What are the best instances of Max's madness?
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.
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