Maxwell Markham used to be famous.
Not movie-star famous. Not billionaire-philanthropist famous. Not the kind of famous where people wanted your autograph at restaurants or asked for selfies in grocery stores.
Wrestling famous.
The kind where twenty thousand people screamed your name in arenas across the country, where your face appeared on pay-per-view posters, where promoters called you personally because your matches sold tickets and your brutality sold stories.
Crazy Max.
That was the name. The brand. The persona that had made Maxwell Markham into someone worth paying attention to in a sport built entirely on spectacle and manufactured drama.
Except Max's appeal wasn't manufactured.
It was brutality.
Real, visceral, uncompromising brutality that made audiences wince and cheer simultaneously because they couldn't look away even when they wanted to.
No finesse. No theatrical flourishes. No elaborate storylines about betrayal or redemption or whatever narrative the writers wanted to sell that month.
Just pain and endurance.
Max delivered both in quantities that other wrestlers couldn't match—either because they weren't willing or because their bodies broke before his did.
His style was simple: absorb punishment until his opponent exhausted themselves trying to put him down, then hit back harder than they'd hit him. Keep hitting until they stopped moving. Make it hurt enough that they remembered it for weeks.
Fans loved him for it. Loved the raw, primal satisfaction of watching someone who didn't pretend violence was choreography. Who made every impact look like it actually hurt because it did actually hurt.
Promoters tolerated him because he sold tickets, moved merchandise, drew ratings. They winced at the injury reports and the liability waivers but couldn't argue with the numbers.
Opponents feared him.
Not because Max was cruel outside the ring—he wasn't. He followed contracts, showed up on time, never started fights in locker rooms or caused backstage drama.
But inside the ropes? Inside the squared circle where the rules said violence was permitted, encouraged, monetized?
Max made people understand that pain was real even when the outcomes were predetermined.
And that made him dangerous in ways the sport didn't quite know how to handle.
The turning point came on a Tuesday morning in October, ten years ago.
Maxwell Markham—thirty-two years old, at the peak of his career, recovering from a match the night before where he'd dislocated an opponent's shoulder and the crowd had chanted his name for five straight minutes—woke up to find his face on the front page of the *Daily Bugle*.
Not the sports section. The *front page*.
Above the fold. Color photo of him mid-strike, expression twisted into something that looked monstrous under arena lighting and telephoto lens compression.
The headline: **DANGEROUS. UNREGULATED. UNWATCHED.**
The byline: J. Jonah Jameson.
Max had read the article standing in his kitchen, coffee going cold in his hand, disbelief giving way slowly to sick understanding as he processed what was happening.
Jameson called him a menace. A lawsuit waiting to happen. A man whose "barbaric" approach to wrestling endangered not just opponents but the sport itself, the audiences who watched, the children who might try to imitate what they saw.
He demanded investigation. Demanded the wrestling commission review Max's license. Demanded someone—anyone—take responsibility before "this unstable individual" caused permanent damage or worse.
The article was thorough. Methodical. Backed by expert testimony from doctors, lawyers, former wrestlers who spoke anonymously about injuries sustained in matches with Crazy Max.
It was devastating.
And it worked.
The wrestling commission listened.
Because J. Jonah Jameson wasn't some nobody with an opinion. He was the voice of New York media. When he said something was dangerous, people paid attention. When he demanded investigation, officials felt pressure to respond.
The hearings started within a week.
Max tried to defend himself.
Sat in front of a panel of commissioners and lawyers and medical professionals, watching footage of his matches replayed in slow motion—every strike, every impact, every moment of brutality isolated and examined under clinical lighting that stripped away the context of performance and spectacle.
"That's the job," Max had said, voice steady despite the tightness in his chest. "They signed waivers. Everyone knows what they're getting into when they step in the ring with me."
"The waivers don't protect you from negligence," one commissioner had replied, not unkindly. Just factually. "And the question before us is whether your conduct constitutes reckless endangerment."
They showed more footage. Injuries documented. Concussions. Broken bones. One wrestler who'd needed surgery after a match with Max, recovery taking six months.
"He came back," Max had argued. "He's still wrestling."
"That's not the point, Mr. Markham."
But it was the point. That was the entire point. Wrestling was dangerous. Everyone knew that. Every contract spelled it out. Every match carried risk.
Max just didn't pretend otherwise.
Didn't soften his strikes for the cameras. Didn't pull punches to protect egos. Delivered exactly what he advertised: brutality that felt real because it was.
The commissioners didn't see it that way.
After three weeks of hearings, they revoked his license.
Effective immediately. No appeal process. No grace period.
Career over.
Reputation destroyed.
All because J. Jonah Jameson had decided Maxwell Markham was dangerous and needed to be stopped.
Time moves different when you're nobody.
Max faded from public memory fast—wrestling fans have short attention spans, always moving to the next spectacle, the next controversy, the next personality loud enough to demand their focus.
