Quarter Bin 95 "Karnak #1"

Karnak #1 (Marvel)
From December 2015

writer: Warren Ellis

artist: Gerardo Zaffino

Warren Ellis is one of the elite comic book writers I don't normally have much time for, but he's got at least one project (Supreme: Blue Rose) that I think truly does warrant his genius reputation, so I always like to keep his work in mind.

Karnak is an Inhumans series.  The Inhumans are Marvel's attempt to try and replace the X-Men as the dominant subset group of its publishing line, because currently the X-Men belong to 20th Century Fox as a movie franchise (Marvel has taken the Fantastic Four completely off the board for similar reasons, but it would be foolhardy to try and do the same with the X-Men, but darned if it doesn't try really hard to do so).  I don't know much of anything about Karnak as a character outside of what I've read in this very issue, but the Inhumans in general seem to have very little definition and a lot of suggestion about them, and I'd never heard of Karnak until I saw this series on the shelves for the first time.

I wish I could bother uploading images, because it's the cover of this issue that always had me semi-interested in it (I finally read this because of a handy comics package). It's a great, impressive cover, Karnak's face imposing itself so that he looks completely badass without really having to do anything to achieve it.

But Karnak turns out to be a little like Doctor Strange mixed with the Spectre.  Ellis tends to write genius characters because there's so little work involved in actually establishing their genius.  It's just assumed that whatever they do is genius.  I mean, it's practically a comics staple, and in that regard, Ellis is right on target.  (He ought to write a Doctor Doom series.)

Grumpy Karnak is asked by Phil Coulson (who's one of those characters Marvel is using a lot these days because of the movies, but whose appearance here totally justifies it; Ellis should be writing a Phil Coulson series instead of a Karnak series) to look after one of the many, many humans recently exposed as an Inhuman because of a McGuffin (Ms. Marvel is the most famous example; she otherwise has absolutely nothing to do with the Inhumans, except for a few early issues).  Karnak proves to be a dick, because he can get away with it.  Pretty much end of story.

Bottom line is, I have absolutely no idea why Karnak exists.  Doesn't really rate such a killer cover.