SELLING THE SUPERHERO WOMEN

 

I started to respond to Tom Brevoort's post on Marvel's 1977 reprint collection THE SUPERHERO WOMEN, and to its attendant comments on that blog. But I decided I would do so here first, and reprint my remarks there afterward. 

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First, I agree with Tom that the selection from SPIDER-MAN #62 doesn't really make the character of Medusa look all that great. Of course, there was no inherent sexism in this guest-starring story, because Stan Lee had written other Spidey stories in which male guest-stars like Quicksilver or The Iceman acted stupidly in order to make the story work. A better selection would have been Medusa's solo story from MARVEL SUPER HEROES, published around the same time as the Spidey story, which in turn may've been designed to get casual readers interested in the long-locked lass.

The RED SONJA story is an okay selection, and the FANTASTIC FOUR entry is well chosen. This story depicted Sue Storm gaining her force field powers, thus responding, after roughly three years, to fans' complaints about her lack of overall power. 

I have the impression that the MS MARVEL selection arose from the company's ongoing agenda to protect the "Marvel" name in any character. Certainly that agenda underlay the creation of the "Marvel Captain Marvel" in the first place, and since a CBR article mentions that the company was taking pitches for various "Ms. Marvel" concepts as early as 1972-- two years after UNCANNY X-MEN and Marvel Girl were off the stands-- that applied to the final, approved version as well. (I couldn't locate an online recapitulation of the story that Jean Grey herself was considered as a possible "Ms. Marvel.")

The selection of the two-part THOR story featuring Hela was a strange one. Since she wasn't purely villainous, she wasn't all that consequential to THOR in particular or to Marvel as a whole. Why not the first Enchantress story, since she was at least important to the universe, and since the tale was a good stand-alone? Maybe Stan just wanted to spotlight some of his post-Kirby work with the God of Thunder, which work was actually pretty good. I'm not surprised there was no Sif-centric story, because I can't think of any at all up to 1977.

A better choice IMO would have been issues X-MEN #62-63. Granted, Marvel Girl was usually a pretty weak sister for most of the feature's run, but this was one of the few times, if not the only time, she was allowed to shine and save the day. And until re-reading the issue, I'd forgot that it included Magneto hitting on Jean Grey big-time, in the old "reign at my side" context. So, Mags, checking out the Young Talent? Sort of like that story where Magneto has the mentally enslaved Scarlet Witch do a hootchie-koo dance for him, years before she was retconned into his pride and joy.

The "Femizons" story was meh, and I suppose the CAT and SHANNA stories were attempts by Stan to repeat his "Well, we tried" defense. The Black Widow story from SPIDER-MAN is another story where the guest star acts stupidly to make the story work, but it holds some historical interest for debuting the bitchin' catsuit-costume. 

That leaves only the Wasp's debut story in the ANT-MAN feature from 1963, which is IMO the best story in the collection. Though Stan's only credited with the plot for "The Creature from Kosmos," I'd theorize that he gave scripter Ernie Hart a pretty thorough breakdown of the whole story, since Stan was after all doing his best to build his then-small universe. For an early Silver Age adventure, it's pretty layered. Ant-Man starts having existential doubts about who will carry on for him while simultaneously grieving for his lost wife Maria. When he considers the possibility of a partner, 1963 readers might have expected (if not for the cover and splash page) the introduction of a kid sidekick-- "Pismire, the Ant Wonder!" Instead Henry Pym gets a meet-cute with Jan Van Dyne, a young woman who slightly resembles Maria, and thought balloons establish that both are instantly attracted to one another. Despite Pym's defensive reaction to the effect that Jan is just "a child," I think it's obvious that she's close to 20, and probably a bit older, given that there's no question of her inheriting the Van Dyne fortune when her pop gets killed. None of that Magneto-type trolling for Old Henry!

