Scans_Daily

Oh, yeah. Max has been shady since his character debut. Hell, part of his debut is him letting a man blow himself up and readers finding out he previously planned to kill his boss. But I think that Max also went through a character development during the Giffen/DeMatteis JLI era that ended with him actually changing and becoming a good man, albeit definitely with what people used to call a "used car salesman" personality.

However, I think that after Giffen and DeMatteis left, other writers just didn't know what to do with Max, so they just went back and forth with him being a good guy or a bad guy in story arcs that were never completed back in the '90s. And then DC needed a villain for Countdown to Infinite Crisis and they chose him because he was maybe a bad robot guy in the '90s and people probably wouldn't remember the character all that much in the 2000s (even though by this time the two new mini series, I Can't Believe It's Not The Justice League, had been/was currently being published).

I didn't read comics back when Countdown to Infinite Crisis was published (I started reading in December 2009/January 2010, when Blackest Night was in full swing), but after learning so much about the JLI and its characters, it bothered me (and still does) about how Max was handled. I also thought that DC would eventually reveal that he was mind controlled and whatnot, but obviously that option is pretty much out of the window. I also hoped that with the Rebirth stuff, DC would reveal, I don't know, that Max changed because of some space-time reboot thing. Hell, I thought that Max was going to go through a redemption arc in the Generation Lost series.

And I guess, if there's even an inch of a possibility that DC will change their minds about him, there will still be a well-written redemption arc for Max.

Although if DC reveals that Evil Max is a clone or alternate universe counterpart and that the Good-ish Max was trapped somewhere or whatever, I'll honestly just go with it at this point.