(Marvel Mystery Comics v1 025-026)
Jarna here is Queen of the Lavarites, a group of aliens from Venus who coordinate with the Nazis (shown here as a chunky guy in his pyjamas about to be punched out by the Sub-Mariner). This is all regular comics stuff but there's some fun highlights:
a) the main Lavarite force is composed of these little roughnecks who talk in their own untranslated language and are clearly having a ball at all times. If your aliens have to look like humans they should absolutely look like fun humans.
b) Lavarites have some extremely fun sexual dimorphism going on! Some wags over at the Marvel Wiki are of the opinion that Jarna here is a member of a second Venusian species who has become ruler of these little guys but that removes the much more fun option of them being some sort of eusocial species like bees and that these are all her worker drone children. Or that Lavarite women are just fifty times larger than Lavarite men!
(this is the first of two times that we cross over into Sexual Kink That I Don't Fully Get territory)
As with any good story involving a bunch of little guys, Namor gets Lilliputianed. (and there's the other one!)
Jarna is also surprisingly merciless in her attempt to do away with Namor - it's just her bad luck that he's also amphibious.
Despite the fact that Namor lets her off with a warning in her first outing, Jarna is immediately back to her old tricks in the subsequent issue She's working with the Nazis to build an underwater staging area for the invasion of the US, but good news: she's planning on turning on them just as soon as they do the dirty work for her. Attempted world domination I can forgive but Nazi collaboration is a harder pill to swallow.
Unfortunately it's just Jarna in this issue - the Lavarites all seem to have gone back to Venus and I guess she hasn't had time to hatch out another generation of them. I miss them.
For some reason probably related to her status as a pretty girl Namor lets Jarna go at he the end of this story as well, and she's stayed away ever since, possibly because he came very close to killing her on a couple of occasions there. I of course would love to see her BRUNG BACK, particularly if she is actually portrayed as the queen of a eusocial species of little guys that she gives birth to, and particularly if they aren't defaulted to the insect version of such but reflect something more like naked mole-rat society or some other, weirder, model. Have 'em come back for revenge on the Sub-Mariner some time when he's vulnerable!
BONUS: this is perhaps the most perfectly drawn "amused disbelief" face I have ever seen
(said in a room with two people who had been surgically altered to be amphibious by the Antarctic-dwelling people of lost Atlantis, by the way)
No comments:
Post a Comment