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inhumansforever · 8 years ago

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Meta-analytic breakdown of Black Bolt #1

(spoilers and highly pedantic wankery entailed)

Saladin Ahmed and Christian Ward’s first issue of Black Bolt was an absolute feast for the eyes and brain. Interestingly, not a whole lot happened in this first issue; it was very much a barebones initial set up for the story. And yet the visuals and narration proved to be hugely stirring, evoking all sorts of ideas and themes. It’s been a long while since a single issue set my mind racing at such a clip. It’s difficult to say exactly what Ahmed and Ward had aimed to provoke with the imagery and plot, so instead I’ll account what it all brought about in the head of this reader.

The story takes place shortly after the events of Inhuman Prime. Black Bolt’s brother, Maximus has been charged with multiple crimes and found guilty. His sentence is to be sent to some mysterious cosmic penitentiary off in outer space. Yet Maximus always has a trick up his sleeve and he managed to switch places with his brother Black Bolt. Utilizing his psychic powers and aided by an image inducer, Maximus assumed Black Bolt’s identity and had Black Bolt assume his. It all resulted in Black Bolt being sent off to this cosmic jail in his brother’s place.

The issue begins with Black Bolt chained, shackled and muzzled, slumped in a dingy cell. Dazed, he doesn’t seem to know where he is or even who he is. A loud, disembodied voices shakes him from his stupor, bellowing out “Name Your Crimes! Repent Your Crimes!”

This is followed by a wave of Black Bolt of incredible energies, an electrical charge that either renders him unconscious or possibly kills him. Again the voice commands that he name his crimes, repent his crimes.

He awakens once more, this time his memory seems more clear. He struggles to free himself from his bindings and is once more shocked by the terrible energies and once more slips into unconsciousness or death.

He awakens again and each time he wakes up it seems that Black Bolt’s memory and strength have returned with greater fervor. Again the voice commands repentance and again the energies shock him, yet this time he is able to summon his strength and break free of his binds. The chains and shackles break under Black Bolt’s strength, yet he is unable to remove the muzzle covering his mouth, nullifying his greatest power: his voice. Black Bolt punches his way out of his cell and does so with such ease that it leads him to believe he is being toyed with. The cell gives way to a nebulous labyrinth, a seemingly endless netherworld of bizarre and foreboding architecture. Passages and stairwells appear to extend on endlessly. Many of the walls are adorned with frescos that seem to mirror Black Bolt’s recollections, portraits of Maximus and the treachery that landed Black Bolt in this prison; as well as memories of Black Bolt’s time as king and the love he once had with is queen, Medusa. It is unclear if these portraits are real or simply a reflection of the thoughts and memories racing through Black Bolt’s mind.

He walks on, descending stairwell and passing through portals, going on and on for what may be hours, days, possibly years. He passes through rooms that are freezing cold; others boiling hot. It is clear that this impossible maze of a prison somehow defies the rules of time, space and matter.

Black Bolt’s seemingly endless and fruitless journey comms to an abrupt end when he hears shrieks of pain echoing from yet another chamber. He rushes to the source of these screams and sees a alien child being tortured to death; all the while that same disembodied voice demands admission and repentance over one’s crimes.

Black Bolt smashes the device with his fists, working desperately to free the child before it is too late. He fails; he wrecks the machine but not in time to save the child and she lays dead a smoldering corpse.

Black Bolt’s noble albeit futile efforts appears to elicit the notice of his fellow inmates. Whereas once the nebulous prison seemed devoid of anyone else, it now appears filled with a host of prisoners from all over the galaxy. Crusher Creel, the fatherly super villain known as The Absorbing Man, approaches Black Bolt, introducing himself and challenging him to a fight.

It quickly becomes evident that there is some force int he prison that nullifies super powers. Creel’s ability to absorb and take on the physical properties of whatever material he touches is inoperative; as is Black Bolt’s ability to manipulate molecular energies. As such, the two do battle the old fashioned way, with heir fists.

A mysterious pair watch on as Black Bolt and Creel trade kicks and punches. One is a large Skrull woman, the other an older male alien of unknown origin. The elder of the two knows Black Bolt by reputation. The two, along with Creel seem to have a plan afoot, possibly an effort to escape, and they consider the utility of recruiting Black Bolt to their effort; that is if he can withstand being destroyed by the Jailer.