I also don't think there's a good argument for Jan, before or after she becomes The Wasp, being an "airhead." Her determination to avenge her dad is what leads Pym to play "Batman" to her "Robin," and to give her the chance not just for vengeance, but to take up the life of a superhero. But she accepts the duty partly because she knows that he's attracted to her, and not as a kid. So all of her subsequent expressions of stereotypical femininity-- drooling over other men, or her frequent references to shopping-- are part of her plan to stay close to Henry and keep reminding him that she's a woman, not a sidekick. And of course, she may actually LIKE shopping. I have it on good authority that some women really do!

GENETIC FREAK-OUTS

I was barely reading any Marvel Comics in the 2010s, but I followed in a loose sense the consequences of the company's bizarre decision to play down the successful X-Men franchise and promote that of the never-successful Inhumans. I'm not sure I knew that plans for an Inhumans film were initiated in 2014, but I certainly saw the result that same year in the AGENTS OF SHIELD teleseries. The first season of that ill-conceived cockup had already been lousy, but the show reached new Heights of Stupid with an attempt to shoehorn the Inhumans concept (though not the familiar comics characters) into a secret agent format. After plans for a movie stalled, in 2017 the principal Inhumans of the so-called "Royal Family" appeared in an eight-episode ABC teleseries. The series proved a huge bomb, critically and commercially. I found in it but one virtue-- a strong performance by actor Anson Mount as the silent king Black Bolt. In my book that put the INHUMANS show on the same quality-level as AGENTS OF SHIELD, whose only strength was the casting of Ming-na Wen as agent Mathilda May.

All these idiotic machinations almost certainly came about because some genius in Disney Marketing decided that the company wasn't getting enough bang for its buck by playing up the X-Men franchise, since that property's movie and TV rights were then owned by Fox. I can imagine the conversation going like, "Hey, Marvel still totally owns the Inhumans, right? The fans will just accept anything we push at them as long as it has a bunch of weird, colorful people in costumes to help them (the fans) compensate for their drab lives." And once this blockhead came up with this genius idea, no one else could point out its fatuity, lest that person seem like he wasn't in favor of the company making more money. One hopes the genius got kicked to the curb for whatever monetary losses Disney suffered for the failure of the INHUMANS teleseries.

As I said, none of these Marvel machinations affected me back in the day, since I wasn't reading the X-books, or for that matter the FANTASTIC FOUR features that also got downplayed for an analogous reason. But when I recently caught sight of a TPB collection of a 2016-17 Marvel series, INHUMANS VS. X-MEN, I wondered if the story, written by Charles Soule and Jeff Lemire,  might signal some of the company's priorities during that historical moment. 

I also dipped into a handful of Inhumans stories published around the same time as IVXM, but I'm sure I've missed a lot of fine points about the execution of the Inhumans franchise. That means that any conclusions I make here are partial at best. But IVXM by itself sets up a situation that COULD have been used to shunt the Unwanted X-Franchise off Planet Earth and to play up the Inhumans, though this possibility does not actually come to pass by the end of the story. Overall the Soule-Lemire story conforms to the "Marvel heroes fight over a misunderstanding" trope, though I will say that, unlike a lot of multi-character crossovers, the writers manage to give most of the characters therein a "spotlight moment" or two. 

Perhaps more tellingly, IVXM attempted to "democratize" the process of genetic-diversity-with-superpower-benefits. The 1970s X-MEN capitalized on this trope far more than its 1960s iteration by disseminating that diversity over countless human cultures and ethnicities. By contrast, the concept of Marvel's Inhumans, as initiated in 1965, was that of an insular culture that had a thing for inducing mutations in its populace, even though the people came from the same stock as common humanity. Following the 1960s, most of the attempts at giving the Inhumans ongoing serials were hampered by the difficulties of endowing such exotic characters with any relatability. Some of the Inhumans stories produced in the middle 2010s, though, sought to modernize the franchise by introducing an assortment of younger Inhumans, sometimes termed "Nuhumans," who in my opinion were designed to compete with the more numerous and successful X-spawn.

