Random Happenstance

I made a metric asston of fun of Marvel's ongoing, and seemingly Sisyphean, attempts to put the Inhumans over, often at the expense of the X-Men. But every once in a while I'd read a random issue that had something to it. Like today's book! From 2016, the Uncanny Inhumans #8, "The Torch and the Queen" Written by Charles Soule, pencils by Kev Walker, inks by Scott Hanna. Cover by
Mahmud Asrar, which hadn't been loaded to the GCD until I did it! That's never encouraging...

Attempting to evacuate a burning building, Johnny Storm gets trapped trying to shore up the foundation, and Medusa goes in after him. She manages to keep them from getting squashed, but they both end up trapped. (Although she's doing it with her hair, it's reminiscent of the Hulk holding up the mountain in the original Secret Wars!) Medusa asks Johnny to talk to her, distract her from holding the weight of a collapsing building, but then blurts out that they should stop seeing each other. In flashbacks, we see the start of their new relationship: with Sue and Reed gone after Secret Wars (and Ben may have gone into space as well) Johnny finds himself adrift. As his date goes down spectacularly in flames--literally--Medusa, who happened to be in the same restaurant catching up with She-Hulk, opts to give Johnny some purpose. She needed a liaison between the human world and New Attilan, and Johnny needed something to do. He turns out to be a good choice, and the two have time to get to know each other: while they had known each other for years, she thought of Johnny as that shallow hothead dating her sister; while Johnny saw her as a "cold fish." Her assessment is pretty dead on, but Johnny is starting to realize there's more to her.

Medusa becomes attracted to Johnny, since he doesn't have the weight of the world on his shoulders. Still, after a visit from Crystal, Medusa had thought their relationship would run its course before she returned; and worries that as Queen of the Inhumans, her job was to manipulate everyone: did she have feelings for Johnny, or was she using him? Johnny isn't hurt. He feels like Medusa saved his life, and puts his back into helping lift the building. He knows he can't lift her weight--but he can help make it lighter for her. They embrace as the building crumbles, not to their deaths, but as Crystal saves them! Medusa tries to say it isn't what it looks like, but Johnny confesses "...it is."

I found myself really pulling for them! Or at least hoping Johnny wouldn't be the one to wreck it. Pretty sure a lot of this one would end up rolled back, sadly. Oddly, I had a couple other issues of this series, which involved Maximus the Mad just living his best life, wrecking crap.