A well placed jab from Creel cracks the muzzle encasing the lower paper of Black Bolt’s face. The prospect of being freed of this muzzle emboldens him and he makes short work of defeating Creel.

Bested, Creel states that Black Bolt can now meet their jailer, pointing the way to yet another chamber. Black Bolt walks on, entering into an enormous room where he faces his warden, a giant monstrous being whose head and eyes are covered by a shroud. “Name Your Crimes!” the beast bellows, “Repent Your Crimes!”

Black Bolt tears the cracked muzzle from his face, confident that he now has access to his greatest power. ‘Stop’ he says, expecting that the mere utterance will generate a seismic shockwave that will obliterate the monstrous jailer. And yet there is no effect. His voice has no power.

“Penance in death for your crimes and violations!” the jailer commands and an electrical energy courses through Black Bolt, frying him into a smoldering corpse.

This death proves short and a magically revived Balck Bolt awakens to find himself once more bound and chained. The little aline girl whom Black Bolt had failed to save earlier has come to visit him in his cell, she too somehow revived back to life.

She introduces herself, her name an impossible to pronounce in an earthly tongue, so instead everyone just calls her ‘Blinky.’

Blinky is happy to see that Black Bolt has made it back from being killed by The Jailer, adding that not everyone does (suggesting that some killed by the jailer are not resurrected; their deaths permanent). She asks Black Bolt’s name and what it was that led him to be imprisoned. He replies that he is Black Bolt; and that he has put himself here.

With this we finally see the exterior of the prison, a bizarre asteroid/spacecraft hybrid floating in a strange cosmic void. And the issue ends with he promise of continuation in the next installment.

Writer, Saladin Ahmed, offers a brief letter of introduction at the end of the issue, welcoming readers to this new adventure. Mr. Ahmed waxes on the power of fantasy and storytelling, how poems and stories and even comic books have the power to answer questions while posing new ones. He states that Black Bolt in particular will center on four key such questions:

Who is a criminal?

What happens when you put people in cages?

How do you tell your story

What does it mean to be a father?

and of course what happens when extremely powerful beings go to battle with one another?

I’m quite excited to see how each of these questions are addressed in subsequent issues. For the time being, however, I’ve many questions of my own, as well as a host of ideas and theories regarding this first issue.

Again, I cannot know for certain what Ahmed and Ward intended to evoke with the symbolism of the words and pictures throughout the issue. Comic books can be like an inkblot, a plastic stimuli that acts as a receptacle for whatever it is that the reader opts to superimpose onto it. That said, the following are my own impressions, guesses and thoughts on what this wild and provocative issue generated in me.

A fair warning: I looking to go whole-hog pedantic, hoity-toity-intellectual in my take. So those who are annoyed by such things, you might want to bail out now.

The beginning sees Black Bolt bound and changed, lying in a dingy cell; the narrative stating that he was ‘once a king but now awakens in filth and darkness.’ The first image of Black Bolt slouched in grimy darkness is reminiscent of an etching that was part of a very fancy edition of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s ‘The Brothers Karamazov.’

Furthermore, the phrase ‘he is a king, but wakes in filth and darkness’ is something of a paraphrase of the beginning stanzas of poem within The Brother’s Karamazov, entitled ‘The Grand Inquisitor.’

The poem tells of a magically reborn Jesus Christ who has returned to Seville during he time of the Spanish Inquisition. The Grand Inquisitor has had Christ arrested and imprisoned, placed in a dingy cell. The Inquisitor comes to visit Christ in this cell, explaining his belief that Christ’s return is antithetical to goals of the Christian Church. As The Grand Inquisitor sees it, Christ offers mankind choice and the burdensome responsibility of awareness, the knowledge of the differences between virtue and sin. His teachings, his gift to mankind is power… yet a power that comes with awesome responsibility (the responsibility to choose virtue over sin). The Inquisitor states that this power is too much for mankind to bear, stating that blind faith and obedience to the church frees mankind of such responsibility, offering instead the blissful ease of just doing as you are told.

In Dostoevsky’s novel, the tale of Christ and The Grand Inquisitor is told by the atheistic Ivan Karamazov to his brother, Alyosha, a young monk who has recently dedicated himself to the church. There is a great deal of ambiguity to the tale, but is largely viewed as a not-so-subtle condemnation of organized religion in general and the Russian Orthodox Church in specific.