I don't have enough information to render any aesthetic judgment on the various INHUMANS comics of this period. There may be some very good works in the actual books, whatever the motives of the marketing people who were responsible for the X-Men X-cision. Still, history will record that Marvel customers still wanted the X-Men, no matter how much the company pushed its favored franchise. Perhaps the fact that the comic-book version of Kamala Khan, originally retconned into an Inhuman as part of the "Inhumans First" project, is now being touted as being "both an Inhuman AND a mutant."

In 2019 Disney bought out Fox and now has the right to monetize any X-adaptations the company might want to do. I suspect, though, that the failure of the Great Inhumans Push will not teach Disney anything about the folly of trying to manipulate their customers' desires for entertainment purely to help the company's bottom line.

INHUMAN DESIRES

 In a recent post on RIP JAGGER'S DOJO Rip devoted a few posts to Marvel's Inhumans features and noted, "The Inhumans always proved to be a hard sell for a self-titled ongoing series."

I had made a similar observation in my review of the 1998-99 INHUMANS graphic novel by Paul Jenkins and Jae Lee:

The Inhumans were introduced in the mid-sixties by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby in FANTASTIC FOUR, and the prevailing wisdom is that they were mostly Kirby's designs. However, subsequent attempts to launch the characters in their own series were largely unsuccessful. Though personally I liked the characters, I found that they were too static and lacked a viable group dynamic. The pattern for THE INHUMANS slightly resembled the Lee-Kirby THOR. In both features, the stories alternated between a fabulous otherworld where most of the characters had super-powers, and visits to the mundane world of humanity. Yet, what worked for Thor-- a central character with a retinue of support-figures-- didn't really work for the five main characters of THE INHUMANS. One reason was that four of the continuing heroes-- Medusa, Gorgon, Karnak, and Triton-- were eternally deferential to Black Bolt, who was not only the leader of their group, but their absolute monarch, and the ruler of all the Inhumans who dwelled in the remote city of Attilan. This meant that it was difficult for writers to evoke the standard formulas of Marvel interpersonal drama.

 

Now, to pull at these threads somewhat, I should not that a "viable group dynamic" is not a guarantee for success. The Silver Age (roughly 1956-1970) gave rise to a larger number of adventure-teams than had been typical for the Golden Age. One of the few teams that had endured from the early 1940s until the mid-fifties was Quality Comics' BLACKHAWK, and this was the only feature that DC Comics continued, starting in 1956, after allegedly purchasing all of the properties owned by Quality once that company dissolved. It may be no coincidence that Jack Kirhy and Dave Wood initiated another team of uniformed crusaders the very next year, resulting in the CHALLENGERS OF THE UNKNOWN, which endured throughout the remainder of the Silver Age. Then within the next three-four years DC and Marvel respectively debuted JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA and FANTASTIC FOUR, which both enjoyed more long-lasting success than any team that debuted in the Golden Age. JUSTICE LEAGUE survived even though it did not originally boast any sort of "group dynamic," while the FF practically defined said dynamic. Both BLACKHAWK and CHALLENGERS, which were "old school" in terms of interpersonal drama, were gone by the early seventies. At least one of Marvel's team-books with the new emphasis on drama, THE AVENGERS, prospered. However, a good group dynamic didn't save X-MEN, which concluded its first run in 1970, even though it was resurrected to spectacular success in 1975. And of course a number of solo Silver Age characters from both Marvel and DC also pooped out by the early seventies, notably THE SILVER SURFER, which had received just as much promotion in the pages of FANTASTIC FOUR as had THE INHUMANS.

