Inhumans: Culture Shock

Inhumans: Culture Shock 

By Sean McKeever, Matthew Clark & Nelson (Marvel Comics)
ISBN 1-84023-921-lllll

One of Silver-Age Marvel’s most venerable concepts got a partial Dawson’s Creek-style reboot for the teen-angster generation with this incarnation of Jack Kirby’s Inhumans.

Debuting in the 1960’s Fantastic Four comic and conceived as another lost civilisation storyline, the feature starred a race of fantastically varied beings that had been genetically altered by aliens in Earth’s pre-history, consequently becoming technologically advanced from the morass of stone-age mankind. Subsequently they isolated themselves from the world and barbarous humanity, first on an island and latterly in a hidden valley in the Himalayas. After knocking around the Marvel Universe for awhile, they relocated their entire civilisation to the Moon and gradually became known to the ordinary citizens of the world.

This is where we come in now. Rather than concentrate on the superheroic Black Bolt and the Ruling Family that had been the focus of previous series, the outing under discussion takes a disparate group of younger Inhumans, and, thanks to orders from their Government, dumps them at a mid-western American university as an interplanetary, interspecies cultural exchange, where they fit in like a Lear-Jet at Crufts.

Taking the teenager’s universal Betés Noir of isolation, insecurity and self-image, and applying them with a healthy dose of refugee chic to the inescapable twin crucibles of growing up and fitting in makes for a winning formula for the modern youngster/consumer. “Nobody understands me” and “Will you be my friend” may be sure-fire mantras for success but it never hurts to throw in some cool, sexy, outrageous, sympathetic and, of course, evil hidden-agenda-setting characters, of which we have a full complement, both Inhuman and not.

Sean McKeever’s script never falls into the mawkish, generic sentimentality that hampers so much of this sort of tale and never forgets that this is, ostensibly at least, a superhero-action vehicle. The art by Matthew Clark and Nelson is clear, precise and expressive: No mean feat when most of your leading cast are only nominally humanoid. This lets the story tell itself without intruding into the narrative contract.

All in all, a good beginning and a definite qualitative front-runner in this burgeoning genre of super-teen drama-roics. My only real quibble is the abrupt cessation of the story. But the next volume ought to take care of that.

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