Marvel Knights Motion Comics to Continue With Inhumans
I had thought that the Marvel Knights Animation motion comic series from Shout! Factory might be wrapping up after the four-volume Joss Whedon Astonishing X-Men releases. I was wrong.
Shout! Factory has just announced that Inhumans, based on the (out of print) comic by Paul Jenkins and Jae Lee with the same cover, will be out on DVD on April 23. List price is $14.97, same as previous Marvel Knights Animation releases, and the bonus feature is “A Look Back at The Inhumans with Eisner Award-winning writer Paul Jenkins, Marvel Chief Creative Officer Joe Quesada, and Supervising Producer Kalia Cheng”. Total running time is just over two hours. Here’s the provided synopsis:
The Inhumans have always been one of Marvel’s most enduring oddities. A race of genetic outsiders, they live secluded in their island kingdom of Attilan, preferring not to mix with the outside world. Even stranger, their genetic mutations are self-endowed; each Inhuman, as a coming-of-age ritual, endures exposure to the Terrigen Mists, a strange substance that imparts unearthly powers — some extraordinary, some monstrous.
But now the kingdom of Attilan is under attack from without and within. Can the Royal Family, led by Black Bolt, repel the foreign invaders who blast at their outer defense, as well as the internal threat of Black Bolt’s insane brother, Maximus the Mad?
This popular series takes a classic Marvel cast of characters, and infuses it with a modern sensibility that includes international politics and an awareness of class systems.
As Kevin Melrose notes at Robot 6,
While a 15-year-old series — rather than, say, something from the Avengers or Iron Man stables — may seem an unusual choice to receive the motion-comic treatment, it’s probably worth noting that Marvel Studios is gearing up for Phase Three of its cinematic universe, one that will include some of the company’s more offbeat properties… An Inhumans movie was confirmed in October 2011 as part of the studio’s agenda, and the third phase that begins in 2015 seems as likely a home for the project as any.
Whether testing the waters or getting tie-in product out early, that’s part of the Disney way — sell the same characters in as many venues as possible.