All that said, the thing that currently interests me most about the Inhumans is that Jack Kirby designed them at a point where Marvel was doing very well with most of its line, even if Kirby himself felt that he was getting the short end of the stick in a business sense. Some fan-sources assert that Marvel had some notion of launching THE INHUMANS as a full series sometime in the mid-sixties, but that this plan was dropped, so that the characters didn't get their own berth until debuting as a "co-feature" in 1970's AMAZING ADVENTURES. I tend to believe that Kirby thought the characters up without much input from Lee when the group appeared in 1965 (not counting the solo appearance of the character Medusa, who had appeared sans origin a year or so earlier). But the fact that Kirby didn't seem to have imagine any raison d'etre for these characters suggests to me that in his own work he didn't focus on interpersonal drama to the degree that Stan did. Kirby certainly knew how to evoke drama and pathos, and he probably contributed his fair share of such moments in FANTASTIC FOUR. Nevertheless, I think he did it largely because that's what his editor Lee wanted, not because the continuing "heroes with problems" was his creative preference. Indeed, most if not all of the "team-books" that Kirby did after ending his collaboration with Lee hearkened back to the "old school approach" of the Golden Age. Whether Kirby did the Boy Commandos or the Forever People, a Newsboy Legion for the forties or for the seventies, the team-members were mostly "a swell bunch of guys," which phrase was once applied to the Justice Society of the forties.

To be sure, Kirby's Inhumans, whether in the pages of the FF or in their own feature (a few of which Kirby wrote and drew), were more dour than brimming with bonhomie. But I'm not sure that anyone who followed Kirby's act with these characters ever managed to give them more complex or evocative characterizations-- even though, as noted above, Jenkins and Lee did a better than average job.

 

MYTHCOMICS: "THE KREE-SKRULL WAR" (AVENGERS #89-97, 1971-72)

Not a few critics have chosen to see the superhero genre as something apart from the confluence of tropes that are called "the SF genre." It's a dubious separation in a critical sense, but it makes sense in terms of marketing. Genres are formed more from reader-expectations than anything else, and it can be fairly said that, say, a character like Superman raises different expectations from a character like Adam Strange.

Marvel's FANTASTIC FOUR blurred the marketing distinction between the genres more than any prior superhero title. Though the heroes spent some time fighting super-crooks like the Frightful Four, they're better known for the many SF-concepts elaborated by Lee and Kirby-- the extradimensional Negative Zone, the "lost race" of genetically modified Inhumans, and the alien race, the Kree, who fostered the Inhumans' advancements, to name the three that have the greatest impact on Roy Thomas's "Kree-Skrull War."

By contrast, though the Avengers had their share of encounters with aliens and lost races, the feature always seemed squarely in the superheroic domain. Further, during the long tenure of writer Roy Thomas on the title, it sometimes seemed like "Fantastic Four West," in that Thomas borrowed a considerable number of villains from the FF: Diablo, the Thinker, and so on. Not until the Kree-Skrull continuity, though, did Thomas make a concerted effort to bring a "sci-fi" flavor to the series.

That said, AVENGERS #89 wasn't precisely Thomas's first effort to blend superheroes with SF. Marvel Comics's version of Captain Marvel debuted in a 1967 Stan Lee story, after which Thomas wrote five more stories before ceding the character to other hands. Thomas's first, very short run with the character-- a soldier of the Kree race, posing as a superhero on Earth-- is noteworthy for revealing a long-standing animus between the Kree and an earlier group of Lee-Kirby aliens, the Skrulls, whom Stan and Jack had mostly ignored for the latter part of the 1960s. Over a year later, Thomas returned to the hero's adventures, and attempted a reboot of the character with Gil Kane art and a new costume (seen in the illo above). Even this reboot was somewhat indebted to the FF feature, since it involved placing Marvel in the Negative Zone, which he could only escape by "trading atoms" with Earth-juvenile Rick Jones.

Thomas wasn't writing the CAPTAIN MARVEL feature at the time he began the Kree-Skrull continuity, but the character is the linchpin that brings the Avengers into a greater SF-tapestry. Issue #89 is largely concerned with revealing to the title heroes the relationship of Marvel and Jones, though it also informs the reader that there's been a power-shift on the Kree homeworld. The Supreme Intelligence, ruler of that world, is deposed by his former underling Ronan (both, incidentally, also FF creations). As soon as Ronan takes power, he sends a robotic Sentry to take Marvel prisoner, while Ronan himself speedily travels all the way to Earth to bring about the total devolution of the human race.

