The Inhumans have always been a weird, isolated corner of the Marvel Universe. A separationist civilization of former humans genetically altered by the alien Kree, they always stood apart and aloof from the Earth at large, save for the few who ventured out to experience humanity – be it Medusa joining the Fantastic Four, Crystal joining the Avengers and spawning a child with Quicksilver, or the student exchange program where Inhuman kids went to a Midwest high school and human kids experienced the majestic city of Attilan. There was also that time when they flew their city of Attilan out into space and actually took over the Kree Empire for a while. Now, however, Attilan has been destroyed, King Black Bolt and his brother Maximus The Mad are presumed dead, and the Inhumans have been thrown into chaos… and there are now potentially millions more of them than there ever were before, and none of them have any structure left at all.
So begins Inhumanity, the new phase in the aftermath of Infinity. Is this an event book? Well, there’s a checklist in the back of Inhumanity #1, but it looks as though it won’t be following an event book format. How to classify this book is less important than what happens in it, though. Writer Matt Fraction takes a decidedly different tone with the Inhuman Queen Medusa than he did over in FF, and a much less bombastic one than he did in the train wreck of Fear Itself. Here, he gives us a lot of important backstory and set-up for the current state of the Inhumans, through the narration of Karnak, one of the Royal Family gifted with the ability to see and exploit flaws.
The beginning of Inhumanity #1 is a bit questionable, as the Avengers send Bruce Banner of all people to handle grief counseling with Karnak, who seems shell-shocked after Attilan exploded over Manhattan – a ploy by Black Bolt to stop Thanos from killing an entire generation of Inhumans – and then the minute Karnak’s distress flares up, the Avengers actually attack and imprison him for some reason. It serves the purpose of calming him down and getting him to talk, which he does. He explains that he’s figured out that Black Bolt had worked with Maximus to make the sacrifice of Attilan a way to ensure Inhuman survival, as Maximus developed a bomb based on the Terrigen Mists which give each Inhuman special abilities (and sometimes very weird apperances) when they come of age. The destruction of the floating city due to Black Bolt’s mega-destructive voice also triggered the bomb, sending a massive blast of Terrigen out into the world, transforming dormant Inhumans that no one knew existed, bolstering the population with potentially millions of new members.
Karnak relates the history of the Inhumans – 25,000 years ago, the Kree came to Earth and juiced up some of early homo sapiens into inhomo supremis, then left to watch what would develop. The ancient leader Randac, developer of the Terrigen Mist, was the first transformed, and is part of the storied history of their society. However, it never occurred to them until now that there were early Inhumans who didn’t really want to follow Randac’s way, so they went out to live and breed among regular humans. Thus, the Inhuman seed had spread throughout humanity, and now people who thought they were average joes are suddenly cocooning and emerging with wild superpowers and extreme makeovers. Then, in a moment of clarity, Karnak somehow realizes that he himself is the flaw in the tapestry of what’s to come, he insists that Medusa forget the past entirely in order to save the future, and then breaks out of an unbreakable cell just so he can jump to his death.
It’s a pretty strong and somewhat eerie first issue, with impressive artwork from Olivier Coipel, making an entire issue of what is essentially a Karnak monologue compelling to see. What’s more is that Karnak’s final words may also serve as a warning to all die-hard continuity sticklers that the realm of the Inhumans is never going to go back to what it was before, and this new era where anybody can be an Inhuman will make the isolated enclave way of life impossible to regain. You’re no longer going to have the classic Inhumans – it’s Marvel NOW and everything’s going to change… probably to make it a bit more movie-ready. So if you’re not down with that, you might as well take a swan dive to street pizza, because you’re not going to deal well with the new order.
That said, Fraction writes Karnak and Medusa very well here, making this transition to a New Era of Inhumanity seem logical. It will be interesting to see how a Royal Family adjusts to the complete loss of kingdom and power. Aside from watching the haughty royals adjust, though, I’m still not entirely sure how this new status quo is going to make itself different from what Marvel already has in the X-Men. Normal joes hit puberty and get crazy powers and have to deal with them – that’s been the mutant thing for 50 years. Now it’s also the Inhuman thing, although it’s happening to older folks, too, and I guess it won’t be an ongoing effect, but rather a single moment in time that changes millions. I suppose, there will be a lot of Kree shenanigans to come, given Karnak’s vision, so the whole space-baby notion may take things in a different direction. So there, I just talked myself out of a criticism. Huzzah!
Overall, Inhumanity is interesting, it does what it needs to do to catch new readers up to speed, and it has me hooked to see what unfolds, and the first issue has prepared me to accept that the classic version of the Inhumans as created by Jack Kirby and Stan Lee back in 1965 is probably gone for good. Now, your pizza guy could be an Inhuman, and oh, what a great point-of-view character he’d make for an Inhumans movie…
