Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, [Doug Moench, Paul Jenkins, Jae Lee, Warren Ellis, Gerardo Zaffino, John Byrne, Ann Nocenti, Joe Simon,] and Scott Buck, 2017

So, as of the point I have reached in the Marvel Cinematic Uni­verse⁠—i.e., late 2017⁠—the Inhumans have been kicking around in Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. for several seasons, but really just as a stand-in for mutants, since I guess the rights to the X‑Men’s corner of the Marvel Universe belong to a different studio.  As I keep saying when I write about the S.H.I.E.L.D. show, the Inhu­mans we meet are “random new ones instead of Crystal and Karnak and all a’ them”.  And now suddenly I get to the next title on my list, expecting a show featuring all these random new Inhumans, and instead it’s Crystal and Karnak and all a’ them!

The Inhumans are a pretty fucked-up concept.  You’ve got a closed society hidden away in the “great refuge” of Attilan, inhabited by an offshoot of humanity whose development was accelerated by the militaristic aliens known as the Kree.  All of these “Inhumans” have the capacity to be transformed by the mist that emerges from “terrigen crystals”, for good or for ill.  A “Genetic Council” attempts to maximize the odds that such transformations will be useful to Attilan by decreeing who may reproduce with whom, but still, the changes wrought by terri­genesis are just as likely to be pointless or even detrimental as they are to be beneficial.  Find yourself unlucky when you emerge from the mists, and it’s off to the slums with you⁠—though even in that case, you’re better off than the Inhumans’ bioengineered “Alpha Primitives”, who spend their lives underground tending to the machines that keep Attilan running.  As for the aspects of society that don’t revolve around DNA⁠—fighting wars and such⁠—Attilan is ruled by an absolute monarch, Black Bolt, with only his own family members as deputies and advisors: Gorgon the goat-man, Triton the fish-man, and a handful of others.  And for decades this royal family was treated as just another superhero team!  When they met up with the Avengers and Fantastic Four, there was a lot of “hail fellow well met” and not a lot of criticism of the fact that their society was founded on eugenics, despo­tism, and slavery. 

The Inhumans debuted in 1965 in the middle of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s famed Fantastic Four run, and they go to show the extent to which these guys were working on the fly.  About a year earlier, they had pitted the FF against the infelicitously named Frightful Four.  As the Frightful Four were meant to be a dark reflection of the title team, they needed a woman as a parallel to the Invisible Girl, but established female villains were in short supply.  So Stan and Jack came up with “Madam Medusa”, whose powers were to have total control over her long red hair and whose background was a mystery (i.e., “we’ll fill it in once we come up with something”).  A few months later, Jack presented Stan with the initial design for another baddie, Gorgon, and Stan replied that Gorgon should come from a whole society of similar chimeras, so Jack should whip up a few.  The result was the Inhu­man royal family, which in retrospect we can take as one of Jack Kirby’s many attempts to build a new pantheon along the lines of his reinvention of Asgard⁠—see also the New Gods, the Eternals, etc.  In fact, it was a little too close to Asgard: with the exception of the Loki figure, Maximus the Mad, they seemed more heroic than villainous.  So Gorgon was turned from an actual bad guy into a misunderstood adversary, on the trail of… Madam Medusa, a fugitive from their secret city of Attilan!  Bang, Medusa’s mys­terious past filled in⁠—and this new group connected up with “‘Attilan,’ island of the gods” from Captain America Comics #1 back in 1941!  But even with all these pieces clicking into place, I doubt the Inhu­mans would have had much staying power had Stan and Jack not decided to give Medusa a little sister.