Within six months, Crazy Max was a footnote. A trivia answer. "Whatever happened to that guy?"
But Max remembered.
Couldn't forget even when he wanted to.
He worked security for a while—nightclubs, corporate buildings, anywhere that needed someone large and intimidating standing at doors. The job required presence without violence, which felt like using a sledgehammer to hang pictures. Correct tool, wrong application.
Then warehouses. Loading docks. Heavy lifting that paid hourly and didn't ask questions about gaps in your resume or why someone his age was starting over in manual labor.
Underground fight rings when he needed money fast. No rules, no commissions, no liability waivers. Just cash and pain and the same brutality he'd delivered in legal venues, except now it was illegal and the purses were smaller and nobody chanted his name.
Every break room. Every waiting area. Every public space with screens.
Someone was always watching the *Daily Bugle's* news coverage. Jameson's face appearing multiple times a day, voice booming through speakers, demanding accountability, calling out dangers, making pronouncements about who deserved scrutiny and who deserved praise.
And Max would sit there, eating lunch or waiting for his shift, listening to that voice.
The voice that had ended everything.
The voice that had decided Maxwell Markham was too dangerous to exist in public, too brutal to be tolerated, too honest about violence to be permitted.
Jameson's voice never left his head.
Ten years of it. Ten years of working jobs that paid a fraction of what he used to make, living in apartments that got smaller each time he moved, watching younger wrestlers on TV doing softer versions of what he'd done and getting celebrated for it.
Ten years of rot.
Of anger fermenting into obsession.
Of knowing—knowing—that one man's opinion had destroyed his life and facing the reality that nothing he could do would change it.
Until he found the suit.
The exoskeleton came through black-market tech channels Maxwell didn't fully understand and didn't particularly care about.
Some weapons dealer he'd met through the underground fighting circuit. Someone who knew someone who had access to corporate prototypes that never made it to market—too expensive, too dangerous, too much liability for legitimate companies to produce.
The seller called it an "industrial assistance frame." Designed originally for heavy lifting, hazard response, construction work in environments where human strength wasn't enough and machinery was too cumbersome.
Max called it perfect.
The base design was functional but boring—humanoid frame, hydraulic assists, reinforced joints. Built to amplify human movement, not replace it. Make someone stronger without making them something else.
Max reworked it.
Spent three months learning fabrication, welding, mechanical engineering through YouTube tutorials and trial-and-error. Added armor plating salvaged from decommissioned military equipment. Reinforced the hydraulics to handle impacts instead of just lifting. Shaped the exterior into something that matched what he felt inside.
A grizzly bear.
Not realistic. Not nature-documentary accurate. Stylized. Hulking. *Monstrous*.
Eight feet tall when he stood in it. Half a ton of reinforced steel and hydraulic power. Claws that could punch through concrete. Servos that turned human movement into something that could crack foundations.
It didn't just amplify strength.
It encouraged impact.
Let him lean into who he'd always been—the person who hit hard, absorbed punishment, kept coming forward no matter how much damage accumulated.
Except now the damage didn't accumulate.
Now he was the damage.
First test run happened in an abandoned warehouse district at 3 AM on a Saturday.
Max climbed into the suit—full-body harness, neural interface sensors, hydraulic feedback systems engaging as he moved—and felt it come alive around him.
Weight distributed across reinforced supports. Power flowing through servos. Every movement amplified, enhanced, made *real* in ways his body alone could never achieve.
He took a step.
Concrete cracked under his foot—not dramatically, not movie-explosion cracked, just stress fractures radiating outward from the impact point because a half-ton of metal doesn't step lightly.
He walked faster. Each footfall leaving impressions. Each movement creating noise—hydraulic hiss, servo whine, the groan of metal under stress.
He tested the strength.
Picked up a rusted shipping container with both claws, hydraulics straining but holding, lifted it overhead and threw it twenty feet.
The crash was deafening. Satisfying.
He punched a concrete pillar.
His fist—the suit's fist—drove six inches deep before the pillar's internal structure gave way and the whole thing collapsed in a cloud of dust and debris.
Pain barely registered. The suit's shock absorption and his own high pain tolerance combined into something that felt like invincibility.
Max laughed.
For the first time in years—real, genuine laughter—echoed inside the suit's helmet, distorted by the voice modulator he'd installed to make himself sound less human.
He didn't feel human in that moment.
He felt heard.
Felt like something that couldn't be dismissed or revoked or ended by someone's opinion.
Felt like Crazy Max again.
But bigger.
Stronger.
Unkillable.
Max didn't plan to rob banks.
Didn't plan to fight heroes or build a criminal empire or any of the things villains in this city apparently did with their newfound power.
He had one target.
One name.
One voice that had been living in his head for ten years, pronouncing judgment, demanding accountability, deciding who deserved to exist and who needed to be stopped.
