Inhumans #2

History

Inhumans Vol. 2 was one of four titles that launched Marvel Knights in the fall of 1998, an imprint born from a deal between a financially distressed Marvel Comics — then in Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings — and Joe Quesada and Jimmy Palmiotti's independent studio, Event Comics, who were contracted to package and edit the line. Quesada and Palmiotti selected Jenkins, a British writer still building his American profile, and Jae Lee, an artist who had previously worked at Marvel on Namor and then spent time at Image on creator-owned work, to helm the Inhumans title; as Palmiotti noted in a 1998 interview, Lee's visuals combined with Jenkins's character-driven scripts seemed a natural fit for a property that had never before received sustained, serious creative attention. The editorial philosophy Quesada and Palmiotti brought to all four Knights titles — step away from continuity-heavy storytelling, prioritize craft and character over event mechanics — gave Jenkins the room to write issue #2 as a self-contained character study with almost no superhero action at all, an approach that would have been commercially risky on the main Marvel line but felt fresh within the new imprint's mandate.

Trivia · 8 facts

• Story title: 'Genotypical' — released to retailers October 28, 1998; cover-dated December 1998.
• Written by Paul Jenkins, with art, inks, and cover by Jae Lee; colored by Avalon Studios / Dave Kemp; lettered by Richard Starkings and Comicraft.
• First appearances of young Inhuman characters Tonaja, Kalikya, Nahrees, Dinu, Neifi, and Dewoz (also rendered as 'Woz') — a new generation of Inhumans created specifically for the Jenkins–Lee run.
• The issue dramatizes Terrigenesis from the perspective of Inhuman youth for the first time with this level of narrative depth, showing the process as emotionally fraught rather than triumphant — including the tragic outcome of Woz's transformation into an Alpha Primitive.
• Kalikya's mutation produces only elongated hands with no discernible power, immediately marking her as an outcast even among her peers — an early Jenkins exploration of the series' central theme that Inhuman society is a caste system with no safety net for the 'wrong' result.
• Published under the Marvel Knights imprint, which was simultaneously debuting Daredevil, Punisher, and Black Panther — all four titles jointly edited by Quesada and Palmiotti out of their Event Comics arrangement with Marvel.
• The complete 12-issue Jenkins–Lee series, including this issue, was later adapted as a Marvel Knights Animation motion comic released on DVD by Shout! Factory on April 23, 2013.
• The full run, including issue #2, has been collected in trade paperback and hardcover editions under the title 'Inhumans by Paul Jenkins & Jae Lee,' making the story continuously accessible to new readers.

Full credits

Key issues in Inhumans

★

#5 1st appearance — Yelena Belova

Variants (1)