Comics / Spotlight

Are Inhumans Great Mutants?

By Hervé St-Louis
December 24, 2013 - 10:21

Notwithstanding the departure of Matt Fraction, the writer of Marvel’s new Inhumanity comic book series, the publisher and its conglomerate owner, Disney seem intent on replacing the X-Men and all of the Marvel mutant characters with the Inhumans, specifically to introduce them in its own cinematic world, so the rumours say. It is a good idea? Can the Inhumans created by both Jack Kirby and Stan Lee who first appeared in the Fantastic Four be the new outcasts of the Marvel universe both in comics and cinematically?

The first thing that needs to be said is that the casting of the Inhuman franchise as the replacement to the X-Men is pure fan speculation and as not really been announced or legitimately confirmed by Marvel. It looks like the Inhumans may be occupying a place familiar to X-Men fans, but it’s all hearsay and conjectures at this point. It all started because Marvel, years ago sold the license to the X-Men, the Fantastic Four, Daredevil and Spider-man to movie studios 20th Century Fox and Sony respectively. At the time Marvel Comics was near bankruptcy and the deals allowed it have its characters developed for film and infused some much needed money into the company.

Marvel’s deal with Fox stipulated that as long as new movies about the properties were released regularly, the studio would keep its license. Recently, Fox did not release a new Daredevil movie allowing the license to lapse back to Marvel and Disney. But properties that are primed for easy franchises such as Marvel comics super heroes are important for studios’ bottom line and thus while Daredevil wasn’t renewed, Fox is willing to try to reboot its Fantastic Four franchise by adding it to the same X-Men universe it has established with the X-Men and Wolverine series of movies.

Sony has a perpetual license to Spider-man and has rebooted the series in 2012. It seems that Sony is in no hurry to ever sell back its exclusive license to Spider-man back to Marvel. Now that Disney has acquired Marvel, the comic book publisher is in a stable environment, much like perpetual adversary DC Comics who is owned by Warner Brothers. Unfortunately, business decisions that made sense for Marvel 15 years ago now impair its future with its biggest historical comic book franchises the X-Men and Spider-man off-limit for its own cinematic universe.

Marvel has instead, relied on the Avengers to build its comic book universe. First Iron Man and then Hulk, Captain America and Thor were featured in several movies to compete heads on with the X-Men, Spider-man and DC Comics’s Superman and Batman franchises. Characters like Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch, perennial X-Men foes and Avengers members could very well appear in future Avengers films but would they be considered X-Men characters or Avengers?

Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver, in comics, are Magneto’s children. They first appeared in X-Men comics battling the original X-Men team with their father Magneto. But they subsequently made a name for themselves as early Avengers, staying, with the various branches of the team for years. Were Marvel interested in adding these characters to the Avengers, a simple way to explain their mutant powers would be through the Terrigen Mist, a device that triggers weird powers in Inhumans. Instead of being mutants, Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver could be Inhumans whose powers are activated with the Terrigen Mist. Stranger things have happened as the long time Captain America villainess the Viper has appeared in the last Wolverine movie as a mutant.

The Inhumans proper have been used irregularly in the Marvel universe until the late 1990s. They have been tied to the Avengers, the X-Men but really are Fantastic Four characters. Perhaps Fox will even script them into action for its next Fantastic Four movie before Marvel gets an opportunity to do it. Seriously, the Inhumans are bad X-Men replacements for Marvel not because of how they gain their powers, which is vaguely similar to how mutant powers are often activated at puberty.

The Inhuman are bad replacements for the X-Men because they are inhumans. They are not a minority hidden amongst humans persecuted for being different and used as a stand in for every other minority du jour since their creation in the 1960s the way the X-Men have been fictional stand in for blacks during the Civil Rights movements or for gays and queers today. In the Marvel cinematic universe, there is at this point no hint that the population despises people with powers. There is no such minority.

In the Marvel universe, mutants and the X-Men continue to be the main minorities and their near extinction supports this even more. What do Inhumans, hidden or revealed have that the X-Men don’t? The better known Inhumans, Blackbolt, Medusa, Crystal, Lockjaw, are all elites and members of a royal family. They are not persecuted minorities. They live in a mythical city that is sometimes hidden on the Moon or in the Himalayas. What life struggle have the Inhumans ever been through that makes them perfect role models and stand ins for the minority of the day, the way the X-Men have evoked for the last 50 years?

What ideological positions have the Inhumans alluded to through their leaders? Blackbolt is royalty and Inhumans royal family cannot mix with lower castes for fear of endangering their weak gene pool. Are these the values and struggles that Marvel wants to introduce to the world? What about the eternal conflict between cooperation and isolation that the X-Men’s Professor Charles Xavier and Magneto embody? Is Blackbolt and his inbreeding royal family’s elitism and exclusivity able to measure up in terms of ideological conflict and inspire comic book and movie audiences?

Unless the concept of the Inhumans is vastly changed from the core material where outcasts such as Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch are made revendicate their denied heritage against and inflexible Blackbolt, I don’t see how anything would remotely compare to the natural conflict the X-Men and other mutants have to face in the imaginary of captivated audiences. The Inhumans are no replacement for the X-Men. To think otherwise would be an insulting the X-Men’s who have often enjoyed the adventures of the mutants because their plight was related to their in real world.

Last Updated: August 31, 2023 - 08:12