Proceeding from a possibly mistaken premise that the question of who and/or what The Hunched Cornish is, is a nagging one for our Distinguished Readers, the following essay will be an attempt to lay the groundwork for further rumination on the subject.
In all the years of The Kyiv Commix, we know at most that The Hunched Cornish has been around for several thousand years, but that he is not immortal and will one day die.
Perhaps he is a creature who is so constituted, that he is fated to live for a very, very long time, whether we, or he, like it or not.
Or maybe he was something closer to you and me in terms of lifespan, but a curse from God damned him to a mentally tortured, cruelly infertile, and unbearably long life.
In exchange for his suffering, he was granted elephantine strength, the unlikely ability to scurry up vertical surfaces, like those of buildings, with uncanny facility and speed, and his every physical cell made a receptacle of blue flame, like a pilot light, which he is able to control and turn up at will by degrees, selectively setting fire to his surroundings, or even outright blowing them up. This skill set was topped off by a competence of evil that is beyond the ken of Satan himself.
Or, if all of this were not a curse from on high, then perhaps we are looking at untapped capacities, latent potentialities of the primordial, perhaps antediluvian, genetic code dormant within him, awakened by some event, moment, circumstance, or trauma buried in The Hunched Cornish’s subconscious, because buried in a literally tortured and extremely painful past.
I am a proponent of this last view, the conjectural perimeters of which I will now attempt to outline below.
Where to start? The beginning, of course, and nothing goes farther back than Genesis
In matters like this, it is best, I think, to start with the beginnings; the beginnings, that is, which are afforded to us by any available ancient records we are still able to coax out of the dust, and which precious crumbly contents may plausibly fit as the hypothetical building blocks of what was to eventually result in The Hunched Cornish – and any others like him, if they had existed, or still exist.
To wit: There is a rejected book of the Bible, although not apocryphal in the Ethiopian version, called the Book of Enoch. Now, I did not read the Book of Enoch after finding it on the Internet, mainly because I adjudged the writing to be intolerably bad; much worse, in fact, than anything in The Kyiv Commix. Therefore, any exposition at this point is merely my rephrasing of Google’s AI on the subject – a resource currently (as of this publication date) available to anyone.
It is in the Book of Enoch one finds an expansion on the Nephilim, described in Genesis 6:4 as “the mighty men who were of old, the men of renown”, who came into being after the “sons of God came in to the daughters of man and they bore children (the Nephilim – my note) to them.”
These “sons of God” have been broadly commented on and interpreted as being fallen angels, referred to in the Book of Enoch as the Watchers, who were charged by God to watch over humanity.
But a part of their contingent was so taken by the beauty of humanity’s women, that they came down to Earth and seduced and raped them, engendering the hybrid Nephilim, a race of evil giants, while earning God’s condemnation and punishment for their rebellion.
They are the ones who came to be captured in the countless stone figures of gargoyles and chimeras keeping us fixed in their lurid and hungry gazes from their cathedral perches high above – maybe as warnings to us; or maybe to mock God and his supplicants from the roofs of God’s own houses.
Or maybe, after all, they are mocking us, and not God; for what need do fallen angels have in mocking God, knowing they could never gain a thing by it. Rather, they seek to destroy us, God’s greatest creation. That is the contest we are in. In that sense, their look, their gaze, their leer, set in dead stone, is a cold, hard, and pitiless warning.
According to Google’s AI, in Enoch, the Watchers are generally considered a distinct group of angelic beings from the ones who fell with Lucifer, the Watchers falling later by lusting after human women, whereas Lucifer’s rebellion involved pride in heaven before God brought humanity into existence.
The Nephilim, whose name, from its Hebrew root, means “fallen ones”, or “giants”, represent a period of corruption before the Flood. They are associated with deep corruption and violence that prompted God’s judgment in the form of the flood. In Enoch, these corrupt giants taught mankind forbidden knowledge and brought evil to the world.