Although Black Bolt has been imprisoned by way of the treacherous manipulations of his brother, he is by no means innocent. As elucidated in the preface introduction, Black Bolt had triggered the Terrigen Bomb, destroying the city of old Attilan and creating a Terrigen Cloud that caused the transformations of dozens of latent Inhumans all over the world. Many such latent Inhumans were endowed with fantastic powers, others were cursed with terrible deformations, and many perished, their bodies unable to withstand the grueling process of Terrigenesis. On top of that, the Terrigen Cloud ultimately proved to be deadly to Earth’s Mutant populace. Many Mutants died form Terrigen toxicity and it culminated in a deadly war between Inhumans and Mutants, resulting in the eventual destruction of the Terrigen Cloud. If that were not enough, Black Bolt has additionally been a rather poor and emotionally withholding father to his adolescent son, Ahura.

Black Bolt’s release of the Terrigen Cloud onto earth is somewhat similar to The Grand Inquisitor’s interpretation of the hardship Christ had bestowed onto mankind. Christ offered power and knowledge, the ability for one to fully actualize a divine sense of meaning. And yet this power came with a terrible price, the knowledge of sin, the responsibility of piousness, and the countless deaths and wars that religious belief has brought about throughout history.

Black Bolt makes for a rather odd Christly figure; yet Attilan has a rather odd sense of spirituality. For Black Bolt and the Inhumans of Old Attilan, Terrigen is in essence their god, the epicenter of their unique and unearthly faith. Black Bolt released the Terrigen, forcing latent Inhumans to transform against their will, killing many in the process as well as unleashing a deadly blight unto the Mutants. He forced his fellow Inhumans into their true actualized selves, offering the gift of power as well as the burden of responsibility.

Doing so upended the balance of his world, destabilized the status quo - and not just in the fictional confines of the Marvel Universe, but also among the fans and readers in the real world. He has brought about disorder in the same way that The Grand Inquisitor that Christ has done.

The Jailer demands that Black Bolt name his crimes and I believe that this crime is the triggering of the Terrigen Bomb and all that has resulted in its wake. The Jailer also demands he repent this crime. Yet repentance can be a much more loaded and multifaceted term than one may suspect. The etymology of ‘repentance’ can be traced back Biblical Hebrew and is a combination of two verbs: ‘shuv’ which means ‘to return,’ and ‘nacham’ which mans ‘to feel sorrow.’ Put together, the term asks that one feel sorrow over an act and return to a former way of being.

In the Torah, The Profit Elijah states that repentance offers redemption and extends life. In short he suggests that turning away from acts that brings sorrow to the self or others will ultimately offer one happiness and a prosperous life. With the concept of original sin, however, repentance takes on a new meaning. Herein the act of repentance is less about engendering a prosperous and fulfilling life and more about avoiding the wraith of a vengeful God. The message is the same: don’t bring about sorrow and hence you will not feel sorrow. Yet the stakes are much higher. Those who disobey are sinners and those who sin and do not repent are cast into hell for eternity.

Repentance is the key into the kingdom of heaven, yet can also be used to exert an absolute sense of control. The Book of John 10:1 reads, “Truly, truly, I say to you, he who does not enter the sheepfold by the door but climbs in by another way, that man is a thief and a robber.”

A less dogmatic reading of the passage suggests that Jesus is the Shepard and his is the passage to heavenly paradise. A more dogmatic reading, however, presents the rules as stark and unbending; those who do not follow the path, who defy the shepherd’s guidance are sinners and doomed to hell. Repentance is not simply about mending your ways, but doing as you are told.

The concept of original sin does not exist in the Qur’an. According to Islam, we are born innocent and misdeeds can be forgiven by way of repentance. As stated in At-Tahriim 66:8, “repent to Allah with sincere repentance. Perhaps your Lord will remove from you your misdeeds and admit you into gardens beneath which rivers flow.” All sins can be foreign by Allah (with the sole exception of ‘Shirk’ (worshipping a false deity)).

Repentance as used by The Jailer in Black Bolt #1 appears to be more in line with the application of the term in the more dogmatic interpretation of The Book of John… with the Jailer himself standing in as the figure of the shepherd. The Jailer seems to possess god-like powers, his prison defies the confines of space and time, he can turn off his prisoners’ powers, and kill and resurrect these inmates with a whim.

