max, I'd just like it to be that it never was Max in the first place!
Or maybe it's just that I don't like Capt. Atom much.
"He's a Skrull. Give it time."
I'm still waiting for the revelation that Marvel's entire Civil War storyline was caused by Superboy punching the universe next door, personally.
See, I started reading comics at the One Year Later jump. So everything I've read with Max has been predicated on the knowledge that he's a manipulative jerk who would kill his friend for a little bit of power.
And you know what? It works. Everything I've read - the old JLI issues, Formerly Known As, I Can't Believe It's Not, everything - makes it perfectly reasonable that Max has always been evil and trying to hold sway over the superhero community.
It makes sense, it really does.
So I can't be with you on this one. Max can't be reset, because he always was evil.
Aw Derek, he was only a leetle bit evil!
*sob*
Sorry, Sally, but he was a 1980s businessman.
There's nothing in this universe or the DC Universe more evil.
Heck, that's why they made Luthor one.
Except that J'onn scanned Max's mind (while Max was unconscious) early in the series. Not to mention we got all those internal monologues from Max about how his sense of right and wrong is evolving. In many ways, the inner journey of Maxwell Lord is the plotline of the Giffen/DeMatteis Justice League.
I could accept his being driven mad afterwards, perhaps because of all the death and destruction that those who work closely with heroes must endure (he was horribly upset when it looked like Scott had been killed by Despero, and when Dreamslayer possessed his body and used him to kill the Silver Sorceress he almost quit working with the League), but not his secretly hating the Justice Leaguers the entire time.
For that matter, I don't buy the idea that they secretly distrusted and despised him the whole time. Guy Gardner came in for a lot more loathing in the original series than Max did. When Max was shot, the gang's anguish seemed pretty genuine.
- Arynne
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