A place called Atlantis
It is this idea of forbidden knowledge and evil, together with some genetic remnant of the Nephilim, that I connect to the Atlantis described by Plato, theoretically proposed by some since the great philosopher’s time to have been a real place, and not just an allegory for the fate of any alien political and civilizational system that dared challenge the obvious superiority of Plato’s Athens.
It has been implied by those who have done the implying that the natural disasters that overwhelmed Atlantis, such as earthquakes and flooding (not the later Noah’s Flood), which ended up sinking the highly advanced island nation, were the result of Atlantis’ own intellectual, scientific, and technological overdevelopment, and therefore hubris, and therefore stupidity in the use of developed powers that had grown, either through vain and tyrannical abuses, or self-propagation and self-advancement, beyond the Atlanteans’ control – much like our own AI is doing even now: not necessarily more advanced than what had been available in Atlantis.
[Please note: I am here giving greatest credence to Plato’s story, rather than associating the sinking of Atlantis with the catastrophic flooding that occurred during the last Ice Age linked to the melting of ice sheets and the resulting rapid rise in sea levels, although Plato’s dating of Atlantis does place it roughly at the end of that Ice Age, and several thousand years before the biblical Great Flood narrative. However, Plato cannot have his Athens beating Atlantis in a fight in 9,600 BC, at the same time that Atlantis is sinking, because it would be thousands of years yet before Athens even comes into existence. If Plato must have his victory, then he must have it thousands of years later, in a time that makes more sense, as I will outline below.]
At the same time, Plato’s story of Atlantis sees this formidable great-island nation as embarking on a campaign to conquer the remainder of the civilizational world at the time, which saw initial successes for the Atlanteans, until they came up against Athens, to whom they fell.
And, while the story may be (among the many other things that it also may be) a Platonic reworking, for pedagogical and didactic purposes, of the Greek’s victory over Troy, I imagine something like an Atlantean fall before Athens possible if we accept Plato’s timeline for Atlantis as existing some 9,000 years before his own time, and then Atlantis’ decline and fall, indeed, its sinking, several thousands of years later, around the same time as the Trojan War, or perhaps some one hundred or two hundred years before.
I can imagine a desperate Atlantis, seeing its fate in what might have been its own technological self-destruction, launching its armies and navies out from its remaining land and ports to conquer new lands and seas, where the Atlanteans might have been able to start again, building on the remnants of what they would be able to salvage of their dying and quickly disappearing world. But, ultimately, for naught.
Could the fallen Atlanteans have had anything to do with the great and violent movements of humanity and the emergence of The Sea Peoples in those days, as they launched their marauding raids on land and their pirate ships into the Mediterranean?
I can imagine the Atlantean castaways, nationless warrior-refugees, and uprooted exiles being slaughtered wholesale, or captured, turned into slaves, or mercilessly and cruelly tortured by those who’d have the bragging rights to victory over them; in this case, the Athenian Greeks at around the time of The Sea Peoples (around 1200 BC) and the Trojan War (circa 1250-1180 BC), or a couple, or several, hundred years before, perhaps concurrent with the Mycenaean Greek takeover of Minoan Crete (1450-1400 BC), where they’d come into full dominance around 1100 BC [dating of events based on answers received from Google’s AI].
Enter, The Hunched Cornish
It is around or within this historical moment that I locate The Hunched Cornish, an Atlantean warrior, among the last of his ancient race, sent to make war against his country’s neighbors to save a civilization in its death throes, a civilization in fact already dead and literally buried in a watery grave.
As for the location of Atlantis and therefore the “Cornish” in the Hunched Cornish’s name, which is obviously a sobriquet for a real name now lost to memory and time, I don’t see what all the speculation is about. Why do people keep coming up with theories, when the matter is, and has been, already factually laid out and settled in authoritative and highly respected sources, put together by experts, scholars, and intellectuals. How sad, if the answer is, because they have nothing better to do.
