Why We Need the Inhumans and Why We Always Will
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We need the Inhumans.
Maybe not the incarnations currently gracing the large, and soon small, screens; those guys have neither the presence nor the gravitas (yes, fine, mea cupa, I was fooled by that one trailer) to truly represent either the characters or the sweeping drama in which they’ve existed for five-plus decades. If you want that, I’d recommend picking up Paul Jenkins and Jae Lee’s The Inhumans or Saladin Ahmed and Christian Ward’s current ongoing Black Bolt. Or even some of the Shakespearean and Greek tragedies (but that’s another article. No, seriously. I have a list and everything).
That’s not why we need them though.
We need the Inhumans because they are a mirror we can hold up in order to examine our progress as a society. To trace our progress as regards the place of the “other” in our (our = the larger society here, friends) national culture, a gauge of how far we’ve come.
Or, more accurately, sadly, our lack of progress.
The Inhumans first appeared in Fantastic Four #45 in December in 1965. They were created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby and they were created other. The Kree, an alien race who, in the long and storied history of the Marvel cosmos have never been able to mind their own damn business, discovered proto-humans during the first Kree-Skrull War and decided to experiment upon them. Hoping to develop canon fodder to throw at their enemies, the Kree spliced Eternal DNA into Cro-Magnon specimens who had been invested with genetic potential by the Celestials (all powerful, also unable to mind their own damn business). The Kree were successful in their endeavors but for some unknown reason, abandoned their test subjects to their own devices and peaced out back to Hala.
The Inhumans did fine on their own, forming a closed society which remained secluded from mainstream humanity, by choice, on the island of Attilan. When Triton, one of HRH Black Bolt’s cousins, was briefly captured by humans, Black Bolt became concerned about discovery and relocated Attilan to the Himalayas. He continued to relocate the settlement every time humanity got close including such remote locations as the “Blue Area of the Moon” (what, you didn’t know there was such place?), and even making a play, at one point, for the ancestral homeland of the Kree Empire.
Look, I’m not saying Black Bolt always did things the right way but his motivations? Hard to question. He was afraid his people were going to be captured and cut apart for study or used against their will for their abilities. Which is exactly what happened every time some fool human happened upon one of the Inhumans. The first thing S.H.I.E.L.D. did upon receipt of stolen Terrigen Mist, for example, was to toss Gorgon, another of Black Bolts cousins, into it just to see what would happen. The result was torturous alteration of his body and the the decimation of his mental faculties.
The Inhumans have always understood a fundamental truth of humanity: those in power, maybe even the vast majority of us—when they see something they want, will take it, from territory to technology to lives.
How, you may be asking, is this relevant?
Maestro, if you please, a very brief survey of what happened to the “other” in real world 1965 prior to the first appearance of the Inhumans:
Maybe not the incarnations currently gracing the large, and soon small, screens; those guys have neither the presence nor the gravitas (yes, fine, mea cupa, I was fooled by that one trailer) to truly represent either the characters or the sweeping drama in which they’ve existed for five-plus decades. If you want that, I’d recommend picking up Paul Jenkins and Jae Lee’s The Inhumans or Saladin Ahmed and Christian Ward’s current ongoing Black Bolt. Or even some of the Shakespearean and Greek tragedies (but that’s another article. No, seriously. I have a list and everything).
That’s not why we need them though.
We need the Inhumans because they are a mirror we can hold up in order to examine our progress as a society. To trace our progress as regards the place of the “other” in our (our = the larger society here, friends) national culture, a gauge of how far we’ve come.
Or, more accurately, sadly, our lack of progress.
The Inhumans first appeared in Fantastic Four #45 in December in 1965. They were created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby and they were created other. The Kree, an alien race who, in the long and storied history of the Marvel cosmos have never been able to mind their own damn business, discovered proto-humans during the first Kree-Skrull War and decided to experiment upon them. Hoping to develop canon fodder to throw at their enemies, the Kree spliced Eternal DNA into Cro-Magnon specimens who had been invested with genetic potential by the Celestials (all powerful, also unable to mind their own damn business). The Kree were successful in their endeavors but for some unknown reason, abandoned their test subjects to their own devices and peaced out back to Hala.
The Inhumans did fine on their own, forming a closed society which remained secluded from mainstream humanity, by choice, on the island of Attilan. When Triton, one of HRH Black Bolt’s cousins, was briefly captured by humans, Black Bolt became concerned about discovery and relocated Attilan to the Himalayas. He continued to relocate the settlement every time humanity got close including such remote locations as the “Blue Area of the Moon” (what, you didn’t know there was such place?), and even making a play, at one point, for the ancestral homeland of the Kree Empire.
Look, I’m not saying Black Bolt always did things the right way but his motivations? Hard to question. He was afraid his people were going to be captured and cut apart for study or used against their will for their abilities. Which is exactly what happened every time some fool human happened upon one of the Inhumans. The first thing S.H.I.E.L.D. did upon receipt of stolen Terrigen Mist, for example, was to toss Gorgon, another of Black Bolts cousins, into it just to see what would happen. The result was torturous alteration of his body and the the decimation of his mental faculties.
The Inhumans have always understood a fundamental truth of humanity: those in power, maybe even the vast majority of us—when they see something they want, will take it, from territory to technology to lives.
How, you may be asking, is this relevant?
Maestro, if you please, a very brief survey of what happened to the “other” in real world 1965 prior to the first appearance of the Inhumans:
- The Soviets, the French, and the Americans all performed major nuclear weapons tests
- Martin Luther King Jr. and 700 other protesters were arrested in Selma for demanding equal rights
- Malcolm X was assassinated