This plot, which lasts over the next two issues, is along the line of "what the Kree giveth, they can also take away." As mentioned above, an earlier generation of the Kree visited the Earth eons ago, and chose to foster the isolated race of modified beings, the Inhumans (whose adventures in their own title Thomas also wrote at one point). The Avengers pursue the abducted Captain Marvel and his captors, and prevent the Earth from returning to Bedrock-status.

Often in comic books, the defeat of an alien invasion had no repercussions on Earth's society. However, the three active Avengers in #89 all belong to groups that weren't quite human: the android Vision and two mutants, Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch. Moreover, by the early 1970s Marvel writers tended, more often than not, to play up their heroes' sense of disaffection from their communities. Thomas goes so far as to have the Vision assert that "superheroes are, by definition, misfits"-- which observation foregrounds the result of the invasion: a massive anti-alien hysteria, at least in the U.S. (Other parts of Marvel-Earth do not weigh in.) Issue #92 is particularly prescient in having two Avengers argue the "government security vs. civil liberaties" question that later informed the CIVIL WAR arc of the 2000s. 

Meanwhile, for no cited reason, the Skrulls declare war on the Kree, forcing Ronan to hurry back to his homeworld. However, now the Skrulls, seeing Earth as a possible resource for their enemies, infiltrate the planet as well. The formidable Super-Skrull tries to destroy the city of the Inhumans, simply so that the Kree cannot enlist their super-powers. The villain also tries to subvert Captain Marvel, so that the Kree officer will reveal a special weapon that can turn the tide in the war. Some of the Avengers, as well as the captain, are abducted, forcing the other heroes to voyage into space to rescue their comrades, while simultaneously trying to keep the two alien races from wrecking the cosmos with their conflict.

The specific breakdown of the back-and-forth battles isn't mythically significant. However, it's interesting to see how Thomas developed of the "Chariots of the Gods" concept put forth by Lee and Kirby in their Kree stories.

By 1971, there was nothing new-- at least in prose science fiction-- about the idea that whole races of aliens and/or Earthmen had evolutionary pathways, or that some of those races still held advancement potential while others had stagnated. The aforementioned Rick Jones, the "ordinary guy" amidst the costumed champions, is Thomas's means of demonstrating this heritage. In order to quell hostilities, the Supreme Intelligence stimulates some deep psychic talent in Jones. His enhanced power literally stops the war. and, for good measure, conjures up a bunch of 1940s superheroes, as a way of celebrating the Golden Age's simpler images of super-humanity.

Thomas's script has a handful of plot-holes, but his basic SF-indebted conception passes the test for a fairly complex symbolic discourse. The narrarive of Kree-Skrull War is somewhat compromised by its noodlings about matters of continuity. This includes not just Thomas finishing up old plotlines (like the status of Black Bolt during Thomas's INHUMANS run) but also creating new narratives irrelevant to the war-story. It's in issue #93 that Thomas lays groundwork for further complications about the Vision character, with a derivative-- but still fun-- reprise of the 1966 FANTASTIC VOYAGE movie, replete with some gorgeous Neal Adams art. 

QUICK THOUGHTS ON INHUMANS PREMIERE

I write this essay the day after a two-hour INHUMANS "film" premiered on ABC-TV. This broadcast premiere follows what has been described as a "disaster," when the same two hours debuted exclusively on IMAX theatre-screens.

I had no high hopes for this franchise. In my review of the 1998 Jenkins/Lee graphic novel, I commented that the characters had failed to enjoy success in comic books partly because they were "static." Of course, the history of the comics-characters doesn't speak to their potential as a franchise in other media-- look at ANT-MAN, a marked failure in the medium of his birth but an adequate performer in his cinematic makeover. But, prior to the debut of the INHUMANS show, Marvel Television attempted to boost the appeal of the franchise by interweaving a very vague version of the Lee-Kirby concept in with the story-lines of their currently-running teleseries AGENTS OF SHIELD. I found these Inhumans-Shield stories witless and tedious, but that was no surprise, since SHIELD had been witless and tedious even before it started trying to build up the Inhumans. Clearly ABC-TV was forcing one modestly popular franchise to attempt supporting a completely unknown entity. It's been suggested that one reason for this strategy was that, seeing how 20th-Century Fox had profited from their cinematic rights to the X-Men, Marvel Entertainment wanted a new set of "merry mutates" over which it had exclusive control.

