Dork Knights in Tights

Commission for @jeysiec of the Argent Adept obtaining Xu’s Bell in the most Zelda-like manner possible. With and without text for Maximum Nerd.

Been working on this on and off for the past month because I’ve had surprisingly little free time But I needed to get at least one big picture done for my favourite month, and decided that all of the canonically LGBTQ+ characters from The Sentinels of the Multiverse was the way to go! Top Row:The Argent Adept, asexual and proudDoctor Medico (MD) probably looking for his husband (would have included but there’s no pictures of him) Bottom Row:Tachyon and her supermodel/humanitarian wife DanaUnity! A loud proud bi!

On the GTG forums there was a thread where everyone was listing quirky instrument ideas for the Virtuosos, and I was basically like “I want a Virtuoso who plays the recorder, because as a singer, in middle school I was always required to play that in music class and man anyone who can play that thing well deserves to be a Chosen One”.

And then later Anthony’s Letters Page ep comes up and Christopher’s like “Yeah Anthony was a singer, so he eventually went with the pipes for his Virtuoso instrument because he remembered his time in middle school playing the recorder in music class” and I was just a kind of half-amused, half-squeeing “ahahahahahaha”.

reading letters from you

let ‘em read them atcha

(let ‘em read them atcha)

(oooooooo)

Bad puns

Joking how every character dies

Realizing that oops this time they have to make it clear the character really did die for reals

Coming up with Nightmare Fuel that would make Lovecraft and Stephen King approve

Sinking all your ships

Coming up with entirely new canon ships that are somehow even weirder than the ones that were sunk

Turning canon mortal enemies into later canon adorable best friends

Making defeating villains in beatnik poetry sessions somehow be totally awesome

Constantly comparing dangerous cosmic forces to breakfast foods

Taking historical figures rumored to be creepy people with mystical powers and turning them into actually being creepy people with mystical powers

Making Apostate legitimately hilarious

Having one of the canon timelines make Ultimate Marvel look bright and cheery in comparison

that’s a tough one.  I’m not sure I can think of ‘great’ instances of Max’s difficulties, although I can for depictions that I found stirring or poignant.  Different writers have taken on different approaches to showing Maximus’ madness, so better than others.  The instances that I think did the best job of it would be Paul Jenkins’ depiction in the Marvel Knights series, Ann Nocenti’s in By Right of Birth,  Roy Thomas’ in the pages of Avengers #95, DnA’s take in the War of Kings series, and Soule’s depiction in Uncanny Inhumans: IvX.  

In the Marvel Knights series, Jenkins and artist Jae Lee depicted Maximus as cunning, ingenious and completely unhinged.    Max had intricate plans afoot which he was able to execute with precision, yet he was also manic with disorganized thinking, delusions of grandeur, and impulsive silliness.  He oscillated from sinister plotting to gleeful jumping about as though his psyche could not contain or tolerate his own dark ambitions.  It may sound odd, but the way Jenkins and Lee presented Max was very much with my own clinical experiences with patients suffering from psychosis.    

Although they had less page-space to work with, Roy Thomas and Neal Adams did a similarly good job demonstrating the nature of Maximus’ madness in Avengers vol. 1 #95.  This issue shows the origins of Maximus’ mental difficulties, depicting his psychological issues as being the result of the severe trauma of being exposed to Black Bolt’s powers coupled with the subsequent tragic death of the brothers’ parents.  Psychosis is a largely organic illness, rooted in inborn neurological abnormalities.  Although that does not mean that experiential factors do not play a role.  For many people suffering from psychosis, the preexisting vulnerability to the illness is triggered into bloom by way of some form of trauma.  I feel this dynamic was captured quite well in Thomas and Addams’ depiction.  

The clinical presentation of Maximus’ difficulties were quite different in Docent and Brett Blevins’ Inhumans: By Right of Birth.  Herein Max is shown as a paranoid schizophrenic suffering from both delusions as well as florid hallucinations.  He;s much more impaired in the story, constantly struggling to understand what is and is not real.  It’s a more over the top take on madness, but fits in well with the melodramatic twiner of the story itself.    

Writers, Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning, with art by Lanning and Paul Pelletier offer up a different take on Maximus’s madness in the pages of the Inhumans: War of Kings series.  Herein Maximus is less sinister in his actions and a little more silly; and there is the notion that what appears as a lack of lucidity is actually a product of Maximus’ enhanced awareness and ultra-lightened intellect.  There’s a great scene in the midst of the story where Maximus appears to have a conversation with Groot.  All Groot says is ‘I am Groot’ yet Max is able to understand what he is actually saying.  It remains up to the reader to decide whether or not Max is really having this in depth conversation or if it is all just a product of his imagination.  

Finally, there is the madcap adventure that book ended Charles Soule’s tenure writing the Inhumans.  Rather than offered yet another grim, high-stakes tale of the fate of the Mutants, Soule and artist Kim Jacinto, utilized the IvX ti-in issues of Uncanny Inhumans (#’s 18-21) to tell a fun and silly affair where Maximus leads a band of rogues on a crazy adventure to discover the means of creating artificial Terrigen.  It’s all quite silly and very fun, sort of an Inhuman version of Stanley Kramer’s goofball movie, ‘It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.’  Soul’s script doesn’t disrespect mental illness as something worthy of ridicule, rather it embraces Max’s off kilter nuttiness as something of the most appropriate response to a crazy world where heroes, gods and monsters are constantly at war.  It’s all an absolute treat and was the perfect balm for the overly serious and rather un-fun tenner of all that was going on in the main IvX book.