Ax Crazy / Comic Books

"I kill for one reason only... Because I choose to."

The DCU

• Batman:
  • Many a member of Batman's Rogues Gallery is known to be a little... off.
  • The Joker. One of his main characteristics is his willingness to go psycho on anyone, including his own henchmen. He becomes even more deranged if he's snubbed from joining a league of villains or if someone tells that he's nothing but a pathetic comedian.
    • His own graphic novel story is even worse! Imagine all the murderous insanity that powered the incarnations of The Joker that Jack Nicholson, Heath Ledger and Mark Hamill played. Now cram it all into one guy. He's that crazy.
  • Harley Quinn usually is this to at least some degree, although she's less evil than the others (in some cases, she's a straight up Anti-Hero who saves her brutality for people who really deserve it.)
  • Then we have Two-Face, Killer Croc, Black Mask, Victor Zsasz (pictured), James Gordon Jr. and many more.
• In Robin (1993) Johnny Warren was already a bit of an unhinged mob enforcer who reveled in torturing people before he was forced by an evil magical object to stab himself in the heart to become a host for a demonic entity and then drain the life of his own mother in order to survive. As Johnny Warlock, he was considerably worse, and far more powerful, after.
• Massacre, Batwing's archenemy. Batwing describes him as "a man who worships death" — and that might be a little too kind.
• Many of Darkseid's minions qualify. As does Darkseid himself, though he hides it well under a veneer of Tranquil Fury. His son Orion, the Soldier God, inherited his rage, but not his self-control.

• Superboy-Prime in Infinite Crisis and Countdown to Final Crisis. Whenever he isn't whining about how "Everything was better on MY Earth!", he's brutally killing anyone who gets in his way.
• Supergirl enemy Reactron is a violent, sociopathic psychopath who gets off on hurting and killing others. In New Krypton He blew the whole Kryptonian race up because Supergirl defeated him in the past, and in Who is Superwoman? he attempted to murder his ex-girlfriend because she had the gall to break up with him.
• Though his insanely over-macho dialogue tends to mask it, Lobo is this trope in spades. He murdered the entire population of his homeworld. Hell rejected him for being too much of a troublemaker to deal with. Valhalla, where the courageous dead fight all day, pull themselves back together at sunset, then feast and drink before they get some sleep so they can repeat the process the next day, kicked him out for being too violent. Think about that one.
• Wonder Woman Vol 1: While the original depiction of Cheetah made it clear she was already a vain, self absorbed jealous murderer even before donning a costume later writers played up a split personality angle with her arguing with herself and being in turn delighted and horrified by the bloodshed she caused.

