Why Nobody Cares About the Inhumans

Even though the Inhumans have existed for years, many still see them as Marvel's attempted replacement for the X-Men recently, since Marvel Film Studios can't seem to buy back the film rights after having sold them to FOX back in the 90's. Anyone who has been following the second Civil War event can clearly see that marvel is shoving these heroes and their stories down reader's throats, finding ways to shoehorn their plot lines into every other story, including the X-Men.

The overwhelming consensus of the Inhumans in comics on places like Reddit and G+ is that they really don't give a shit. They don't hate the Inhumans, but at the same time, they aren't particularly liked, either. To me, they kind of suck from a storyteller's perspective, which I can only speculate is part of the reason most people don't care about these characters.

• The plot of the inhumans is boring.

The Inhumans are the result of a Kree alien experiment on earth thousands of years ago. The Inhumans get their powers when they're exposed to the Terragen Myst, and live in a secret city, isolated from the rest of the world, where the biggest source of conflict and motivation is to propagate their species. To me, this comes off as the most uninteresting setup for a story I could possibly imagine. A story where your biggest concern regarding your people is who you're going to fuck next is the kind of plot you would expect from a late 90's comedy starring Ryan Reynolds.

Now, contrast that with the X-men, who are a group of heroes born with a mutant gene that gives them extraordinary powers by the time they hit puberty. The sheer scope of their powers, coupled with the reputation for mutants with great power to turn to commit acts of crime has resulted in a warranted fear and prejudice from the Human majority, who often try to protest and legislate them out of the general population. Their story is far more interesting, because the plot puts them at odds with the rest of humanity in a way that practically writes itself. The humans hate the Mutants, so fear-mongering and religious propaganda puts them at odds with special interest groups who seek to destroy them. Not only is attempting to integrate them into society a good thing from a storytelling perspective, but giving them the status of an oppressed minority group within that society provides so many opportunities for social commentary. The Inhumans have none of that.

• The characters suck

Okay, Maybe not all of them suck, but most of them do for various reasons, not the least of which is the fact that most of them come off as selfish assholes. They are boring as shit, many of them have completely interchangeable personalities, and just plain aren't interesting at all.

I was just reading The first issue of the Uncanny Inhumans, where Black Bolt; the King of the Inhumans; tries to get his son back from Kang the Conqueror, after having sold his son to Kang in order to save his life. What really stuck out for me while reading this story is that the only characters that really stood out as being memorable was the ones who weren't Inhuman. Beast (an X-MAN) was the most level-headed, rational individual while Jonny Storm (Fantastic Four) was the most forward-thinking and likable character in the story, who ended up taking the most initiative. Reader was the only Inhuman who came off as being a relate-able character.

To top it all off, we get a shot of Medusa Making out with Johnny Storm, as Black Bolt walks in on them. Jonny is naturally on the defensive, while Medusa is being a colossal cunt about the situation. The reason I bring this up is because this is a microcosm of a much bigger problem with the inhuman cast of characters, which is that they are all kinda dicks anyway. There are no sympathetic characters in their stories, just a bunch of self-absorbed pricks who get put in whatever situation the plot needed them to be in.

The X-Men and Fantastic 4 all have compelling character Dynamics. They are able to bounce personality traits off of each-other in order to weave a coherent story with believable characters. The Inhumans are lead by Black Bolt, who doesn't even fucking talk, while the supporting characters are either knob-heads, assholes, or are so bland that you could literally switch dialogue bubbles out on a whim and have no idea who's personality is being projected through the dialogue.

• Inhumans have no villains.

Like I said before, The most pressing issue the Inhumans have is the necessity to propagate their species. Pretty much every villain or catastrophe they have ever faced came from a more popular story from another book that got shoehorned into somehow being the InHuman's problem. This way, the writers could use the popularity of other IPs to sell their books. The InHumans don't even have a single InHuman antagonist, besides the occasional erectile dysfunction, and possibly low sperm count.

Contrast that with the X-Men, who almost always have antagonists within their own gene pool, ranging from class 5 Mutants like Magneto to literal God-like beings like Apokalipse!

People have been saying that the Uncanny Inhumans are a step up in storytelling for the franchise, but the only reason that appears to be the case in my opinion, is because Characters with actual character were injected into these stories like Beast and the Human Torch. Had the InHumans been left to handle the Kang issue in Uncanny InHumans #1 by themselves, they would all have been erased from history, and the book would have likely been canceled.