Was Marvel’s Illuminati a Good Idea?

Marvel has long been known as the House of Ideas, and that has helped define the publisher. Marvel took the idea of the superhero and injected all-new ideas in it. It give readers the shared universe, put real world issues into the comics, and created characters that felt like the readers. Marvel definitely didn’t come up with every idea it used, but it was able to find a way to bring in ideas that made superheroes better. Over the years, Marvel has taken their characters in new directions, and the Illuminati was a great example of this. The Illuminati have become so important to Marvel that they’ve even made an appearance in the MCU. The Illuminati was another example of Marvel pushing the envelope of what a superhero could be, and became a huge part of the success of Marvel in the ’00s.

The Illuminati, on the surface, is a great idea. A secret society of superheroes working behind the scenes to save the world, doing things that they wouldn’t normally do, was a great evolution of what superheroes could be. The Illuminati, though, have also been controversial idea for a lot of fans. There are pros and cons to the idea of Illuminati, and looking into them will answer a very important question — was the Illuminati a good idea?

The Illuminati Is an Idea That Changed Marvel

The Illuminati was brought together by Iron Man after the Kree/Skrull War. Mr. Fantastic, Professor X, Doctor Strange, Black Bolt, and Namor joined the group, with Black Panther refusing (although he would later join). The Illuminati would meet and discuss the biggest problems with the superhero community, and would take steps to solve the problems that their teams and allies couldn’t. The Illuminati brought an edge to superheroes that made sense. The various leaders coming together like a superhero UN to deal with biggest problems is something that would certainly exist and it allowed the most powerful and intelligent heroes to use their resources and share information. It was a lot of fun to see the characters work together in this manner, and it developed of them as characters in the “new” Marvel Universe of the ’00s. Marvel was pushing things in a new direction at the time, some would call it a more realistic direction, and the Illuminati was a big part of that. There’s no way that a group like the Illuminati wouldn’t have existed in the Marvel Universe. It was also the first time that readers got to Iron Man, Mr. Fantastic, Professor X, Doctor Strange, Black Bolt, and Namor all together at once without having to deal with their subordinates as well. Seeing these characters play off each other was a lot of fun, and the six issue Illuminati miniseries is at its most entertaining when the Illuminati is talking to one another about their lives as superheroes.

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However, a lot of those pros of the Illuminati also led to some of the cons. For example, the Illuminati was the beginning of one of the more distressing tendencies of 21st century Marvel. Iron Man, Mr. Fantastic, and Professor X were once characters that fans loved and believed, but the Illuminati made them into pragmatic individuals that would do whatever it took to the save the day, including breaking the rules of superheroing. It changed the way readers looked at the Marvel Universe in a bad way, and would lead even further down this road during the Incursions, when the Illuminati began destroying alternate Earths in Hickman’s New Avengers (Vol. 3). The Illuminati became a symbol of everything wrong with superheroes, a group that was willing to destroy anything in order to save the day. Heroes had always been willing to sacrifice things for the greater good, but the Illuminati went much further than that. They were willing to secretly break everything the superhero community stood for in order to save the day, which made for interesting stories, but eventually became cliche. That’s another big problem with the Illuminati as a concept — it took the idea of breaking the rules for the greater good and made it commonplace. Instead of agonizing over doing evil in order to do good, the Illuminati made such decisions constantly, taking away what made these kinds of stories special.

The Illuminati Was a Good Idea That Was Taken too Far

The Illuminati has been looked at as a positive and negative thing over the years, and both of these arguments have merit. However, looking at what the Illuminati did to the concepts of superheroes, it’s plain to see that the Illuminati was a good idea that was taken too far, and was used to ruin several characters. There’s no way that a group of superheroes wouldn’t come together to work behind the scenes, solving the problems that traditional superheroing couldn’t. That said, the only problem with the idea of the Illuminati was how far aspects of it were taken.

The Illuminati stopped being a group of superheroes rather quickly, and that hurt them. It would have been fine to see them secretly meeting and setting the directions of their team, and then sometimes having to enter the field to commit atrocious acts to save the world. However, the extent to which they were used as this pragmatic secret society doing the worst things imaginable to save the day became a huge problem. The Illuminati was a good thing, but it would have been better if it was used more sparingly.

What did you think of the Illuminati? Sound off in the comments below.