Marvel Universe

• Captain America: Sin, the Red Skull's daughter, and her equally psychopathic boyfriend Crossbones. In modern Marvel the two are Mickey and Mallory Knox as supervillains, with all that entails. In their first story arc they go on a non-stop killing spree across America: Because they CAN.
• Daredevil:
  • Bullseye. His homicidal nature gets taken up to eleven in Daredevil #169, where he has a brain tumor that makes him hallucinate. He sees everyone as Daredevil, and goes about murdering random people on the street.◊
  • The Owl isn't much better. He was nothing more than a crooked financial adviser with explosive anger issues and the ability to glide at first, but after multiple humiliating defeats, he underwent various experimental treatments to grant himself superhuman physical characteristics. They sure did work, but they also did a number on his sanity, turning his bad temper into unreasoning homicidal fury and giving him increasingly strong bestial impulses and urges. It's so bad that even the Kingpin treads very, very carefully when dealing with him.
  • Matt Murdock's Arch-Enemy Wilson Fisk aka the Kingpin. He started out as a brutal street thug who enjoyed getting blood on his hands. Even as the Kingpin, Fisk still really enjoys physically dominating people and brutally killing them with his bare hands.
• Dark Avengers:
  • Most of the team is nuts. Bullseye is wildly murderous. Venom can barely keep himself from eating everyone he meets. Even Osborn is constantly trying to hold back the crazy goblin voices in his head.
  • The second team aren't much better: Ragnarok, Thor's unhinged cyborg clone; June Covington, serial-killing geneticist; Ai Apaec, chimera god prone to torture and bloodletting... Even Skaar, the team's Token Good Teammate - and it should worry you when a Hulk is the Token Good Teammate - has had an Ax Crazy bout.
• Deadpool: Deadpool combines extreme violence with being a Bunny-Ears Lawyer and Sociopathic Hero, frequently Breaking the Fourth Wall, and many more.
• The Incredible Hercules: Ares so much. He was one of the first members considered for Norman Osborn]'s Dark Avengers team. Though it should be expected considering the guy is the God of War. While Ares has shown affinity for all weapons, from spears to bazookas, his weapon of choice is his enormous axe.
• Warren Ellis's newuniversal has John Tensen, a serial killer with psychic powers. His ability to see people's sins has led him to believe that he's dead and in hell, and that practically everyone deserves to die; and his ability to create blades of Hard Light has allowed him to embark on an endless killing spree.
• The Punisher: Played around with in Punisher War Journal Annual #1 (2008)... the Big Bad's plot to siphon Frank Castle's psychosis and mind for sale as an intoxicant in gaseous form backfires when everyone exposed ends up "tripping" on the Punisher's mind... and the sheer messed-up-ness. The difference is that he is used to it even after he inhales his own psychosis and can still function, whereas the "super" wannabes that would have been barring his way become incapacitated, babbling wrecks. In general, some writers make him lean a bit in this direction, and the Punisher War Journal series has recently hinted at this.
• The Punisher MAX: Oh, so many. Fun game: Take a drink everytime you see a villain who is frighteningly sadistic, violent, twisted, and willing to kill many people without a single trace of guilt. To say that they are violent sociopaths could be a huge Understatement.
• Spider-Man:
  • Norman Osborn, but only when he's the Goblin. He's far more lucid out of costume, but still evil.
  • Back when Eddie Brock was a villain, Venom was unhinged and hellbent on vengeance against Spider-Man, even approaching some levels of homicidal urges. However, after character development, Eddie has grown out of this, to the point that as Venom he tries not to kill criminals anymore.
    • The Venom symbiote's first host Tel-Kar was hell-bent on genocide so it adopted that personality. As its corruption worsened, it became increasingly rage-filled and homicidal, even abandoning the twisted morality it had while bonded to Eddie. However, it can still be tamed by the right host and eventually gets better as it controls its bloodlust along with keeping its insanity in check — unlike its offspring Carnage, who enjoys senseless murder and is extremely bloodthirsty.
  • Carnage. He's the definition of Ax-Crazy, killing people and destroying things not because of any grand master plan on his part, but simply because he can. He's so much of an Ax Crazy that one of the most common manifestations of his ability to reform his arms into weapons is an ax. Not that he wasn't out of his gourd before bonding with the symbiote; he was a Serial Killer who had killed at least eleven people before being caught, and may have killed one or both of his parents.
• Venom: Jack O'Lantern definitely qualifies as this. As a kid he had all the textbook signs of being a serial killer/sociopath, like torturing animals for fun. After he was taken in and trained by the Crime Master he used his skills to track down and murder his own parents. He later hunted down and murdered the two guys who previously held the title of "Jack O'Lantern" just to "clean up the brand". He also has a creepy obsession with Agent Venom, believing him to be his personal archnemesis.
• Wolverine: Sabretooth is a psychopathic bestial assassin who, unlike his Good Counterpart, fully embraces his murderous and feral instincts.
• X-23:
  • Kimura, Laura's sadistic ex-handler at the Facility, who serves the same role for X-23 that Sabretooth does for Wolverine. Kimura took a special pleasure in torturing and both physically and emotionally abusing Laura, severely punished her even when she carried out her orders successfully, and has no qualms at all about killing anyone that potentially stands in the way of recapturing her. If they aren't in the way, she's perfectly willing to kill them anyway just because Laura cares for them. And when Kimura finally does recapture her, she goes to work on her with a chainsaw for "being a bad girl."
  • Also Laura's former pimp, Zebra Daddy. He's a Faux Affably Evil psychopath who viewed her as property he could dispose of on a whim, and when he even suspects one of his girls tipped off Laura, Kiden Nixon, and Cameron Palmer that he was coming for them (she actually didn't), he puts out her eye with a toothpick. In the climax he sends his entire gang armed with automatic weapons after three "unarmed" teenage girls and a schoolteacher. To be fair, the three teenagers were Laura and two other mutants, and the teacher wielded a mean Frying Pan of Doom, but Daddy didn't know any of this. He was perfectly happy to send enough firepower to wage a full-scale gang war against four people who didn't even look to be a legitimate threat just because.

