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An iconic Spider-Man villain is doing everything he can to become the hero he has always wanted to be, and nothing he ever does will make that happen,.
WARNING: The following contains major spoilers for Devil’s Reign #3 by Chip Zdarsky, Marcho Checchetto, Marcio Menyz, and Clayton Cowles, available now from Marvel.
Out of all of Spider-Man’s classic foes, Doctor Octopus is easily the most complex. His villainous aspirations eclipse most, if not all, the Wall-Crawlers villains, including everything from ruling the planet, getting people addicted to a drug only he could provide, and stealing and reselling all the grease in New York City. Over the years, Otto Octavius has also made more than his fair share of heroic turns, even at his own expense. And then there’s his relationship to the Webhead. Peter Parker’s a man Ock tried to kill, to help, has literally been, and who’s Aunt he once tried to marry. Like it said at the start: complex.
His most recent gamble, however, maybe his most personal and least likely to succeed yet.
In Devil’s Reign #3, Octavius has embarked on a risky game of playing both sides against the middle. More than happy to round up the now fugitive Fantastic Four when it served his interests, Doc Ock has shifted to both working against Wilson Fisk’s war on New York’s superheroes and altering the lives of him and his interdimensional counterparts. Either would be a heavy life. Both are a near impossibility.
For Otto, taking down Marvel’s First Family was only ever about gaining access to Reed Richards’ unfathomable array of advanced technology. With Reed’s lab firmly in his grasp, Doctor Octopus wasted no time in recruiting a trio of menacing variants of the Hulk, Wolverine, and Ghost Rider, all of whom are host to their world’s Doc Ock. No matter how maniacal his machinations might seem, everything Doctor Octopus has done so far has been in the name of becoming the hero that the rest of the world has never let him be. Or at least, that’s what he insists.
Otto Octavius’ history in the Marvel Universe stretches back to 1963’s Amazing Spider-Man #3 by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko. Over that time, the iconic villain lived through no small number of transformative moments. Despite his unequivocally villainous origins, Doctor Octopus has made numerous attempts to redeem himself. During 1995’s Amazing Spider-Man #397 by J.M. DeMatteis and Mark Bagley, Otto took it upon himself to save the titular hero from what would have been a torturous demise. Years later, Otto took control of Peter Parker’s body, effectively killing him. However, once there, it took far less time than expected for Doc Ock to embrace several of the ideals that Spider-Man embodies genuinely.
Of course, none of Doc Ock’s attempts to become a real hero have ever been successful for very long. Otto’s cold, calculating, often callous nature may belie his true intentions or be off-putting to others. His methodology will nearly always leave him at odds with the world’s heroes, even when doing his absolute best to emulate them. And when he’s being heroic for selfish reasons, well, the success rate drops even further.
Nonetheless, when Doc Ock explains his plan to his Superior interdimensional counterparts, he insists redemption has been denied to them by the world’s heroes. There’s no sense of introspection, no indication that he’s genuinely willing to change. He doesn’t acknowledge how they, including himself for a time, took over superhero bodies to become Superior versions of them, an unequivocally grotesque act of violation. As long as the Superiors and Otto don’t see that for themselves — or continue to pretend they don’t — they will never achieve redemption no matter how loud the declaration that they’re here to save the world.
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