It makes sense that the comic went with the MK2 version of Jax. When Malibu Comics adapted Mortal Kombat in 1994, the video game sequel was brand new, with Mortal Kombat 3 just on the horizon by the time the run was over.
Other versions of the character were not so lucky. Raiden – an outright god – criticized Jax’s choice to use enhancements, leading to Jax later beating up Motaro with his bare hands. In the movie, he was practically goaded into removing them by peer pressure. On the cartoon, there was an episode where a member of Reptile’s race spit acid onto the arms, screwing them up for a bit and forcing Jax to rely on his own strength for the rest of the episode. Interestingly enough, both of these early adaptations featured moments where Jax actually ditched his metal arms to find the strength within himself. There was nothing actually wrong with his regular arms. The live-action sequel Mortal Kombat: Annihilation and the animated series Mortal Kombat: Defenders of the Realm both followed the idea that Jax’s metal arms were simply add-ons. While Jax only had a cameo in the first Mortal Kombat movie, he was featured much more prominently in two tangential follow-ups. Here are the many origin stories of Jax’s metal arms… Little did his co-creators Ed Boon and John Tobias know that a simple visual upgrade would turn into something much worse for Jax, who was doomed to lose his human arms in increasingly gruesome ways for all eternity, including in the film reboot, which is set to explain once again how Jax ended up armless. The unfortunate Mortal Kombat: Special Forces prequel also explained that Jax had experimented with prototypes over his arms to make it easier to knock out Kano’s teeth, a trial run for what would one day become a permanent upgrade.
Originally, the story behind his new arms was that Jax chose to get the cybernetic enhancements in order to better protect Earthrealm from Shao Kahn’s impending invasion. Those bionic arms just looked cool, and if his nemesis Kano could have a cybernetic eye, why couldn’t Jax get his own gimmick? For Mortal Kombat 3, Midway decided to give him an upgrade, fitting the character with metal arms, but gave little explanation for the change within the story. When Jackson “Jax” Briggs was introduced in Mortal Kombat II, he was Sonya Blade’s shirtless muscleman CO and, for the game, roster replacement.
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