The Inhumans are one of Marvel‘s most interesting concepts. Created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby in the Silver Age, the Inhumans were a sci-fi concept that combined themes of evolution and eugenics, and made for some rather interesting superheroes. While the Inhumans were never extremely popular, they had a core of fans who loved them, and books like 1998’s The Inhumans that these fans could point at as great. However, there’s really only one reason any one talks about the Inhumans in the present day, and that’s because of the disastrous Inhumans push of the mid ’10s. This included failed TV series The Inhumans, as well as multiple comics like Inhuman, Uncanny Inhumans, Inhumans, and The Royals. The story of the Inhumans push is one of Marvel’s hubris and making massive mistakes.
The Inhumans push has its origins in the MCU, and Marvel’s business practices at the time. It’s one of those situation where it’s impossible to not see that it was going to fail completely. Marvel has made many mistakes over the years, and the Inhumans push is one of the biggest, Marvel’s failure destroying an entire corner of the Marvel Universe.
The origin of the Inhumans push was Marvel’s lack of film rights to the X-Men. While Marvel couldn’t cancel the X-Men comics like they did with the Fantastic Four, they could try to position another group in their place. That’s where the Inhumans came in. The Inhumans were a group of humans who were experimented on by the Kree in ancient times, their genes changed so that exposure to the Terrigen Mists gave them superpowers. They created a secret nation and segregated themselves, becoming a legend before being found by the Fantastic Four. So, not exactly like mutants, but close enough for Marvel. They introduced two ideas to make the push work — one was that Inhumans genes had spread into the general population and the other was Black Bolt detonating a Terrigen Mist bomb that would saturate the atmosphere with Terrigen clouds, causing those with Inhumans genes to gain powers. This was their replacement for mutation; however, they weren’t done marginalizing mutants yet. They made the Terrigen Mists poisonous to mutants, doing damage to the X-Men as a concept that wouldn’t be repaired until the Krakoa Era. Marvel put the best creators they could on Inhumans books, and started to release multiple Inhumans books. Marvel went all in on the Inhumans, and it backfired spectacularly.
The problems with the Inhumans are immediately apparent to anyone who knows anything about the Inhumans. To begin with, the Inhumans are a eugenicist society ruled by a slave-owning monarchy that Marvel was trying to replace their civil rights analogue characters with. The extent to which this decision was completely tone deaf is astounding. However, that was a problem that could have been overcome. What made the Inhumans fail is that Marvel had no patience with their push. They wanted the Inhumans to be huge right out the gate, but completely underestimated fan esteem in the characters. See, it’s one thing to organically push characters — put out a book that gets surprisingly popular and then expand upon it — but another to shove characters down everyone’s throat. The latter is what Marvel did with the Inhumans. Instead of starting with one team book that introduced the new Inhumans status quo, Marvel kept trying to make fetch happen and it never did. Comic fans can be brought around on any idea as long as they are given a reason to. Marvel never found a way to make what they were doing with the Inhumans interesting, instead hoping that oversaturating the market with Inhumans books would force fans to actually buy the Inhuman books they were putting out. The whole thing was mystifying at best, and horribly stupid at worst.
The Inhumans can be very interesting when done right. Their society — one based on genetic merit more than anything else — can be intriguing to explore and the drama of the Inhuman royal family can be used to tell Game of Thrones-type stories. This is why it’s so strange that Marvel dropped all of this in order to just make the Inhumans into wannabe mutants. There were better Inhumans stories to be told if Marvel had kept the original concept of the characters. The Inhumans were somehow meant to be Marvel’s mutant replacement, become a multimedia hit, and completely replace the X-Men in the minds of fans. It was somehow supposed to do that very quickly. It was the dumbest decision imaginable, and destroyed one of Marvel’s coolest concepts.
Pushing C-list characters to the A-list has always been a part of the comic industry, but Marvel seemed to believe that it wouldn’t have to do any of the work associated with making the Inhumans push work. The Inhumans push was the baby of Ike Perlmutter, the former head of Marvel Entertainment who didn’t understand anything about Marvel other than it made money, and not the creatives, which definitely played a big role in their failure. However, the failure of the Inhumans push was always doomed. Instead of taking the things Inhumans stories did well and presenting them to the audience — something the aforementioned 1998 series The Inhumans did brilliantly (seriously — hunt it down, it’s amazing) — they tried to replace monumentally popular characters with characters that were niche at best. It remains Marvel’s biggest mistake.
What did you think about the Inhumans push? Sound off in the comments below.
The Inhumans are one of Marvel‘s most interesting concepts. Created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby in the Silver Age, the Inhumans were a sci-fi concept that combined themes of evolution and eugenics, and made for some rather interesting superheroes. While the Inhumans were never extremely popular, they had a core of fans who loved Read More