Inhumans’ Black Bolt Getting His Own Solo Series

The Inhumans royal family as a whole may be headed into outer space, but the Inhuman king, Black Bolt, has a unique set of problems to deal with. As part of the ResurrXion initiative, which is refreshing both Marvel’s Inhumans and X-Men lines, Black bolt will be getting his first ever solo ongoing series.

Black Bolt will be written by Saladin Ahmed, the novelist nominated for a Hugo Award for his 2012 fantasy novel Throne of the Crescent Moon. He’ll be joined by artist Christian Ward (The Ultimates, ODY-C).

The new Black Bolt series finds the royal hero in an unexpected situation. Black Bolt has been imprisoned among some of the worst criminals in the galaxy and cut off from communicating with his family. He’ll be forced to make some unlikely allies in order to get to the bottom of incarceration.

“I won’t get too much into the backstory, but we start the series with Black Bolt helpless,” Ahmed tells io9. “Helpless and locked up. And that’s not a position he’s used to being in.”

“Black Bolt has been—he’s kind of an odd character, because he’s been around in the Marvel Universe for fifty years,” Ahmed said of the character. “He was created by, you know, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby back in the day. And the Inhumans have always been this sort of interesting, almost ‘cult’ thing, in the Marvel Universe. They’ve never been as famous as the X-Men or The Hulk, or Spider-Man, or anything like that. For more kinda hardcore Marvel nerds, they’re these touchstone characters. I don’t want to say ‘hipster,’ [laughs] a hipster test—but if you know who the Inhumans are, then you’re sort of like, on the inside. So, the challenge is bringing him to new readers. He’s this kind of strange, sort of ’60s cosmic Marvel character. Very much a creation of his time.”

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The Inhumans may be a relatively unknown branch of the Marvel Universe for now, but their profile is rising. Ahmed spoke about writing Black Bolt with that fact in mind as well.

“I’ll say this: it’s a bit of an odd book, because it’s both an Inhumans book and not, right? It’s very much a story that’s intended to be new reader friendly, despite it being this kind of cult property. It’s intended to bring in people who aren’t necessarily massive Inhumans fans, or even [fans of] Marvel continuity. So to a certain degree, at least at first, the book is not going to be bogged down by connections from all the other Inhumans things going on. There will be connections from folks who are looking for them, But one needn’t be versed on what’s going on with everybody—you don’t need to know all that to get into the book. It’s very much about one place and time. At least it starts out that way!”

Check out Ward’s full teaser art for Black Bolt in the gallery below, and look for Black Bolt #1 to be relased in spring 2017.