J. Jonah Jameson.
And by extension, the institution that gave Jameson his platform: The *Daily Bugle*.
That building in Midtown with Jameson's name on the masthead, where pronouncements were made and lives were ruined and nobody faced consequences because journalism was protected, necessary, untouchable.
Max was going to touch it.
Was going to walk through the front door in a suit that weighed half a ton and make Jameson understand—make everyone understand—that words had consequences too.
That you couldn't just destroy someone's life and walk away clean.
That brutality wasn't something only wrestlers delivered.
Sometimes it came for you.
Max chose Tuesday afternoon. Rush hour. Maximum visibility.
He walked through Midtown in the bear suit, broad daylight, not hiding or sneaking or pretending to be anything other than what he was.
A monster with purpose.
Traffic scattered. Cars swerving, braking, one taxi clipping a fire hydrant in its panic to get clear. Water erupted, spraying across the street, and Max walked through it without slowing.
Pedestrians fled. Some screaming, some silent, all running in that particular way people run when instinct overrides thought.
Phones came out.
Of course they did.
This was New York. This was 2020. Nobody ran without filming first.
Max didn't care.
Wanted this seen, actually.
Wanted the footage to spread. Wanted Jameson to watch from his office as something he'd created came for him.
He didn't rush.
Walked at a steady pace, each step deliberate, letting the hydraulics absorb his weight, letting the claws scrape pavement, letting the spectacle build.
Someone shouted about calling the Avengers. Someone else screamed about Iceman.
Max kept walking.
Eight blocks. Seven. Six.
The *Daily Bugle* building looming ahead, glass and steel and Jameson's name in letters ten feet tall.
Security appeared at the entrance—two guys with radios and nervous expressions, clearly not paid enough to confront whatever Max had become.
"Sir, you need to—"
Max didn't slow.
Didn't stop.
Didn't acknowledge them as human obstacles worth responding to.
Just kept walking.
He reached the building's front entrance.
Glass doors. Marble lobby visible beyond. Tourists and employees frozen, staring, some already running toward emergency exits.
Cameras everywhere. News crews arriving, setting up, broadcasting live because a monster in Midtown was content gold.
Max raised one massive armored claw.
Hydraulics engaged. Servos whined. Power concentrated into a single point of impact.
And he slammed it into the entrance.
Glass exploded. Not shattered—exploded, fragmenting into thousands of pieces that caught sunlight and scattered like diamonds made of violence.
The frame buckled. Steel supports groaning, concrete cracking, the entire entrance collapsing inward as structural integrity failed under the impact.
Alarms screamed—fire, security, emergency broadcast, every system designed to signal crisis activating simultaneously.
Max stepped through the wreckage.
Debris crunching under his feet. Water from sprinkler systems raining down, hissing against heated metal.
The lobby stretched ahead. Elevators. Stairs. Jameson's office somewhere above, protected by floors and walls and the belief that buildings were safe, that journalists were untouchable, that consequences were for other people.
Max intended to climb.
Intended to go floor by floor if necessary, breaking everything between him and that office, making Jameson watch his world collapse the way Max had watched his own career end.
He took one step toward the stairs.
A web line snapped tight around his wrist.
Not painful. Just sudden. Adhesive gripping metal, tension pulling his arm slightly off-balance.
Max looked up.
Spider-Man crouched on the remains of the entrance frame, perched impossibly on twisted steel, red and blue costume bright against smoke and destruction.
His voice echoed through the chaos—younger than Max expected, almost cheerful despite the circumstances:
"Okay, big guy. I get wanting to hug a building, but this one's taken."
Max stared at him.
The hero. The celebrity. The person Jameson praised in half his editorials and condemned in the other half depending on the day and the narrative.
The person who got to be violent for applause while Max had been destroyed for the same thing.
Spider-Man tilted his head slightly, trademark casual posture suggesting this was routine. "So here's how this goes: you power down the Iron Bear suit—nice aesthetic choice, by the way—and we talk about whatever's bothering you like civilized—"
Max roared.
Not words. Not threats. Just sound—raw, amplified by the suit's voice modulator into something that rattled windows and made the crowd outside flinch.
Then he yanked the web line.
Hard.
Hydraulics straining, servos maxing output, half a ton of metal and fury pulling against spider-strength.
Spider-Man released the line before it could pull him off-balance, backflipping away as Max charged.
And somewhere in Max's head—underneath the rage, underneath the obsession, underneath ten years of rot and resentment—a thought surfaced:
*Ten years of rage had finally found its audience.*
Not commissioners. Not lawyers. Not faceless bureaucrats deciding his fate in closed hearings.
But this.
This moment.
This fight.
This recognition that he existed, that he mattered, that he was dangerous enough to demand attention from someone who actually mattered in this city's hierarchy of violence.
Max charged toward Spider-Man.
And for the first time in a decade, he felt like Crazy Max again.