In abstract summary and paraphrase, here is what the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica, 11th Ed. – a copy of which I just happen to have right here – has to say regarding the supposedly oh-so elusive and mysterious Atlantis:
As of that edition’s publication date, the encyclopedia notes Atlantis to have been a sunken island off the CORNISH COAST, and until 1853, was marked on English charts as a rock at 44 degrees, 48 minutes north, and 26 degrees, 10 minutes west.
Now, can we entertain any doubts as to the accuracy of the island nation British Empire’s maritime charting or its nonpareil global prowess in the charting and mapping sphere? No, we cannot, and they are a fool who does.
Now, I see The Hunched Cornish, having lost all his comrades-in-arms, being driven relentlessly into the sea by the raging Greeks. And I see him miraculously escaping to Minoan Crete, at the time an advanced-civilization island outpost of the now sunken Atlantis itself, and therefore the friendly shores of an ally of Atlantean geopolitical ambitions for The Hunched Cornish. But, therefore, also the obvious target of Mycenean Greek civilizational destruction and conquest, the Greeks’ momentum unstoppable after crushing the haughty Atlanteans under their heels.
It is here that the vision grows dim, with only patches of light to illuminate our subject, and even those are breaking apart, becoming more scattered and ever smaller, diminishing to nothing.
But what we additionally know about The Hunched Cornish from our Kyivan adventures is that his frighteningly massive body, head included, is covered in deep gashes, welted over, and carved into again and again, as though a pattern had been intended, with strips of flesh left unharmed, untouched between the gory yawning lashes.
It is my impression that the Mycenean Greeks, after capturing The Hunched Cornish on Crete, subjected him to endless games of torture, including excruciating ordeals other than the non-stop whippings and carvings of his flesh, having begun with the initial intent to kill him, subjecting him to a long and harrowing death by torture, only to wonder in amazement at his inability to die; and so it became, as I’ve suggested, a game – protracted over a few hundred years.
It is further my impression – and this is what I can still see, but beyond which the darkness enshrouds – that with each new set of lacerations, The Hunched Cornish was lowered into a barrel of Mediterranean Sea brine, for reasons of the salt constantly washing over and eating into the wounds. The barrel, no doubt, was very large, and in all likelihood built especially to accommodate his phenomenal bulk.
It is in the constant suffering of his extreme pain that, I propose, The Hunched Cornish lost all past memory of himself. Perhaps it is also where his proclivity of falling into hypnotic states by dint of effortless craft emerged, as we have witnessed in a number of Checkout stories within our greater Kyivan Commix narrative, coming from the likes of The Good Witch (early on), The Half Guinea (of course), and even Josh Davies’ severed head. I interpret this tendency to easily fall into a hypnotic state as something like a symptom of his memory loss, the latter, therefore, being the disease: the unbearable amnesia of never knowing who, or what you are, because you’ve lost all memory of, all connection with, your past.
Despite The Hunched Cornish’s astounding physical abilities, the easy hypnosis appears to be his major weakness, through which he can be taken advantage of when under. We see he has consistently managed to snap out of it, although it sometimes takes him as long as an entire year.
Furthermore, I believe the constant torture The Hunched Cornish had been subjected to, miraculously remaining alive through it all, was the event, circumstance, and trauma that transformed him into a semi-immortal being, his natural life extended beyond the greatest limits formerly available to Man, as in the Bible, perhaps, where we have come to believe that lives of 700, 800, or even 900 years’ length are possible.
I believe that The Hunched Cornish’s centuries-long ordeal somehow opened up his immortal, or immortal-like side, that of his hybrid Nephilim ancestors of thousands of years earlier, with their bad angel blood. Activating in his veins that part of that blood.
As the Mycenean Greeks came to full dominance over Crete several hundred years following their first conquest, around, say, 1100 BC, as mentioned earlier according to the AI-generated timeline, like The Hunched Cornish, they’d long forgotten who or what he was and, losing interest, ceasing to wonder even at his terrifying longevity, granted him his freedom by putting him in the same barrel in which he’d been tortured for so many years, minus the brine, and cast him into the sea to be handled by Fate whichever way Fate chose.
