Many famous names have played little-known Marvel Comics characters in the MCU. One can make the argument that Iron Man himself wasn’t all that well-known before Robert Downey Jr. got the role. But with Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, we’ve got a legendary actor in the form of Bill Murray playing a character that made literally one appearance in a single comic, over fifty years ago. The character in question is Lord Krylar, whose only appearance was in 1972’s The Incredible Hulk #156. So what’s this guy’s story?
Lord Krylar: A One-and-Done Bad Guy
The green-skinned Krylar lived on planet K’ai, a world within the sub-atomic realm called the Microverse. The Microverse later became a key location for stories centered on the heroes known as the Micronauts. But since those were based on a toy line that Marvel only had temporary rights to, for the MCU, the Micoroverse became the Quantum Realm. Marvel’s love affair with the Microverse began not in any Ant-Man comics, as one would think, but in the pages of The Incredible Hulk.
In the early ’70s, writer Roy Thomas sent the Jade Giant into the subatomic universe. There, he encountered a whole humanoid population living there. And it turned out they were all green-skinned just like him. No longer feeling like an outcast, Hulk became their champion. He even fell in love with their Queen, Jarella. Thus began a long association with the Microverse in the pages of The Incredible Hulk, long before Marvel was publishing the Micronauts comics.
Welcome to Pitll Pawob
On K’ai, Krylar lived on the isle of assassins, Pitll Pawob. (Seriously, don’t ask us to pronounce that). It was home to that world’s oldest civilization where a high level of technology flourished. Much like the kingdom of Atlantis on Earth, Pitll Pawob fell into the sea, and there were almost no survivors. The descendants of the few Ptill Pawob survivors kept their tech to themselves, only sometimes selling them as weapons, and also selling themselves as weapons. This is where we officially met Krylar for the one and only time.
During one of his visits to K’ai to see Jarella, the Hulk finds her kingdom demolished. Turns out, she was taken prisoner by the ruler of another kingdom on K’ai, named Visis. Krylar was one of Visis’ chief scientists. For his master, Krylar invented a machine that can create the physical embodiment of someone’s deepest fears. Of course, Banner’s deepest fear was his inability to control his Hulk persona.
Krylar’s machine created an anti-Hulk to destroy the original. Realizing that creating one Hulk to fight another was maybe not a smart idea, Krylar turned off the machine. For that insolence, Visis stabbed Krylar in the gut, leaving him for dead. Since we haven’t seen him since, we can assume he did indeed die. One of the few Marvel characters to stay six feet under.
Krylar in Name Only?
Will Bill Murray’s Krylar be anything like the one from the comics? Well, for starters, he’s not green. That’s one key difference already. There also doesn’t seem to be a Lord Visis in this film. From the sound of things, aside from being a Marvel villain who lives in a microscopic universe, there are no other similarities we can see. Not that there was much to go on with the comic book version to start with, he literally existed for just a few panels. We would not be surprised if Peyton Reed simply came across the name Krylar while researching the Microverse, and decided he liked the name. If there’s any major takeaway here, it’s that there is no character or name too obscure for an A-list actor to play in the MCU anymore. Maybe one day we’ll see Tom Cruise as Stilt-Man, or Julia Roberts as White Rabbit. Nothing is off the table anymore.