‘Repent’ it would seem, is the Jailer demanding that Black Bolt and his fellow prisoners bow to his power and do as they are told. An ironic dilemma in that this Jailer is surely a false deity and obeying his will, bowing to his power would itself be tantamount to the one unforgivable sin noted in the Qur’an: that of Shirk.

Artist, Christian Ward, really lets loose and excels in his depiction of the space prison. Everything is awash is pale shades of blue. The clean, confident lines of the architecture is reminiscent of 1920’s art deco, coupled with the designs of MC Esher and the dreamscapes of Winsor McCay.

It’s beautiful and haunting. The structure seems to look modernized and futuristic while synonymously aged and decrypted. There is a great emphasis on symmetry with the exception of a series of red pupil eyeballs peppered periodically throughout the architectural ornamentation.

These disembodied eyeballs seem to allow the prison to be both a labyrinth as well as a panopticon. The 18th century philosopher, Jeremy Bentham, conceived the panopticon as a correctional institution whereby inmates are constantly watched and can be viewed and seen at all times. The theory being that the sense of being constantly watched prevailed a ‘mode of obtaining power of mind over mind’ and that such institutions could act as ‘a mill for grinding rogues honest.’ The French philosopher, Michel Foucault, expounded on Bentham’s ideas concerning the panopticon in his 1975 work, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Foucault suggests that the panopticon provides an unequal gaze which engenders an internalized sense of discipline wherein inmates are less likely to break rules if they feel they are being constantly watched.

This too adds to the Jailer’s quality of being omniscient and akin to an angry and vengeful god. He sees all, his gaze is unequal. This creates a bizarre irony when we finally see the Jailer and his is adorned by a red shroud that covers his eyes. It remains unclear why the Jailer’s head and eyes are covered by this shroud. At first it seems to be something of a play on the Greek goddess, Themis, who is also depicted as blinded, in her case by a ribbon wrapped across her eyes.

Themis’ blindfold represents impartiality, the notion that the scales of justice should be applied without regard to wealth, power or status. Statues of Lady Justice aside, actual justice rarely is blind and The Jailer himself certainly doesn’t appear blind… rather it would seem that the various eyes fastened throughout his prison merely offer him an artificial sense of omnipotence. Yet another instance of the Jailer assuming a god-like status.

I received an ‘ask’ a little while’s back where I was queried whether I thought Medusa’s illness and Black Bolt’s imprisonment could be seen as a kind of karma inflicted over all of the Mutants who died from exposure to the Terrigen Cloud. I replied that it is not my impression of how karma works… it’s not an immediate thing. It would be great if the world was just and bad things happened to guilty people, but how then does one explain when bad things happen to innocent people?

The matter is brought up because an artificially generated sense of ‘karma’ is also a theme in this first issue of Black Bolt, wherein the Jailer has the power to kill and resurrect his inmates. We see Black Bolt killed at least once, possibly multiple times; and also see Blinky killed only to be resurrected at the end. Blinky expresses happiness that Black Bolt ‘made it back,’ suggesting that not every inmate killed is ultimately resurrected.

In traditional Hinduism, karma is associated with the saṃsāra: the endless cycle of death, rebirth, good and bad fortune. Herein, good deeds contribute to good karma and future happiness, whereas bad deeds contribute to bad karma and future suffering. Those who fully actualize on a spiritual level are ultimately released from the mortal coil; they achieve ‘moksha’ and are freed from the cycle death and rebirth. In Buddhism, the attainment of moksha is referred to as attaining ‘nirvana,’ a blissful state of complete selflessness.

It is possible that The Jailer imposes his own sense of moksha, where those he feels have repented (or more likely are no longer of interest to him) are freed of the cycle of death and resurrection. They die for real and not reborn. Once more it can be seen as a further instance of The Jailer using his awesome powers to impose an artificial sense of godliness where he determines who has and has not earned the right of ‘freedom’ by way of permanent death.

Although The Jailer is surely not a true god, Black Bolt’s ultimately defeating/escaping him will likely involve him having to achieve a greater sense of virtue. Whether we label it ‘Repentance,’ ‘Dharma’ or ‘al-Barā’ah,’ Black Bolt is going to be forced to mend his ways, transcend his hubris and account for his past follies if he is to truly prevail against such a powerful opponent.

And I cannot wait to see how it all goes down…

#Inhumans #Black Bolt #spoilers #Saladin Ahmed #Christian Ward

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