George Miller's Mad Max: Fury Road thrilled audiences and critics alike when it arrived in 2015, but what's the secret backstory behind Tom Hardy's title character? Fury Road is often ranked as the best Mad Max film in the iconic sci-fi action series; a potent piece of chase cinema which doubles as a thoughtful political commentary. The film managed to fuse thoughtful statements on environmentalism, fascism, and living with a disability with some truly extraordinary action sequences.
However Miller isn't a fan of extraneous exposition, and Fury Road starts fast and only gets quicker from there, never letting up to offer unnecessary backstory or world-building.The audience never discovers how Furiosa lost her arm, how Immortan Joe's death cult came to be, or how Max ended up outside the Citadel where he's kidnapped by said death cult. Fortunately, there's a comic series illustrating a lot of the film's backstory which was co-written by Miller himself, and it provides Max with an appropriately tragic backstory that explains his shook, disturbed demeanor throughout the film's action.
Max has been through the wringer before Fury Road began, hence the shaky PTSD-reminiscent elements of Hardy's performance. Unfortunately for the eponymous madman, the story revealed by the prequel comic series (also called Mad Max: Fury Road) doesn't paint a pretty picture of his post-Thunderdome existence. The comic sees Max traveling to Gastown to fight for a V8 engine so he can build himself a new V8 Interceptor (which canny viewers will recall was totaled by the close of The Road Warrior, proving that there is continuity between Mad Max movies). This prompts a gory battle for survival which sees Max eventually come out on top, but the titular anti-hero earns the ire of a gang of Buzzards who accuse him of cheating. They swear vengeance and soon attack Max on his way out of town, but luckily he's saved from bleeding out by a mysterious good samaritan.
No good deed comes without a price, though, and this enigmatic figure needs Max's help retrieving her young daughter who the Buzzards have kidnapped and are using as a scavenger. Max promises to return the girl, Glory, safely and successfully infiltrates the Buzzard's subterranean lair. Of course, it can't be too simple, and Glory's fear of Max alerts the Buzzards to his presence. Naturally, this being a Mad Max property this prompts a gory battle wherein Max slaughters the Buzzards.
The comic's final scenes clarify the Mad Max series timeline as they connect the ending of Thunderdome to the beginning of Fury Road. Max returns Glory to her mother but the lone surviving Buzzard, the same one who left Max for dead earlier, kills the pair by running them off the road. A heartbroken and, as the title promised, thoroughly mad Max kills the Buzzard, buries the pair, and arrives outside the Citadel distraught and despondent, wrapping up the backstory and setting up the film's events.