In Fantastic Four #45, the teenage Johnny Storm, miffed about his longtime love interest Dorrie Evans having other plans when he calls her up for a date, goes for a walk and ends up wandering into a slum scheduled for demolition, where he randomly finds an orange-haired teenage girl in a simple white dress sitting on a concrete block.  “Wow!” he thinks. “I must be seeing things! What’s a vision like that doing in a deserted neighborhood! She almost doesn’t even look real⁠—sort of like something out of a fairy tale! I hate to be disloyal⁠—but she makes Dorrie Evans seem like a boy!”  But she runs away when she sees him, and when Johnny calls out that he just wants to talk, she cries, “No! I can’t! I mustn’t! If ‘they’ learn that I was seen by anyone⁠—!”  Johnny replies, “A gal with your looks oughtta be seen by everyone!”, to which the gal in question responds by miraculously setting her surroundings on fire.  But Johnny Storm is the Human Torch, and absorbs the flames.  “You have hidden powers, too!” gasps the astonished girl.  “Then you must be one of us! Why didn’t you say so??”  Johnny, deciding that “I’d better play it cool till I find out what she’s talkin’ about!”, replies, “Sure I’m one of you! That’s what I’ve been tryin’ to tell you!”  The girl replies, “Oh, how wonderful! My name is Crystal!! What is yours?”  Johnny answers, “I’m the Human Torch! But my friends call me Johnny!”  And a beaming Crystal says, “I would like to be⁠—your friend!”

And that’s that.  From this point on, the FF had their Romeo and Juliet story, as Johnny cares about nothing but being with Crystal, and Crystal cares about nothing but being with Johnny.  But the two are almost immediately separated, with Maximus surrounding Attilan with an impenetrable “Negative Zone” barri­er; it would be over a year, real time, before they were reunited⁠—twenty percent of the running time of the Marvel Universe up to that point.  On one mission, Johnny mopes that “for all I know, I’ll never see Crystal again!” and his sister Sue points out, “Johnny Storm! You’ve barely met her! You hardly know her!”  But the story is clearly on Team Love At First Sight, as Reed Richards interjects, “Sue, when a man thinks he’s in love, nobody can tell him he’s not!”, and Johnny thinks, “That’s the first time he ever called me a man!”  The eventual reunion is actually kind of anti­climactic, as it comes in the middle of a crisis and everyone’s distracted, but Crystal ends up joining the FF while Sue is busy tending to the newborn Franklin Richards, so she and Johnny finally get to spend some appreciable time together.  Anyway⁠—these stories were from before my time, but I did read them during my prime comic collecting days thanks to the anthologies I found at the Canyon Hills Library, and I’ve always loved Crys­tal.  Why?  It’s certainly not because of the sophisticated story­telling on offer in these issues⁠—the storytelling here could hardly be more primitive.  It really boils down to “Yore reel purdy! I wuv oo!” “OMG ILU2!!”  And it’s not because of anything done with the character later.  An unhappy marriage to Quicksilver, a cheap affair with a random real estate salesman, a stint on the Aven­gers in which her main role is to play the good girl in a love tri­angle involving Sersi and the Black Knight of all people… chop­ping her magnificent hair off and becoming some sort of badass operative… none of that explains why I had a poster of Crystal in my first apartment back in the ’90s.  (That’s what today’s corner box is from.)  It’s not even because of her looks: Johnny Storm’s protestations to the contrary, Jack Kirby drew Crystal as the same broad-faced Rhineland milkmaid he always drew.  I think it’s basically just that while I haven’t succumbed to an all-con­suming-crush-for-no-reason since I was nineteen, I had a lot of them before that⁠—like, from age five onward⁠—and Crystal repre­sents the fantasy that those all-consuming feelings might be returned in equal measure.  Plus a healthy dash of “exotic prin­cess wants to know about this Earth thing you call ‘kissing’”.