However, the SHIELD show did not adapt the classical "Royal Family" or any support-characters from various versions of the comics-franchise. Thus, the ABC pilot was free to build upon those characters with no reference to anything that had happened on the SHIELD show. That show merely alluded to the comics' idea of the "terrigen mists" through which the Inhuman citizens of Attilan mutate themselves in new, often fantastic, sometimes super-powered forms. Thus the two-hour film introduces audiences to the Royal Family who have always been the stars of the INHUMANS franchise-- Attilan's monarch Black Bolt and his super-powered cousins, Gorgon, Karnak, Medusa, Triton, and Crystal. The pilot also introduces the family's pet Lockjaw, a colossal canine with a penchant for teleportation, and Black Bolt's scheming brother Maximus.

I won't review the two-hour film, in part because it's a continued story that may not be resolved until the last of the show's eight episodes. I can to some extent understand why anyone who splurged to see the film in IMAX would feel cheated, for in terms of production, it's just another TV-movie. Sets and FX are more expensive than they would be for a commonplace SF-themed teleseries, but they can't compare with the outlay for Real Hollywood Features. If you're looking for big-budget eye-candy, the INHUMANS two-parter is not for you.

Still, I'm amazed that anyone would call this "jaw droppingly awful television." The characters are not precisely the same as their comics-templates, but that may be a plus, since the Royal Family has sometimes come off like a bunch of royal bores. Scott Buck is credited as the "showrunner," which presumably means that INHUMANS is written by a team of scripters. But Buck or someone has devoutly researched the original comics-series, with good effect to the dramatic arcs for the show's seven main characters (eight if you count the dog). One of the better moments, in which Evil Maximus shears away Medusa's formidable tresses, is taken from the Jenkins-Lee graphic novel. Not every arc is equally entertaining. But if there's even one good arc-- such as the complex relationship between Black Bolt, his wife Medusa, and Maximus, who desires his brother's wife-- that's one more good arc than AGENTS OF SHIELD has.

I've encountered some complaints about the quality of the FX. I admit I can see some flaws-- especially with the animation of Medusa's prehensile locks-- but it's not that much worse than most of the FX on television. Slightly flawed CGI doesn't bother me. I grew up seeing most of the TV-aliens sport zippers in their backs.

I might dislike a lot of the behind-the-scenes deal-making, but the dubious machinations of the SHIELD-INHUMANS crossovers certainly didn't make SHIELD any worse than it already was. The debut for the show proper has some decent character moments and some interesting plot-developments. (Lockjaw uses his teleport-power to dump Black Bolt in the middle of a New York street. Howcum???)

I've seen many, many TV-debuts weaker and less appealing than THE INHUMANS. It's rumored that it will never get any more episodes due to the IMAX failure, which proves that whoever engineered that idea was a complete idiot. But it doesn't prove that Scott Buck's INHUMANS deserves to be dumped on in egregious fashion-- particularly when AGENTS OF SHIELD is a much deserving target.

MYTHCOMICS: THE INHUMANS #1-12 (1998-99)

Given the negative press being given to the new INHUMANS movie, it seems appropriate to look at one of the better renditions of these Marvel characters.

The Inhumans were introduced in the mid-sixties by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby in FANTASTIC FOUR, and the prevailing wisdom is that they were mostly Kirby's designs. However, subsequent attempts to launch the characters in their own series were largely unsuccessful. Though personally I liked the characters, I found that they were too static and lacked a viable group dynamic. The pattern for THE INHUMANS slightly resembled the Lee-Kirby THOR. In both features, the stories alternated between a fabulous otherworld where most of the characters had super-powers, and visits to the mundane world of humanity. Yet, what worked for Thor-- a central character with a retinue of support-figures-- didn't really work for the five main characters of THE INHUMANS. One reason was that four of the continuing heroes-- Medusa, Gorgon, Karnak, and Triton-- were eternally deferential to Black Bolt, who was not only the leader of their group, but their absolute monarch, and the ruler of all the Inhumans who dwelled in the remote city of Attilan. This meant that it was difficult for writers to evoke the standard formulas of Marvel interpersonal drama.