Other

• Evil Ernie of Chaos! Comics is Ax-Crazy, but for good reason. His childhood is horrific and the only people who try to "help" him are Mad Scientists. He eventually gets to pull the Ultimate Ax-Crazy Moment and kill the entire world..
• Cain from Echo is genuinely insane, complete with religious delusions and messianic fantasies, and that only adds to the terror of his violent rampages. When a man is already mentally unstable things become worse when you add in the ability to fillet you with his mind.
• Luna, the protagonist of She Could Fly suffers from homicidal and self-destructive urges that border on homicidal and suicidal fantasy. It's a fairly brutal depiction of this trope, as while she has delusions of grandeur and is intensely antisocial, she still has a palpable conscience and is ashamed that she so desperately wants to hurt others and herself.
• All the villains in Hack/Slash. The essential concept of the series is that you can become undead just by being Ax Crazy enough, and it makes you worse.
• The title character of Hothead Paisan: Homicidal Lesbian Terrorist lives up to her name by assaulting, killing or castrating men on sight in the name of stopping misogyny and homophobia.
• Subverted with Johnny the Homicidal Maniac. Johnny's a Serial Killer who knows he is crazy and thinks of himself as the villain, but is treated sympathetically by his creator. You get the feeling that he would be shocked by the positive light usually put on him, if he knew about it.
  Johnny: I've been talking to dead rabbits and feeding bloody walls. I've done horrifying things with salad tongs. It's really eaten into my social life.
• In John Wick, Calamity is a violent, unhinged Psychopathic Manchild that goes out of her way to kill everyone in her path, regardless if she’s being paid to or not and only hesitating if it ruins her sense of fun. By the time we see her in the present day, she’s been in the nuthouse for the past ten years and hasn’t changed a bit.
• The title character of Roman Dirge's comic Lenore the Cute Little Dead Girl is either Ax Crazy or a particularly dark and dangerous variation of a Cloudcuckoolander, depending on how generous one feels in their evaluation of her — although if one does consider her Ax Crazy, she's a very, very sympathetic portrayal of it.
• Troy Grenzer in Shade, the Changing Man, the man who kills Kathy's parents. Subverted when Shade takes over his body at the point of his execution in the first issue. So the hero of the comic has the face and body of a convicted killer! Though Troy dies in the first issue, his influence is felt throughout the series.

