8 Reasons Why Inhumans Could Never Replace The X-Men

By Joe Glass / September 8, 2017

The Inhumans are a race of beings in the Marvel Universe who were created via alien genetic manipulation centuries ago. They also use a semi-mystical gas called Terrigen to go through a process called Terrigenesis that gives them crazy powers, and often leaves them looking more, well, inhuman.

X-Men, and mutants, are a genetic offshoot from baseline humanity, with wild and crazy superpowers that typically manifest at puberty. Their strange and often frightening powers and differences have led to the world fearing and hating them, and the X-Men fight to get to a world where mutants and humans can co-exist.

Some time ago however, Marvel decided to really push hard for the Inhumans, and cut back on X-Men titles significantly. This was because Marvel doesn't hold the film rights to mutants and the X-Men, which they sold to Fox decades ago. The fact that Fox keeps making financially successful movies from them certainly doesn't help.

Marvel wants in on that action, so certainly in the movies and TV shows of the Marvel Cinematic Universe they have been really pushing the Inhumans as a version of the mutant metaphor for audiences. In the comics, this didn't work out and things are reverting to how they were before, but the shows and films still want Inhumans to happen.

But can they really? Are Inhumans similar enough to mutants to be an adequate replacement? We certainly don't think so.

8. Inhumans Still Only Has A Handful Of Interesting Characters

There have been very few worthwhile additions to the Inhumans, and it shows.

When Marvel decided to shift focus from mutants to Inhumans, this meant creating the opportunity to make a whole batch of new Inhumans for readers to get behind. Thus, at the end of the Infinity event, the Terrigen Mists were released across the Earth, and new Inhumans began manifesting globally.

Mutants, meanwhile, experienced a decline in population, even ultimately going through a time where it turned out the Terrigen Mists were in fact poisoning the mutant population and attacking the X-Gene itself.

The problem was, out of the many new Inhumans created, very few turned out to be interesting.

Sure, some looked pretty wild or weird and were visually interesting, but few captured the imaginations of fans quite as much as many of the mutants that have been created over the decades.

The most successful new Inhumans, or NuHumans, were probably Ms. Marvel and Moon Girl. These characters developed staunch fans quickly, a big part of that probably coming from them also representing drastically under-represented communities in the medium and Marvel really pushing them as exciting new titles.

They also went and turned Quake from a mutant to an Inhuman, so it would fit with the explanation of the character in the ABC TV show, Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.

However, the majority of other new Inhumans were nowhere near as developed, and many were actually very similar to existing characters in a way that made them feel a little cheap. As part of their initial Inhumanity series, the main new Inhuman was one named Inferno, who was pretty much just a copy of the Human Torch. When Human Torch himself became a part of the Inhumans titles, Inferno became utterly redundant, and sadly, a lot of the newer characters have felt like that too.