So this is Marvel’s new thing, then – sticking file extensions on the end of issue numbers to signal crossover stories.  Hallelujah. With this out of the box thinking, the industry is saved.

Uncanny X-Men #15.INH doesn’t work.  Or at least, it doesn’t work if you’ve been skipping the build-up to Inhumanity – which I have.  But since this issue’s primary purpose is apparently to advertise Inhumanity to Uncanny X-Men readers, you would certain hope that it would be aiming to capture the interest of people coming to the event fresh.  In this, it fails.

From the relatively little I’ve seen of the build-up to Inhumanity, I don’t honestly understand the hook.  And yes, that’s even after reading the one-shot we reviewed on last week’s podcast, which was nothing but recap.  Because it’s not so much that I don’t understand the plot – more that I don’t understand why it’s supposed to be interesting.  The hook, as best as Marvel have managed to convey it to me, is that the Inhumans’ city of Attilan has been destroyed by a massive bomb which has spread their mutagenic Terrigen Mists around the world.  This has apparently activated a bunch of dormant Inhumans, whatever the hell that’s supposed to mean, who have gone into cocoons and come out with super powers.

So basically… a thing has happened and a bunch of people have got super powers.  That’s fine as the starting premise for a superhero universe, and in fact such a thing more or less was the premise for the New Universe back in the 1980s.  But as a Marvel Universe concept with the Inhumans attached, I don’t get it.  These “new Inhumans” are, from the look of it, just ordinary folk who didn’t know they had any connection to the Inhumans.  But the entire point of the Inhumans is their distinctive culture.  That’s their thing.  They’re kind of heroic but they do weird things to their kids and keep a slave race – they’re somewhere between foreign and alien.  Take that away and replace it with “ordinary people from the world over” and you haven’t got a concept any more.

Or a least, I don’t understand what the replacement concept is meant to be.

The X-Men pose a further problem for this revamp of the Inhumans, since the X-Men’s series has already littered the Marvel Universe with ordinary folk who suddenly developed super powers, inviting the obvious question of what makes the new Inhumans different.  That’s not necessarily such a big problem for the Marvel Universe in general; the X-Men have always been a bit semi-detached from the rest of Marvel continuity, and there’s never been a particularly good reason for the Marvel Universe public to draw such a distinction between mutants and other superheroes.  The Marvel Universe is ultimately just a storytelling device to allow characters from different books to meet.  But if you’re going to do an Inhumanity tie-in issue of Uncanny X-Men – then yes, you’re going to have to turn some attention to asking how these two concepts fit together.

What actually happens in this issue: the women from Scott’s team decide to go shopping in London.  (This first half of the book is basically fine, by the way, if you like Bendis’ downtime issues.)  They stumble upon an Inhuman emerging from one of the cocoons, who turns out to be a Latverian called Geldhoff who doesn’t like mutants and is a bit confused.  There’s a minor altercation and then AIM come and cart him off.  And… um, that’s it.

There’s some vague and unexplained blather about Inhumans being different from mutants, without any attempt to explain why – most likely because Bendis doesn’t know either.  In fact, Bendis seems to be using this story as a device to bring Geldoff from Ultimate Spider-Man into the Marvel Universe (even though that’s been done already).  Which only goes to emphasise the fact that there’s nothing remotely Inhuman about these new Inhumans, if an unrelated character can simply be plugged into the role.

Or at least, if there’s an explanation out there in the other tie-in issues of what makes these characters Inhuman in any meaningful way, it’s not to be found here.  As of right now, not only do I not care about Inhumanity, I don’t even know what it is I’m supposed to care about.