Inhumans don't work, by turning them into mutants. In 2013, Marvel Television launched what was intended as the first official MCU tie-in TV series, Agents of SHIELD. It didn't take long for the show to begin blazing its own trail, though, with season 2 introducing the Inhumans. Chloe Bennet's hacker Skye was transformed into the Inhuman superhero Quake, a literal metamorphosis that essentially led to her becoming the show's co-star.
The small-screen debut of the Inhumans was accompanied by Marvel Studios' Phase 3 announcement, which included the announcement of an Inhuman movie, scheduled for November 2, 2018. At first this seemed like a surprising case of corporate synergy between Marvel Television and Marvel Studios; the general assumption was that Agents of SHIELD was introducing the concept of the Inhumans, setting them up to become their own major MCU franchise. Unfortunately, the relationship between Marvel Studios and the rest of Marvel Entertainment soured, with Disney forced to conduct a major corporate restructure in 2015. The Inhumans movie was swiftly dropped, with the entire property ed to Marvel Television, who launched their own Inhumans TV series instead - an ostensible companion show for Agents of SHIELD that flopped. This failure led to the Inhumans being relegated to a secondary plot-point even in Agents of SHIELD, with several major arcs dropped.
In truth, though, Agents of SHIELD had unwittingly signaled the major franchise as a whole. Marvel Comics had been attempting to increase their profile at the time as well, and Agents of SHIELD mimicked the comics by introducing a version who were more like the X-Men's mutants than anything else. It should have served as a warning that the concept of the Inhumans is a hard sell.
The Inhumans Have Always Been A Hard Sell
It's easy to forget that even Marvel's best writers and artists were people of their times. In the case of the Inhumans, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby were directly influenced by the now-discredited science of eugenics, which was much more common back in the 1960s. This led them to create the Inhumans as a superhuman caste-based society, that appears to have had three tiers:
- The Inhuman Royal Family sit at the top of this caste pyramid, holding the position by virtue of inheritance.
- Then there are the general Inhumans, who - importantly - are never shown working.
- The lowest caste are the Alpha Primitives, a slave-race who have been genetically engineered to have low levels of intelligence and only the most basic skills; they perform all the work.
It's immediately easy to see why these tropes and concepts are, to put it mildly, problematic. According to the comics, the caste-based society has been forced upon the Inhumans because of limited resources, but that's really only a justification. It also brings with it disturbing questions of whether the secretive Genetic Council control breeding in the lower castes, given there aren't many resources to go around. This, sadly, is probably a major reason Inhumans series historically haven't tended to last long. One of the better runs launched in 1975, by Doug Moench and George Perez, and it lasted just 12 issues; another definitive run by Paul Jenkins and Jae Lee launched in 1998 and fared no better. The core concept just doesn't resonate.
Marvel Made The Inhumans Work... By Turning Them Into X-Men
Marvel had an answer; turn the Inhumans into the X-Men. In the comics, this was accomplished by having the legendary Terrigen Mists released into the Earth's atmosphere. These mists trigger the development of super-powers in anyone with an Inhuman gene, and it turned out in ancient times humans and Inhumans had intermarried quite a lot. Agents of SHIELD took a similar approach, with Terrigen released into the Earth's water supply. People with latent Inhuman genes who came into with the Terrigen - perhaps by eating a fish that had been exposed to it, for example - spontaneously developed superpowers, often with little control of them.
Surprisingly, this led to Marvel simply import ideas from the X-Men. The world reacted with hate and fear to the spontaneous Terrigen-induced transformations, with President Ellis commissioning a new organization called the Advanced Threat Containment Unit (ATCU) to deal with Inhumans in the United States. Quake initially became something of a Professor X figure, trying to train new Inhumans in the use of their powers and put together her own Secret Warriors team. She and her SHIELD colleagues soon found themselves torn between dealing with rogue Inhumans like Lash and fighting off a terrorist group called the Watchdogs, clearly styled on the classic X-Men anti-mutant group known as the Friends of Humanity.
Marvel Television changed the Sokovia Accords, with every Inhuman legally required to - a more comic-book-accurate version of the SHRA, but also inspired by the X-Men's infamous Mutant Registration Act.
Marvel Television's Inhumans Killed The Franchise
Agents of SHIELD had made the Inhumans fairly successful, and the comics were taking exactly the same approach. And then, in 2017, Marvel Television launched its Inhumans TV series. This time, they played the Inhumans straight; they introduced the city of Attilan on the dark side of the Moon, and recreated the caste-based society. Inhumans itself had a lot of problems; it didn't have the benefit of skillful writing, performances were silted, and its shoestring budget meant special effects were less than impressive - for example, Medusa's hair was shaved off early on, clearly for cost purposes. But all these issues were in addition to the fact the core concept of the Inhumans is an outdated, controversial and debunked science, and viewers didn't really have any reason to connect to the characters.
The failure of Marvel Television's Inhumans led to a major course-correction at Marvel. Agents of SHIELD's story arcs spun away from the Inhumans, even leaving rare loose ends related to the characters they'd introduced. In the comics, the Inhumans - who'd been pushed since 2013, to the detriment of the X-Men who they now so closely resembled - were gradually sidelined. 2018's Death of the Inhumans event seemed to be appropriately named; although this was only a comic-book-death, meaning it led to inevitable resurrection, it ended the Inhumans as a major comic book presence. Their leader, Black Bolt, only returned this year in the Darkhold miniseries - the first time he'd been seen since Death of the Inhumans.
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Agents of SHIELD made the right call when it turned the Inhumans into a version of the X-Men. But that's a trick Marvel Studios won't duplicate, simply because they regained the film rights to the X-Men themselves when Disney acquired the bulk of Fox's film and TV empire. They don't need to create their own iteration of the X-Men; they have the real deal. And so, perhaps unsurprisingly, all evidence suggests the Inhumans have become a property the studio don't want to touch. The Ms. Marvel Disney+ TV series looks set to have completely written Kamala Khan's Inhuman origins out, replacing them with something either cosmic or magical. The decision feels like a symbolic one, suggesting the age of the Inhumans is well and truly over.