It is apparently during this voyage that The Hunched Cornish again becomes self-aware, regaining his self-consciousness, for he remembers his life from this point forward only, though nothing of his past.
We have this from The Hunched Cornish in testimonial form, from a previously unpublished interview of him conducted by American Detective First Class Dirk Dickerson, the raw notes of which we recently discovered in Dickerson’s journal.
Here is the pertinent quote, The Hunched Cornish responding to Dickerson’s, “Who are you; what are you; where are you from?”:
“I could never really quite tell, or find any way to find out, for sure. The more I sought an answer, the more the question itself slipped away from me. And I’ve been chasing it for thousands of years, trying to catch myself; ever since the barrel I’d been stuck in finally washed ashore mainland Greece, crashing aground one of the beamlike fingers of the Peloponnese. Therefore, to me, myself has always been something in-between: a creature, admittedly a grotesque abomination, but with feelings, and hopes, and dreams, wanting to find out who I am, and not just living with what I am, engendered in the great shift between the ages… from –”
And here, it cuts off… although the break in speech, if a result of The Hunched Cornish’s own volition, rather than of Dickerson’s decision to stop writing, might suggest that The Hunched Cornish actually knows, or recalls, more than he was willing to let on.
The Competing Theory of the Minotaur and the Woman from Wales
I believe, therefore, that all the stories connecting The Hunched Cornish to the famous Minotaur of Crete, Asterius, the monstrous offspring of a pure Titan female and a gift-bull from Poseidon, brother of Olympian Zeus, represent nothing more than popular myth that arose regarding The Hunched Cornish due precisely to his mind-boggling longevity, notwithstanding the endless pain and crippling torture he was subjected to by generations of Greek tormentors, all of whom he’d outlive – until they simply saw no sense in it anymore and let him go.
The story became that the Minotaur, an uncontrollable and deranged monster, a nightmare in chains, kept downstairs, inside a labyrinth, fathered The Hunched Cornish on a Cornish woman – hence, “Cornish”. She’d been picked up by seafaring merchant Minoans in Wales, where they’d been loading tin mined in those parts onto their ships and, upon arriving back home in Crete, gave her to King Minos in partial lieu of tribute or tax they were otherwise obliged to pay him, and whom the king had thrown into the labyrinth to feed his stepson, the notorious Minotaur. Who, excited by what he saw, mounted her instead of eating her, like he was supposed to, thereby producing The Hunched Cornish in what would have been a highly unlikely feat of genetics, if it were true.
But if that were true, then that would make The Hunched Cornish part human, on his mother’s side, and part Titan and part Olympian on his father the Minotaur’s side: the latter was pure Titan on his mother Pasiphae’s side, and pure Olympian on his father the bull’s side, who’d been a gift to King Minos (himself a son of Zeus, and husband of Pasiphae) from Poseidon, Zeus’s underwater brother, and therefore an Olympian. And it would also make The Hunched Cornish part magnificent bull, I almost forgot to add; quite the pedigree.
This version of The Hunched Cornish’s story is helpful in constructing a theoretical framework, based in myth, both for his superhuman longevity due to his gods’ blood, as well as to his eventual (not yet consummated) death due to his mortal mother’s blood.
But is it, after all, possible, that the Mycenean Greeks, when overrunning Crete, found the Minotauric child-freak and began cutting it and torturing it for fun, giving themselves the excuse that it wasn’t human, only to discover its amazing resilience to death? And so, having turned the cruel pastime into a betting game, they kept doing it, to see what would happen, for days, and years, and centuries, until, as I’ve suggested, they sent the grown and by then hundreds of years old monolith of incomprehensible flesh packing in a barrel upon the sea.
Nah…
Why?
Well, because the Minotaur – I mean, come on! Gods… Titans… Olympians… bulls that reproduce with gods to create abominable monsters, who in their turn rape mortal women and produce the likes of The Hunched Cornish. I mean – COME ON!!!
Needless to say, that’s utterly preposterous – but I’ll say it anyway: that’s utterly preposterous!
I’ll take Plato’s Atlantis any day…
1.30.26