Marvel Announces 'Death of the Inhumans'

It looks like the story is ending for Marvel's Inhumans.

Marvel Comics today announced Death of the Inhumans, a new project from writer Donny Cates (Thanos, Doctor Strange) and artist Ariel Olivetti.

No details about the series were announced other than that it debuts in July. Marvel also unveiled the first cover for the series, by artist Kaare Andrews. Take a look below.

While we can't say for certain what this means for the future of the Inhumans in the Marvel Universe, Death of the Inhumans certainly sounds like a surprising change in direction for the Marvel franchise.

For years, it seemed like Marvel was determined to turn the Inhumans into its next premiere franchise. Beginning with the end of Marvel's Infinity event, the publisher trusted writer Charles Soule with expanding the Inhumans mythology and created several new Inhumans characters that could populate the Marvel Universe.

Some fans saw the Inhumans expanding role in the Marvel Universe as crowding out the mutants of the X-Men franchise, either deliberately or otherwise. Marvel Comics picked up on this sentiment and wrote it into the story of the Marvel Universe in the aftermath of the Secret Wars event, introducing the idea that the Terrigen Mist trapped in Earth's atmosphere was becoming deadly to mutants and would eventually make the planet uninhabitable for homo superior.

This led to a trilogy of event that pit the Inhumans directly against the X-Men. The Civil War II: X-Men tie-in miniseries saw the two groups fighting against each other over the existence of an Inhuman who could supposedly predict the future. Death of X flashed back several months to show the start of the tension between these two groups. Inhumans vs. X-Men finished the saga off with a showdown that reset the status quo for both groups in the Marvel Universe.

The ResurrXion initiative followed, which saw the launch of seven new X-Men books and three new Inhumans titles, seemingly shifting the balance of editorial weight between the two groups. Since then, the Inhumans have gone through a series of changes. The destruction of the Terrigen Clouds means that no new Inhumans have been created. The Royal Family abdicated their authority and left the planet in search of a solution only to end up drawing the attention a powerful race of cosmic progenitors, making the future of the Inhumans more uncertain than ever.

More details on Death of the Inhumans will likely follow at the C2E2 convention in April.