Black Bolt

• 1. Introduction

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  Black Bolt, born Blackagar Boltagon, is the king of a hidden city called Attilan, and he has spent his whole life afraid of his own voice. In Marvel Comics, a single spoken word from him unleashes a blast destructive enough to level a city. So he has trained his mind never to make a sound, even in his sleep. He communicates mostly through sign language. Black Bolt belongs to the Inhumans, a reclusive race of genetically altered superhumans. Stan Lee and Jack Kirby created him, and he first appeared in Fantastic Four #45, published in December 1965. How does a ruler govern when he cannot speak? What did the silence cost the people closest to him? And what happens when a man built to be quiet is dragged into wars across the galaxy?

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• 2. The Sealed Room

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  King Agon and Queen Rynda of the Inhumans had a son who was exposed to the mutagenic Terrigen Mist while he was still an embryo. As the boy grew, he showed that he could manipulate electrons, and his parents faced a problem that no nursery could solve.

  To protect the Inhuman community from his devastating voice, the family placed him inside a sound-proof chamber. There he was tutored in how to use his powers. When he finally re-entered Inhuman society as a young man, he had already vowed never to speak.

  His younger brother Maximus tested that vow almost at once. Maximus attacked him and tried to goad him into speaking, but the attempt failed.

  This origin was told in a back-up feature called Tales of the Inhumans, which ran in the title Thor. The character proved popular, and he soon decided to leave Attilan and explore the outside world.

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• 3. A Brother's Madness

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  A flashback story in The Avengers explains how Black Bolt came to rule, and it begins with a betrayal. He discovered that Maximus had secretly allied himself with the alien Kree, the race whose genetic experiments first created the Inhumans.

  Black Bolt tried to stop an escaping Kree vessel and overextended his sonic powers. The vessel crashed. Several members of the Council of Genetics died in the wreck, and his own parents were among them.

  Maximus survived, but standing so close to the voice drove him insane. Black Bolt became king, and he was haunted by what his power had done.

  The brothers' feud never settled. In the 1990s Maximus used a creation called the Trikon to force Black Bolt out of Attilan, though Black Bolt eventually defeated the Trikon and took back the throne.

  In the Silent War storyline, Maximus took advantage of a crisis to overthrow Black Bolt and imprison him for a time. Later, in the storyline called Death of the Inhumans, the Inhuman executioner Vox rampaged through a gathering of royalty and controlled several Inhumans. Maximus and Triton were killed in the fighting.

  That was not the end of Maximus. In the Imperial storyline, Black Bolt arrived on the planet Kal Lak'Thunn to face the Grandmaster and a resurrected Maximus. After defeating the Grandmaster, he left with his brother to rebuild the Inhuman empire.

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• 4. Anatomy of a Voice

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  Deep inside the speech center of Black Bolt's brain, an organic mechanism produces an unknown particle that interacts with the electrons around him. That link explains why the power sits in his throat. Any attempt to use his vocal cords sets off a disturbance he cannot control, so even the softest utterance is a danger to everything near him.

  The scale of the danger is stated plainly in the comics. At full strength his voice can destroy planets, and a mere whisper can rock a battleship. The effect is called his quasi-sonic scream.

  A fork-like antenna worn on his forehead helps him control the power. Without speaking, he can channel energy inward to raise his strength and speed. He can also focus it through the antenna or his arms as concussive blasts.

  His most extreme attack is the Master Blow, a single punch that uses all of his available energy. It leaves him extremely vulnerable afterward.

  By concentrating his electrons into anti-electrons, he can fly at up to 500 mph for six hours, protected by an anti-graviton field. He can wrap himself in a nearly impenetrable force field. He can also use his electrons as extrasensory probes that detect electromagnetic phenomena, and he can jam certain electromagnetic machines.

  He can even build particle fields solid enough to walk across, though the effort is exhausting. His body is also strong beyond ordinary Inhuman levels in stamina, durability and reflexes, and his senses are superhuman.

  The Skrulls later captured and experimented on him. Their tests showed that the scream is triggered by his emotional state and depends on it at least in part.

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• 5. Medusa and the Royal Family

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  Medusa, the Queen of the Inhumans, is both Black Bolt's cousin and his wife, and she is the person through whom he usually reaches his people. He sends his wishes to her through a limited telepathic link, and she speaks for him to his subjects. The royal family's teleporting dog, Lockjaw, receives destination orders from him the same way.

  That semi-telepathic bond runs through Black Bolt's whole bloodline. It is why he could resist the powerful mind of his brother Maximus, and sometimes even overpower and control it.

  His cousin Crystal drew him into some of the early family dramas. He stepped into her budding romance with the Fantastic Four's Johnny Storm. He later settled a quarrel between Johnny and the mutant Quicksilver over her affections. Later still, an announcement revealed that Crystal was pregnant with Quicksilver's child.

  His own marriage to Medusa came in the 1980s, after a battle between a Kree soldier and a Skrull soldier interrupted the ceremony. Soon afterward, Attilan's Genetic Council forbade the birth of the child he had conceived with her. Medusa fled to Earth and bore their son Ahura there.

  Years later, Black Bolt gave Ahura to Kang the Conqueror for safekeeping during the incursions. His prolonged absence from Attilan separated the couple, yet they still joined forces against Kang to recover their son.

  Black Bolt, now unwelcome in Attilan, ran a nightclub called the Quiet Room as a neutral zone for metahumans. Emma Frost and Dazzler ambushed him there during the Inhumans vs. X-Men storyline, and Medusa led the rescue.

  A psychic link later let the two exchange news. Black Bolt learned of Medusa's love for Gorgon, and they agreed they could not return to their marriage. After an encounter with the Progenitors, they met on the Astral Plane and chose to remain partners rather than lovers.

