Prodigy #1

[history79]

"There’s something fun about writing geniuses. I loved doing it when I wrote Superman: Red Son, I loved writing Lex Luthor. This is like doing a Bruce Wayne multiplied by Lex Luthor, but with Indiana Jones’s taste for Adventure."

- Mark Millar

Comments

[thanekos]

Can't wait for Millar to use " genius works out events years in the future to amazingly specific precision " again.

[mazway_75]

I admit, I did like in Jupiter's Children how the smug genius talks about how he can solve the world's problems with ease...and his attempts at fixes include sinking half of England and filling China with garbage as all the "super calculations" in the world hit reality.

[matrix_dragon]

That is NOT how you sterilize an operating room young man! And where are your gloves?! *Sigh* Would someone please explain to Millar that even geniuses need a proper education and experience before cutting people open?

Plus, adding Lex Luthor to any summary of a character fills me with utter dread.

[icon_uk]

The angle-poise lights have been modified to emit a low level sterilisizing radiation?

[silicondream]

I'm just bemused that the kid improvises a surgical mask, gets blood spattered all over the non-masked part of his face, and then pulls down the mask with a blood-soaked hand to smirk at the audience. Why did he even bother? Is biosafety failure his kink?

[freezer]

Prodigy: The adventures of Nemesis as a boy!

[mastermahan]

*deep sigh*

[malitia]

The problem with geniuses in fiction is that they always clash to the edges of the writer's own intelligence and (more importantly) knowledge.

Ie. If they're so smart why do they seem to miss basic understanding of whatever they're doing? (Because the writer didn't know and thought they can get away with it "because genius character".)

[tcampbell1000]

This is a variation on what I call the Apollo problem. There are ways around it (especially when you're rendering a young genius just coming into his powers). I'd even accept it if you told me his lack of gloves was a colorist error. But still, someone screwed up there.

[thanekos]

To paraphrase Raymond Chandler, every fictional genius is an attitude and a few dozen lines of unforgettable dialogue.

[silicondream]

Some authors can convincingly write a character who's smarter than they are. Mark Millar is not one of them.

[mazway_75]

Yep. Just look at some CBS shows (Big Bang Theory) with how it shows guys so genius at stuff completely oblivious to human behavior.

Take that series "Scorpion" where the main character is a guy with 171 IQ but has no idea how people behave. Like when he's falsely arrested and smugly stands up in court to say they have to let him go because "I have to have a jury of my peers and you'll never find 12 people in this county as smart as I am."

Just a super-annoying trope.

[icon_uk]

Scorpion isn't just about a genius and his wacky psychological issues (apparently based on a real guy, but one who conveniently won't allow his IQ test to be reviewed though the tests taken at the point in time he would have taken it are notoriously unrelaible) it's about a TEAM of geniuses, each with their OWN wacky psychological issues.

That... doesn't really help does it?

[icon_uk]

As they put it in the Legion of Superheroes when Braniac 5 says the first thing he needs to do to solve a problem is go to sleep*

"He's a genius, if we always understood what he was doing, we wouldn't need him on the team"

* Turns out that sleeping allowed him to connect to a Coluan shared under-mind and vastly enhance his intellect.