Primitive Mortals
Today we’re going to discuss one of those childhood bloopers, something I once loved as a kid but turns out to be not-so-great when viewed through adult eyes. Very few people actually seem to remember the comic series Primortals, but back in 1995, when I was ten-going-on-eleven years old, it was one of my favourite comics.
Fifteen years ago, publisher Tekno Comix began its short life with a line of shiny sci-fi titles which were billed as [Famous Author X]’s [Comic Title Y]. In truth, these comics only used said authors’ short outlines as a springboard, with the series themselves penned by freelancers. After two years of publishing the company folded.
The only Tekno title that I read regularly was Primortals, billed as Leonard Nimoy’s Primortals, though Isaac Asimov was also credited with “creating concepts”. It was a first-contact story, but with a slight twist: the majority of aliens involved in the story were in fact evolved Earth organisms, taken from the planet by the superior alien race known as the Majae and gradually guided into sapience. The main villain of the story is Zeerus, an evolved Pteranodon and rebel against the Majae’s rule. He gets to Earth first and attempts to convince humanity that his pursuers are the evil ones.
Primaster is the Majae in charge of Zeerus’ capture, and of Primaster’s ship and crew, only four members and no ship survive a sabotage attempt en route to Earth. Stuart Davies is the everyman who first caught the signal from Zeerus, and there’s his girlfriend, Jess Rossini, and various other humans and aliens to round out the cast. After some conflict, the aliens manage to defeat Zeerus and leave, though the plot was left unresolved by the series’ abrupt cancellation in 1997. Primortals also received a novel adaptation (a separate version focusing almost entirely on a new cast of humans and their reaction to Zeerus’ arrival) and an informational CD-Rom.
Looking back, it’s easy to condemn Tekno Comix for making cheap celebrity cash-ins; I do the same (and by 1997, it was also already indulging in crossovers and miniseries). Furthermore, without my nostalgia blinders, Primortals is more potential than creation. Based on a quick re-reading of all twenty-four issues, the characters are often flat, and the roads taken with them are usually the simpler ones, with some outright ludicrous moments.
For instance, the series begins with Zeerus in energy chains, but Primaster is only convinced that Zeerus could cause trouble in prison after his assistant Prisar (an evolved Brontotheriidae and one of the eventual surviving crew members) tells him so. Instead of trying to further guard or isolate Zeerus, Primaster gets Prisar to run a background check on potential guards for Zeerus instead. This complete idiocy only gets worse, with another standout moment being Primaster relenting in his withholding of technology from Earth to cure some terminally-ill patients in a hospital, and then being surprised when this secret is let out and hordes of humans are clamouring for him to do the same for them and theirs.
Though one could easily make the case for the rule of the Majae being not-so-benevolent, given that their power over their creations is still absolute, the storyline virtually discards moral complexity. How the Majae govern their creations is not explained, and Zeerus is nearly always presented as a sneering, cackling megalomaniac who might be at home in the worse Saturday morning cartoons, with very little explanation as to why he rebelled or how he gained followers. The adventures of Stuart Davies are not compelling, and his girlfriend, Jess, is an even flatter character than he is, her moments restricted largely to displays of concern, shock, and of verbally defending Stuart.
The plot takes turns that are almost savagely bad, such as Zeerus being imprisoned by, and then taking over, a hostile (fictitious) Middle Eastern nation, or blood transfusions between humans cured by Primaster and the others, producing a plague of bizarre mutations with no warning. There are other, minor absurdities: alien race names and character names are too often puns and references, such as “Majae”, “Avitaur” (Zeerus’ people) or characters named “Krude, Krate, and Krutch” (three rather stupid rebels), “Narab” (named after a character Nimoy played in Zombies of the Stratosphere), or “Kafka” (an alien who is basically an elfin bug-centaur). Prisar retains his ancestral shape…but has a tiny anthropomorphic bird named Quickwing to help him in daily tasks, like a sophisticated oxpecker.
For anyone with even a passing familiarity with pterosaurs, the rendering of Zeerus as a sharp-fanged, long-taloned predator that mows humans down like grass is laughable. The name “Pteranodon” means “winged and toothless”, and they were prehistoric seabirds; hardly threatening, and yet the comic explicitly blames Zeerus’ behaviour on his “predatory” heritage. Making Zeerus an evolved theropod would have been too cliché, but at least pick as his predecessor a creature that could seem a physical threat because of his species (though blaming his behaviour on his genes is a pretty awful thing to say about a character, isn’t it?).
Yet, shamefacedly, the reason why I read Primortals was Zeerus. I was, and still am, obsessed with pterosaurs, though now I realize that most pterosaur-based characters aren’t the shiniest stars in the sky. Zeerus is pretty silly, for all the reasons listed above, and after the first few issues, he also balloons from a fairly slim character to a giant of Liefieldian proportions, for no other reason than an artist’s whim. Perhaps it’s to better emphasize his height in comparison to humans, or make him able to credibly go toe-to-toe with the equally overmuscled Primaster, but it is a jarring change.
What makes me cringe even more than Zeerus, though, is that the series could have been good. Making the majority of the aliens evolved Earth creatures (though outside the main cast, few look anything like Earth life anymore) not only bypasses the question of why aliens look so relatable to human readers, but adds an intriguing aspect to first-contact: the aliens aren’t coming here, they’re coming home. Add in the subplots about rebellion and alien politics, then Earth politics and the trials of Stuart Davies, and one could have had a long, epic, and complex series on our hands.
Near the very end, the newer writers seem to realize just how much potential is lost, as they try to recapture some of it. Zeerus is revealed to have doubts, and an eleventh-hour friendship with Akemi Nugumo, one of his human handlers, whose death he mourns. Zeerus then attempts to reach Narab, a frustrated member of Primaster’s team, a sequence in which Zeerus begins to be handled much more believably. But neither Akemi nor Zeerus are strong enough characters to carry their scenes, and the plot thread with Narab is left dangling. Another cool sequence is the reveal that the “real” Primaster is not the green humanoid that we always see, but a small, tentacled creature living in his chest. The sequence makes some intriguing suggestions about Majae culture and biology, but also never goes anywhere.
Despite its intriguing premise, bad characterization and bad plotting bring Primortals down, and the few times the comic displays a spark of life or of imagination are unable to save it. The art’s pretty good, and the comic is so obscure that the kid in me wants to save my copies, but this is not something I’ll recommend, or take much pleasure in as an adult.