Rueben's Ramblings

Comic books are an easy place these days to get stories from – part of the appeal of a comic book is that there is a fanbase already out there – but depending on how a show is executed, one can soar while another fails.

It’s especially difficult with Marvel titles – and this season there are multiple shows based around Marvel titles that have had different success levels.

(We’ll leave aside Marvel’s Runaways, which will air on Hulu, because it won’t debut until November 21.)

So far in this season, Fox’s The Gifted – a show that features some well known and new mutants struggling in the US – has been well received by fans and critics. The show plays with the right amount of fun (in the pilot, one character has the 90s animated theme as his ringtone) while still telling a compelling and complicated story.

Where The Gifted uses some smaller X-Men (Lorna Dane is the best known mutant to comics fans in the show), the show makes the world seem real and dangerous where mutants are hunted for real reasons. Even if you don’t know the comics, the show establishes clear ways to see into that world and helps to keep you there each week as a small group of mutants try to escape government prisons (or worse).

While The Gifted has been a hit, ABC’s Marvel’s Inhumans (using a term from Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.) has been less successful. The show was panned by many critics, and has made it difficult to find a good way for fans to get into the show.

For a show that focuses on people with extra powers (Inhumans) the villain of the story is a human who is out for power in a world where he has none. For Inhumans who live on the moon – away from injustice that the same Inhumans face on Earth in S.H.I.E.L.D. – there is still stratification based on the level of power each Inhuman has – but the whole premise seems forced. S.H.I.E.L.D. is already dealing with prejudice between humans and Inhumans, but this show is pushing it too far.

I’m all for shows that use other source material well, but comics can be tricky because so many people know so much before they have even watched the series. Perhaps if I were less of a comic fan (and even I know I’m new), I’d care less about the ways that Marvel’s Inhumans  frustrates me while The Gifted does not.