Publication History

In 2009, Axel Baines was created by Keith Giffen as one of the supporting characters in the Magog ongoing series. Axel was the foremost of these supporting characters and has appeared in every issue thus far. 

History  

With whatever name Axel Baines was originally known by, he served in the United States Marine Corps, and it was during that time he became a friend of David Reid. The military life apparently did not suit him, because he went out of his way to get a section eight discharge. He did this by insisting to psychiatrists that he was Batman with such zeal and determination they had to believe he was crazy. 
 

Once out of the corps, he set himself up as an independent operator under the new identity of Axel Baines, slipping into the comfortable facade of a southern good ol' boy running a tiny gas station in Ordell, West Virginia. He dealt in information, using a sophisticated search engine he created called Mirage. This was his life when David Reid, who had recently become Magog, looked him up. 
 

Magog was looking to act independently of the Justice Society of America, but doing so required him to have his own resource when it came to gathering intelligence. Axel was more than up to meeting the requirement, pointing Magog to hotspots and finding answers to the questions Magog returned with. When Magog later found himself kicked out of the Justice Society, Axel became the hero's only resource. He helped Magog also get set up living in Ordell with a house that was somewhat of a fixer-upper. 
 

One of the biggest questions Magog came to Axel with was also the most surprising. They needed answers about who Magog was, because beings were showing up claiming to be relations of him. They were claiming ties to Magog and not David Reid, and up until this point, neither David or Axel had reason to make a distinction between the two. This mystery began for Axel with a violent encounter with Magog's alleged mother Alba in his gas station. Entering into Mirage some of the keywords said to him as Alba was throwing him around, he found some scraps of a legend of thirty-three wicked sisters that tied into Magog's true origins. 
 

Abilities and Skills

Axel behaves like lazy, uneducated guy with no cares beyond the walls of his gas station. The truth is that Axel is a trained Marine, intelligence operative and computer genius. He created a search engine, Mirage, that is possibly on par with programs utilized by Oracle.