While the Juggernaut has mostly been viewed as a thuggish brute throughout his villainous Marvel Comics career, his secret murder spree elevates his level of villainy, making his antihero reinvention a joke. Cain Marko aka the Juggernaut became a supervillain after obtaining a gem within the Temple of Cyttorak which granted him all of the powers of the Crimson Bands of Cyttorak. However, there was also a task Juggernaut had to complete before claiming these mystical powers as his own, one that makes any kind of redemption for the character impossible.
In New Excalibur #15 by Frank Tieri and Jim Calafiore, the Juggernaut has turned over a new leaf and is assisting a team of superheroes to fend off a deadly threat. However, since the Juggernaut gave up his criminal ways, the demon god Cyttorak challenged Marko to a test of strength so that he may prove himself worthy of remaining the Juggernaut. After Cain Marko passes the test, the New Excalibur team arrives at the mystical temple, where Cyttorak tells them the truth about the Juggernaut’s past.
In order to fully become the Juggernaut after Cain Marko touched Cyttorak’s gem, he first had to defeat the previous Juggernaut and complete the task his predecessor refused, thus proving himself a loyal soldier of Cyttorak. Marko was successful in defeating the older Juggernaut, and so he proceeded with his second assignment before he was free to roam the earth and cause as much chaos as he could muster. That assignment was to utterly annihilate his predecessor’s home village as the people there stopped worshiping Cyttorak in favor of another deity. That village contained men, women, and children, and the Juggernaut killed them all. With this revelation, the Juggernaut was exposed as a mass murderer, which is a far cry from the standard, destructive criminal he was previously shown as. In the current X-Men continuity, the Juggernaut is on the roster for an off-shoot X-Men team led by Nightcrawler known as the Legionnaires, but reworking him as an X-Men antihero after knowing about his murderous past will be a hard pill to swallow.
While it may be hard for fans to forgive the Juggernaut after he wiped an entire village off the face of the earth all in the pursuit of power, the Juggernaut has made significant strides to never do something so horribly villainous as that ever again. The Juggernaut severed his ties with Cyttorak after he was granted a power from Bands of Cyttorak forged on earth which he obtained after being trapped in Limbo. The only reason the Juggernaut killed those men, women, and children was because of Cyttorak’s influence over him, an influence that has since been removed.
Even though there was a dark and powerful force guiding his hand, the Juggernaut still chose to do whatever Cyttorak asked in order to keep his vast amounts of power, no matter how atrocious. While he assuredly won’t do something like that ever again, the fact that the Juggernaut was ever capable of that level of villainy is troubling and makes his antihero reinvention an absolute joke.