Jack Kirby grew frustrated about being viewed as merely an artist and not as a plotter and character creator, and deciding that it was time for him to write a title himself, he selected the Inhumans as his subject.  Kirby’s solo take on the Inhumans co-headlined a new volume of Amazing Adventures that launched in 1970, but then Kirby jumped ship to DC and the Inhumans lost their spot in the Marvel publishing lineup.  In 1975 they got a book all their own, but it only lasted twelve issues.  They spent a decade making spotty guest appearances; Ann Nocenti wrote a graphic novel in 1988 about a clash between the Genetic Council and Medusa over her unapproved pregnancy; they spent another decade making spotty guest appearances.  But in 1998, Marvel, emerging from bankruptcy, farmed out four of its secondary properties to a studio headed by Joe Quesada to see whether deviating from the Marvel house style might attract some read­ers.  This was the Marvel Knights initiative.  Long term, the big­gest success of Marvel Knights was that it got the ball rolling in turning the Black Panther into an A‑lister.  But at the time, the attempt by Paul Jenkins and Jae Lee to relaunch an Inhumans comic as a Vertigo-style prestige series got just as much press, or more.  Issue #2 of the Marvel Knights Inhumans, rolling out a new generation of non-royal Inhumans, earned particular notice, with two of its featured characters going on to star in their own Inhumans series starting in 2003.  Then along came the MCU, and with it, the pressure to make the comics match what viewers were seeing in the theaters and on their TVs.  If in the MCU, In­humans were playing the part of mutants⁠—regular people trans­formed into superhumans, not eccentric geniuses who, deliber­ately or inadvertently, were responsible for developing their own powers⁠—then on the off chance that some of those MCU fans wandered into a comics shop, there should probably be some titles roughly matching up with what they’d seen!  So a terrigen cloud was released on Earth, triggering transformations among those who, quite unsuspectingly, were carrying around some Inhuman DNA.  The X‑books were shuffled into the background for a bit and filling their place were substitutes like Uncanny Inhumans and All-New Inhumans and some limited series to flesh out the Inhumans’ corner of the Marvel Universe.  One of these was Karnak.

Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Warren Ellis, Gerardo Zaffino, and Roland Boschi, 2015–2017

I guess I should finally say something about this, since it may well be my favorite Marvel series.  And not because of nostalgia.  It didn’t come out until I was in my forties. 

My senior year of college, Marvel released a series called Mar­vels, written by Kurt Busiek and painted by Alex Ross.  Yes, pain­ted⁠—this was a prestige series with fully painted art.  It retold the saga of the Marvel Universe from the Golden Age up through the end of the Silver Age from the perspective of regular people, people for whom superheroes battling supervillains meant hav­ing to evacuate the city in terror and then watching some blurry clips of the conflict on the eleven o’clock news.  A year later, a new writer named Warren Ellis somehow got the green light to write an edgelord version of Marvels called Ruins.  Here’s the Hulk, except the gamma bomb turns him into a giant mass of cancerous tumors!  Here’s Jean Grey as a prostitute: “I’ll do it better than anyone for twenty dollars”!  (She is then shot dead by Nick Fury, who then shoots himself in the head.)  Puerile and abysmal.  But edgelords can grow up.  Ellis went on to pen some critically acclaimed series: Transmetropolitan (which I haven’t read); Planetary (which I haven’t read); The Authority (which I have read, and which despite its edgelordy tendencies is pretty good).  By the time he returned to Marvel in the 2000s, his stuff was much better than during his first stint: I have mixed feelings about Nextwave, but his brief stints on Thunderbolts and Secret Avengers were first-rate, and then came Karnak.

Karnak was a member of the Inhuman royal family who debuted along with Crystal in Fantastic Four #45.  A short guy with a little mustache, his power was that he could see the flaw in all things: present him with a ten-ton marble block, and he could stare at it, determine its weak spot, and give it a swift karate chop that would break it to pieces.  Hence his epithet: Karnak the Shatterer.  His powers did not come from terrigenesis, we learn: after his older brother Triton was transformed by the mists into a freakish merman, Karnak’s parents decided to spare him a similar fate, and so he developed his powers by a combination of study and natural expression.  So, cool power, but no one really had much idea of what to do with him.  Generally he was paired with Gorgon as half of an odd couple: Gorgon was the blustery buffoon, Karnak the analytical cold fish, and in every adventure they would learn to appreciate each other despite their temper­amental differences.  Paul Jenkins and Jae Lee gave him a new look⁠—out with the Kirby mask, in with some colorful face tat­toos⁠—but he was still as much of a non-entity as ever.  In 2014 Matt Fraction killed him off; the following year Charles Soule brought him back.  And then Warren Ellis got his hands on him.