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• 6. Attilan on the Move

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  Attilan has never stayed in one place for long. A back-up feature in What If? follows Black Bolt's search for a new site for the city, which ended in the Himalayas. Another back-up feature shows him working with the Eternals to move it there.

  When pollution on Earth became too great for the Inhumans, he directed a second move, this time to the Moon. In the 2000s the Inhumans resettled in the Blue Area of the Moon and began to rebuild.

  The Kree have haunted the Inhumans throughout. In one self-titled series, the Kree regard the Inhumans as abominations. In a later limited series, Ronan the Accuser led a surprise Kree attack that captured Attilan and forced the Royal Family into service against the Shi'ar. Black Bolt defeated Ronan in personal combat, but the Inhuman people chose to leave with the Kree. That left Black Bolt and the Royal Family alone.

  The deepest Kree secret came out in the 2010s. Hundreds of thousands of years earlier, a genetic prophecy had predicted an anomaly in the Kree Inhuman program that would end the Supreme Intelligence. Black Bolt likely was that anomaly. To prevent the outcome, the Supreme Intelligence ordered every world with genetic experiments destroyed. Only five colonies escaped, Earth's among them, and they became the Universal Inhumans.

  After he returned to Attilan, Black Bolt joined the Universal Inhumans and was presented with four new brides, one from each of the other colonies.

  The resurrected Supreme Intelligence then sent the Kree Armada to wipe out Earth and the Inhumans. Guided by Franklin Richards, Black Bolt confronted the Supreme Intelligence and surrendered, which triggered protocols forcing a truce. He persuaded it that the prophecy was broken. The price was that Ronan, Crystal's husband, would return alone to the Kree domain.

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• 7. Wars and Impostors

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  The Illuminati first appeared to readers in New Avengers, which revealed that Black Bolt belonged to a secret council of superheroes. It was formed during the Kree-Skrull War to deal with threats to Earth. When the group collected the Infinity Gems, it split them among its members so they could never be used together again. Black Bolt received the Reality gem.

  Trouble over stolen Terrigen crystals led to the Silent War. Quicksilver had taken a canister of the crystals from Attilan, and the US military attacked the Inhumans to stop them from retrieving it. Black Bolt warned the United States against further aggression and then launched an offensive against it. When Gorgon and other Inhumans were captured, he led a rescue team himself. The mission worked, and Maximus then seized the throne.

  Black Bolt refused to join the Civil War over the Superhuman Registration Act. During the World War Hulk storyline, a Black Bolt was beaten brutally by the Hulk. The Secret Invasion limited series revealed that this was a Skrull impostor, who was killed in battle by the Illuminati. The real Black Bolt had been captured, because the Skrulls wanted his voice as a weapon of mass destruction.

  Angered by the Skrull invasion, he changed tactics in the War of Kings. The Inhumans overthrew Ronan, and Black Bolt declared himself supreme ruler of the Kree Empire. He planned to release the Terrigen Mist across the galaxy so that every being would be made equal. Vulcan, the usurper ruling the Shi'ar, interrupted him as the bomb charged. Crystal argued that the new powers would only inspire more harm. Black Bolt and Vulcan seemingly died in the blast, but he had in fact survived.

  During the Infinity storyline, Thanos sent his Black Order to demand a tribute of Inhuman younglings aged 16 to 22. The demand was really cover for a hunt for Thanos' own secret Inhuman son. Black Bolt unleashed a scream that tore down Attilan and set off a Terrigen Bomb that spread the Mists across Earth. Thanos beat him unconscious and held him captive. Maximus later saved the day, and Black Bolt and Maximus secretly agreed to hide the fact that the bomb had greatly diminished his powers.

  After the Secret Wars, he was imprisoned in a deep space torture prison meant for Maximus. There Absorbing Man sacrificed himself so that Black Bolt could kill the jailer and free the other inmates.

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• 8. Critics and Screens

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  Chase Magnett of ComicBook.com called Black Bolt "one of the most outstanding creations from the legendary run of Jack Kirby and Stan Lee on Fantastic Four." He argued that a king who cannot speak because of his own destructive potential is exactly the kind of central metaphor Kirby excelled at creating.

  ComicsAlliance ranked Black Bolt 2nd in its list of Marvel's royal Inhumans. It praised the Kirby-designed costume and its tuning fork diadem, and it joked that his real name, Blackagar Boltagon, is so ridiculous that it becomes wonderful. Comic Book Resources placed him 1st in its list of the 20 most powerful Inhumans.

  In 2017 Saladin Ahmed and Christian James Ward gave him his first solo series. According to Diamond Comic Distributors, Black Bolt #1 was the 57th best selling comic book in May 2017. The series won Best New Comic Series at the 2017 Golden Issue Awards, and Entertainment Weekly named it "Best Debut" in its list of the best comics of 2017. A one-shot, Darkhold: Black Bolt #1, followed in December 2021 and ranked 161st in sales that month, according to Comichron.

  On television, Fred Tatasciore voiced the character in Ultimate Spider-Man, Avengers Assemble and Marvel Future Avengers. Anson Mount played him in the 2017 series Inhumans, with Lofton Shaw as his younger self.

  Mount returned in the 2022 film Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. That version came from Earth-838 and belonged to an Illuminati that Wanda Maximoff kills.

  In video games, Black Bolt is a playable character in titles including Lego Marvel Super Heroes, Marvel Contest of Champions and Marvel Snap.

  One of the strangest versions of the character lives in the Amalgam Comics universe. There, Vykin the Black Bolt merges Black Bolt with the DC Comics character Vykin.

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