• The villainous Psyko, one of Sleepwalker's most dangerous adversaries, more than lives up to his name. He was a Serial Killer before being transformed into a demonic creature, and after that using his powers to make everyone else around him Brainwashed and Crazy, including Sleepwalker himself.
• Sonic the Hedgehog:
  • Sonic the Hedgehog (Archie Comics):
    • Rosy the Rascal, the Mirror Universe version of Amy Rose. Like her counterpart, she used a magic ring to age herself up so that her beloved Sonic would finally notice her; unlike Amy, the ring drove her completely fuckin' nuts in the process and now she wants nothing more than to smash anything that breathes into a pulp.
    • From the same universe, "Super Scourge". While regular Scourge is just a more arrogant and cruel Sonic, Super Scourge is just non-stop violence and gleefully plans to destroy TWO whole planets. Because he CAN.
• The Tick was rife with them.
  • Subverted in the same series with the Chainsaw Vigilante, who was Exactly What It Says on the Tin... except he always fought to wound rather than kill (and was skilled enough with his weapon of choice to actually pull it off).
• Transformers:
  • Galvatron is frequently thought of as murderous crazy. This is perhaps unfair. He is certainly insane—think Megatron, but (more?) operatic. He is not Ax Crazy, though...at first. His sanity degenerates markedly, seemingly after the destruction of Unicron, however; a popular Fanon theory wasn't quite made canon in Simon Furman's run on the G1 comics. By the end of the series (more accurately, the penultimate issue)...well, when you have a particle cannon that can blow apart even other creations of Unicron in a single shot, but think of this◊ as a good battlefield tactic, you have a good idea of how Galvatron thinks at this point...
  • There are two versions of Galvatron out of four (probably) who are legitimately crazy. The first Galvatron (the one from the UK comics) isn't crazy until his second appearance, where his head is scrambled by time-travel and a rough landing, but he tries to keep his sanity. Then Blaster shoots him with his electro-scrambler. He eventually recovers from that, for a time. Then he meets Megatron, and quickly goes right off the deep end.
  • The second Galvatron (the one from the US comics) manages to keep his sanity for a long while, up until he runs into a freshly revived Megatron. Then the Ark crashes into Earth, which really doesn't help. Galvatron spends the next several days wandering around Canada in a haze, but when Fortress Maximus attacks him, he finally snaps for good, and spends the last few minutes of his life in a berserk rage.
  • Then you have Straxus. The Decepticon warlord left in charge of Cybertron in the Marvel Comics, he's almost as insane as Galvatron. Bonus points for actually having an axe.
  • How about Menasor, the combined version of the Stunticons, who is a psychological mess due to two things; one, the five component parts have such extreme personalities (Dead End is a fatalist, Wildrider a psychopath, Breakdown a paranoid schizophrenic, Drag Strip a narcissist, and Motormaster a raging tyrant), and two, Motormaster is SUCH a raging tyrant that the other four utterly loathe him. And he likes it that way.
  • Megatron can veer into this. In Issue 25 of the Marvel US series, he's so manic over the recent death of Optimus Prime that when Brawl, the most violent and bloodthirsty of the Combaticons, tries to be the voice of reason, Megatron crushes his cranial unit in with his bare hands! Brawl got better.
  • And then there's his Regeneration One appearance. Tired of wiping out humanity, he's just waiting for Optimus Prime to come back, so he can have one last battle before nuking both of them out of existence.
  • In the IDW continuity, Arcee went mad after Jhiaxus's experiments to reintroduce gender to Cybertron and hates him and everything associated with him. When Ultra Magnus apprehended her, she was sentenced to maximum security at Garrus-9, the separation of her spark; that period of isolation was the first time she felt at peace since her change. Her peace was broken when Fortress Maximus reconnected her so she could fight the Decepticon Secret Service when they raided the facility. She managed to track down Jhiaxus and spent six years repeatedly killing him. After Cybertron rebooted, Arcee became Prowl's secret enforcer, murdering Ratbat in what was officially ruled a suicide, fooling nobody. Unusually for this trope, she eventually came to terms with her past, adjusted to her body, found a loving girlfriend in Aileron and finished the comic at peace with herself, having settled down to become a teacher.
  • Whirl in The Transformers: More than Meets the Eye likes to pantomime this characterisation (only to let it down by occasionally being nice to people or caring about his few friends), but his Arch-Enemy Killmaster has him thoroughly outclassed. Killmaster's day job is killing people. His hobby is inventing new tools with which to kill people. He changed his name to Killmaster because his original name of Murderking did not adequately convey how much he liked to kill people. And he may not even be the most unhinged MTMTE-focused character, considering that other antagonists include a respected judge and scientist who's decided to kill half his species to ease his guilt complex and a Psycho Psychologist who keeps a Serial Killer with a taste for Mind Rape on a leash because he's just that fascinated; when Getaway turns to the latter for help papering over the cracks in his increasingly tenuous mutiny, the price is the lives of twenty-five crewmembers.
  • The Wreckers are, perhaps, a little too willing to recruit these. Roadbuster used to sacrifice cadets to the God of Death in service to the voices in his head, which turned out to be Tarantulas screwing with him, and once got high on Syk and forced a Decepticon to eat his own spine, and by The Transformers: Sins of the Wreckers Guzzle makes him look tame, in that Roadbuster is at least considered stable enough not to be kept in a cell when not actively in combat.
  • No list of insane Transformers is complete without a mention of IDW's take on Overlord, who kicks this trope up and beyond. After taking over Garrus-9, he turned the place into his personal kingdom of misrule, forcing prisoners and guards alike to fight gladiatorial battles for his own amusement, all in a bid to force Megatron to come for him so he could kill him...and then collapsed and became suicidal when told that Megatron was dead (it turned out later that he wasn't). When told that Megatron was still alive, he went right back to butchering people...

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