The Flaw in Everything: Warren Ellis’ Karnak the Shatterer
It’s the best part of the reading experience to run across a story with a new voice. Warren Ellis, of The Authority and Transmetropolitan fame, has assumed various voices, but I love his newest one: the narrative perspective of Marvel’s Karnak the Shatterer, a character associated with the Inhumans.
The Inhumans, created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, have been around since The Fantastic Four was in double-digits. Some of you may recall that Karnak is the one with the big head and the super-effective karate chops because his special talent is finding the structural flaws in things.
(Although, to be accurate, Karnak isn’t technically an Inhuman because was never exposed to the Terrigen mists — bring that up at a dinner party for a No-Prize!)
Over the years, Karnak’s powers and perceptions have expanded to include seeing the flaws in arguments, concepts, and people. His greatest achievement is finding the flaw in death, thereby returning from the dead.
It may sound a bit blithe to say it that way, but Karnak’s philosophical viewpoint has been strengthened over the years and bears some thematic resemblances to people like Iron Fist’s warriors of K’un-Lun or the Ancient One (of Dr. Strange fame).
The Inhumans of course, have been increasing in their importance in the Marvel Universe. I’ve seen internet theories that Marvel is downplaying the X-Men while up-playing the Inhumans, because Marvel doesn’t hold the X-Men movie rights.
As I’ve said before, sometimes the movies I see at Fantasia on a given day have a common theme. And sometimes they don’t, however much it might look like they ought to. On Wednesday, July 20, I’d go downtown to the Hall Theatre to watch an oddity: a restored Japanese propaganda cartoon from World War II, Momotaro, Sacred Sailors (Momotaro, Umi No Shinpei). Then I planned to head across the street to the De Sève and watch an independent American horror film, The Alchemist Cookbook. I hoped to make it back to the Hall after that in time to watch the second in a series of Japanese science-fiction action movies, Library Wars: The Last Mission (Toshokan Sanso: The Last Mission). It looked like a packed day, and I wondered how the movies would play off of each other.
Sometimes the movies I get to see on a given day at Fantasia have an obvious common theme. Sometimes not. Sometimes there’s a commonality binding two otherwise different movies, but it’s tenuous. So it was that on Tuesday, July 19, I watched a Korean historical drama called The Throne (originally Sado), and followed it with a Polish musical-fantasy-tragicomedy called The Lure (originally Córki dancingu). They’re both films based on older stories, in the first case recorded history from the eighteenth century, and in the second Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale “The Little Mermaid.” As you might imagine from those two very different source materials, these are very different movies in very different genres. But it also seemed to me that the process of retelling the stories was very different as well.
