The title character of the series serves as Agent N3 of AXE, a fictional spy agency for the United States government.
Carter served as a soldier in World War II, then with the OSS, before he joined his current employer AXE.
He is fluent in English (his native tongue), Cantonese,[3] French,[4] German,[4][5] Greek,[6] Hungarian,[7] Italian,[4] Portuguese,[8] Putonghua (Mandarin),[9] Russian,[9][10] Sanskrit,[11] Spanish[12] and Vietnamese.
In the earliest stories, Carter got the gun off a German officer during a harrowing mission during World War II.
The blade retracts into the handle, and the knife is worn on a special sheath on the wrist, designed to release it into the user's hand with a simple muscle contraction.
The third member of the triad is Pierre, a poison gas bomb, which is a small egg-shaped device, usually carried in a pocket but sometimes as a "third testicle" at his scrotum.
Activated with a simple twist, it would, within seconds, kill anyone or anything that breathed its potassium cyanide,[18] an odorless and colorless gas.
AXE headquarters are located in the 6th floor offices of a building in Dupont Circle, Washington, DC under the cover of the Amalgamated Press and Wire Service.
AXE is purported to contain several different departments with specific functions including Editing (later called "Special Effects and Editing")—headed by Geoffrey Poindexter—which, among other things, creates false biographies for agents and provides appropriate props (e.g. fake latex fingerprints); Documents—whose role is to plant stories in the media to support specific activities and create false identification and travel documents; Records—which provides background information on suspects; and Operations—which provides logistic support for specific missions.