In this 12-issue maxi-series, writer Paul Jenkins and aritst Jae Lee found a way to exploit some of the "monumentalism" of the Inhumans theme, by focusing upon the enigma of Black Bolt. The character possesses a plurality of powers, but the one that most determines his character relates to his voice. Black Bolt is a "silent king" because even a whisper from his throat can unleash catastrophic sonic destruction. Early in the series, Jenkins's script even specifies the touch that his own parents-- and those of his brother Maximus-- were slain when Black Bolt uttered a calamitous sound. Jenkins uses captions to speculate on what Black Bolt may be thinking during the story's events, but in keeping with the usual depiction of the character, "thought-balloons" are not used for him (thus making him a distant pioneer to the many "mature" works of the 1990s that foreswore the use of balloons).

Brother Maximus, a prisoner in Attilan, is one of the threats to the Inhumans' peaceful isolation, and it's soon revealed that he has a hand in an outward threat: a group of mercenary soldiers, secretly funded by both Russian and American schemers. The soldiers surround Attilan and begin bombarding the force-field defenses of the super-city. To the expressed surprise of the four "junior" members of the Royal Family-- that is, Medusa, Gorgon, Karnak, and Triton-- Black Bolt refuses to take violent action against the invaders. Even when a few rank-and-file Inhumans suffer death or injury because of the invading humans, Black Bolt stays his hand, with no explanation. 

Thus the stratified nature of Inhuman society-- one in which Black Bolt is a messianic figure to a population where every citizen is "a subspecies of one"-- is used to beguile the reader as to the king's true motives. The field-leader of the invaders thinks that the Inhumans' king withholds violence due to a sense of noblesse oblige. "Being a man of honor," opines the military man, "it would be beneath him to destroy us." One of Black Bolt's subjects asks him. "What are you afraid of?," suggesting that he may withhold violence because the king was traumatized after killing his parents. 

Subplots also deal with some of the serpents in the Inhumans paradise. Earlier stories established the existence of the Alpha Primitives, a breed of lookalike Inhumans with no special powers, and though Lee and Kirby treated them simply as "shock troops," later authors, including Jenkins, put a "Morlock" spin on the Primitives, claiming that they were created to service Attilan's miraculous technology. "Their breeding," comments a character, "gives [the Primitives] no choice but to work the machines." The Inhumans' penchant for maximum diversity, in theory, sounds like it ought to prevent body-shaming, but Jenkins and Lee establish that there exists a "darkward" section of Attilan, as the dwelling-place for mutations who prove less than optimal. In addition, another subplot deals with some of the young people of the city, who are about to undergo their genetic transformations, and how some of them, following said transformations, began to show signs of pretension.

Still, the narrative emphasizes the unfathomable mystery of the monarch's apparent lack of initiative. Even when the conclusion reveals that he has been playing a dangerous game of chess against his opponents, the sense of mystery is not lessened. Lee's artwork, in contrast to the hyperkineticism of the Inhumans' artistic creator, gives the story's events a slow, stately gravitas, even evoking Egyptian art-motifs to convey the stasis of a monarchical rule-- as we see in the splash page to the cleverly named chapter "Sonic Youth."

Jenkins and Lee aren't able to do nearly as much with the other four members of the Royal Family, though each of them does get some attention. Karnak, who began as something of a gimmicky type, comes off best, as Jenkins makes his special power-- that of finding any physical flaw in a structure, so that he can break it-- a metaphor for the flawed nature of society and the physical world. In the end, even fantastic super-powers cannot reverse what Karnak calls the "entropy" of the world. But Black Bolt, despite his silent reserve, ultimately justifies his people's faith in him, and finds a way to put off doomsday for just a little longer.