I have said that Watchmen is my favorite book⁠—not just my favorite comic book, but my favorite book of any type⁠—and one of the many reasons is what Alan Moore accomplished with the character of Rorschach.  Watchmen began as a treatment for a group of characters that DC had recently acquired from Charlton Comics; one of these was the Question, developed by Steve Ditko in the 1960s, after he had fallen under the spell of Objectivism.  Ayn Rand’s version of Objectivism tended to focus on the supposed virtue of selfishness, but Steve Ditko was much more concerned with setting forth the case for merciless, black-and-white moral­ity.  With his creator-owned character Mr. A (see right), on whom the Question was based, Ditko took “black and white” even more literally.  Alan Moore took the Ques­tion (and, by exten­sion, Mr. A), based Rorschach on them, and took a deep dive into the psychological and philosophical underpinnings of these characters.  As I have written, I don’t know if any literary work I’ve ever encountered has shown one human being’s understanding of another the way that Watchmen demonstrated Alan Moore’s understanding of Steve Ditko.  With Karnak, Warren Ellis fished a character that no one had been able to do anything with for fifty years out from under the couch and turned him into Marvel’s answer to Ror­schach.  That is impressive enough for me to give this series a high rating just on general principles, but what made it a favorite is that it hit even closer to home for me than Rorschach did.  See, I am not a badass in any sense of the term, but if I were one, Ellis’s Karnak is the type of badass I would be.  Ellis has referred to the series as “a character study of an absolute trashfire of a human being”, and the series ends up concerned primarily with how the biographical details about Karnak that trickled out over the course of half a century of In­humans stories led the charac­ter to adopt a half-baked nihilistic philosophy as a defense mech­anism.  I understand that Ellis’s project is to set forth a case for why this makes Karnak contemptible.  So why, given that I vibe with most of what Karnak says, do I love this series, constructed to attack him, and, by exten­sion, me?  I guess because, in a world in which I can’t really relate to 99% of the discourse on any topic, this series at least makes me feel, as the kids say, “seen”.

Warren Ellis might roll his eyes in exasperation that he set out to deconstruct a horrible person and I wound up adopting him as kind of an aspirational figure, but apparently this sort of thing is more the norm than the exception.  In my recent articles on the MCU, I’ve written about how the Punisher started out as a villain and wound up becoming so popular that in the ’90s he was head­lining multiple books at once, for instance.  I’ve read the creators of Breaking Bad make the same lament: that the whole point of the show was to show how some initially mild character flaws and some bad breaks could turn a reasonably okay guy into a monster⁠—but that much of the audience was cheering on that monster right to the final frame of the series.  Which brings me to:

Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould, 2015–2022

So this series was one of the very few that I have followed in real time in recent years, and it just wrapped up.  It was very well made for what it was, but what it was was kind of a weird pro­ject: take a popular show, scoop out the main characters, and make an even longer prequel series about ancillary characters from different worlds whose paths rarely intersect.  The result was a lot of chess boxing.  The chess: half the series was about Jimmy McGill’s deterioration into Saul Goodman, his relation­ship with his brother Chuck, his relationship with his eventual wife Kim, his legal cases, his scams.  (That’s another thing about the show: so much of it is about scams, but the scams always threw me out of the show a little bit.  I couldn’t escape that little voice in the back of my mind muttering that the scams only worked because the scripts said they did.)  The boxing: the other half of the series was about Mike Ehrmantraut’s deterioration into a fixer for a local druglord, the struggle between that drug­lord and the Salamanca family within the cartel that sponsors both of them, and the perils that befall one of the Salamancas’ lieutenants.  Chess, boxing, chess, boxing, with little overlap.  What overlap there was nearly all stemmed, interestingly, from an instance of the redemption of… not the ludicrous, exactly, but the random.  Waaaaay back when Saul Goodman first debuted on Breaking Bad, the writers needed a speech for him when Walter White kidnapped him to give viewers a sense that he was already in over his head with the local drug trade, and this is what they came up with: “No, it wasn’t me, it was Ignacio! He’s the one! Oh, no! Oh, no, no, no, no! Siempre soy amigo, siempre, siempre soy amigo del cartel!”  Then, when Jesse Pinkman says to speak English: “…Lalo didn’t send you? No Lalo? …Oh, thank god!”  And while the writers themselves had no idea what any of that meant at the time⁠—they just needed something evocative⁠—that little speech basically became the plot of the boxing side of Better Call Saul.  Over the course of seven years, we meet Ignacio, find out what he did to make him “the one”, meet Lalo, find out what he did to make him Saul’s ultimate boogeyman, and learn the ulti­mate fate of these guys.  Maybe we can call this Pattern 12b or something.

In any case, it seems pretty clear that Better Call Saul was also a Pattern 25 show⁠—an experience delivery system.  It probably would never have been considered, received a green light, or been renewed year after year if not for the sense that there was an audience out there that wanted not just more Vince Gilligan content but specifically more Chicken Man, more Mike explaining here’s what you’re gonna do, more Saul and his scams.  Breaking Bad’s ratings skyrocketed as it headed toward its conclusion; Better Call Saul’s, despite its quality and critical acclaim, actu­ally fell season after season.  I wonder whether the audience for that experience delivery system finally had its fill of these guys.

So, back to Crystal and Karnak and all a’ them.

Apparently this series was a colossal flop.  Why?  The consensus seems to be that you need a gigantic budget, something on the order of the Thor movies, to have a prayer of making this con­cept work, and that this looked more like one of those syndicated action shows from the 1990s.  It’s hard to miss how many narra­tive decisions were motivated by cost cutting.  Medusa’s (admit­tedly very silly) power is total control over her super-strong hair, giving her the equivalent of a dozen flexible arms ten feet long; she gets her head forcibly shaved in the first episode and is pow­erless for the rest of the series.  Karnak’s powers take much less effort to animate, but he still loses them in episode two.  Gorgon’s power is that he’s a goat from the waist down, and can kick with earth-shaking force; the show puts him in pants and boots so that he looks fully human.  Triton goes missing for five out of the eight episodes, saving the show the cost and effort of merman makeup.  And of course Black Bolt’s gimmick is that he’s never supposed to use his main power, which is that a single word out of his mouth can bring an entire city crashing down.  (In practice, Chekhov’s gun dictates that he use this power once per adven­ture.)  In the comics, he falls back on his secondary powers of flight and energy blasts.  Neither of those are in evidence here.  On the TV show, when he can’t use his voice his backup plan is tae bo.  The one power that does get used a lot is the teleporta­tion of Crystal’s dog, Lockjaw: apparently digitally smearing an image and cutting to another scene is relatively cheap.  Digitally adding the black band to Crystal’s hair, I guess, was not so cheap.  It looks like instead they put it on with a sharpie.

You can make up for a tight budget with top-notch acting and writing, but these are also not in evidence here.  I’m not an acting coach so I’ll focus on the narrative decisions I mentioned above.  The most timeworn, overdone Inhumans plot is that Maximus overthrows the royal family.  The plot of this series: Maximus overthrows the royal family.  And, fine, those unfamiliar with the comics don’t know that, so it’s new to them.  But those who are unfamiliar with the comics would probably like to know who these people are before they start getting overthrown.  This show starts with the status quo getting upended before we have much sense of what that status quo even is.  David Mamet might give that decision a thumbs-up, but I’d have liked to see at least a couple of stories about a functioning Attilan before the coup kicks in.  So right away the royal family is on the run, split up so they’re all having solo adventures, which I guess is meant to give all these characters a spotlight of their own, but which prevents the writers from taking advantage of group dynamics and keeps the show from feeling like a unified whole: it’s like the chess box­ing of Better Call Saul, only it’s chess soccer catering macramé boxing.  Meanwhile, the show leans very hard on the casting of Ramsay Bolton from Game of Thrones in establishing the bad guy.  “You know who this guy is, right? Let’s move on.”  I’m also a little dubious about the message the coup plot is supposed to be sending.  “If you live in a fucked-up society, don’t support anyone who promises things like liberty and equality! He’s probably just in it for himself! Trust your benevolent overlords to become more enlightened on their own!”

Still, I would probably give this series a grudging thumbs-up just for the joy of a live-action Crystal and Karnak, if not for the fact that I had to spend six hours listening to people pronouncing “Attilan” like “Ativan”.  I don’t know how Stan and Jack may have pronounced it, but clearly the second syllable should receive the emphasis.  Vanilla : vanillin :: Attila (as in the Hun) : Attilan.  Come on now.

	comment on Tumblr	reply via email	support this site	return to the Calendar page