SPOILER WARNING: The following article contains major spoilers for Death of The Inhumans #2 by Donny Cates, Ariel Olivetti, Jordie Bellaire and Clayton Cowles, on sale now.


It's safe to say Marvel’s experiment to make the Inhumans a top-tier franchise didn’t go the way the publisher intended. Thus, after a couple of attempts to get the characters to a level on par with the Avengers or the X-Men, it’s decided to instead very dramatically kill them all off.

Yep, Death of The Inhumans is as literal a title as you can get from a comic book. The first issue is indeed a bit of a bloodbath with the new Kree-engineered villain Vox cutting a path of death and destruction through the Terrigen-powered space gods.

RELATED: Death of the Inhumans Lives Up to Its Name with a Bloody Opening Act

If you’ve already read Death of The Inhumans #1, you’ll know that it isn’t messing around and along with so lower-tier deaths. The issue takes out a couple members of the Inhuman royal family, including possibly the most beloved character in the entire franchise. But if you’re feeling down about it, don’t worry too much; a closer look at the pages with Death of the Inhumans’ big demise suggests that perhaps that character isn’t as dead as we may be led to believe and instead, it’s more of a fake-out for shock value. That said, "a fake-out for shock value" comes with its own benefits and drawbacks, and even if the characters believed to be dead aren’t, fans may not be too pleased to have been misled in such a way.

Fake Out

While there are several on panel deaths of NuHumans such as Sterilon, Flagman and Naja, Death of The Inhumans also takes out several members of the royal family. Along with the death of Triton, who dies shortly after discovering a hidden bomb in the corpse of a Universe Inhuman queen, there’s a more personal touch to some of the “deaths” on hand in this issue.

If you take Death of the Inhumans #1 at face value, it seems that the new Kree-engineered character Vox is responsible for the deaths of Maximus The Mad and the Inhumans’ loyal dog Lockjaw. With the Inhuman royal family trapped at the edge of the galaxy, only Lockjaw can make the jump back the Inhumans’ new home on the moon New Arctilan, and though he attempts to save Black Bolt’s brother, the pair of them are seemingly obliterated by Vox’s sonic scream which seems to rival even that of The Midnight King, with Lockjaw attempting to jump in front of Maximus and save him from Vox’s attack.

However, pay closer to attention to the issue, because the clues indicate Maximus and Lockjaw aren’t dead at all. The first big clue is that Vox doesn’t just have Black Bolt’s powers, he has the powers of the entire Inhuman royal family. The second clue is the energy pattern surrounding Lockjaw when he teleports; compare it the energy pattern that envelopes Lockjaw and Maximus as they’re “obliterated,” and they look identical, aside from a change in color. It seems a lot more likely that Vox has Lockjaw’s powers among his collection of abilities and rather than shout them to death, he’s teleported them away for some unknown purpose.

Page 2: [valnet-url-page page=2 paginated=0 text='So%2C%20how%20is%20Lockjaw%20still%20alive%3F']



Who’s A Good Boy?

Introduced in Fantastic Four #45, along with the first appearance of the majority of the Inhuman royal family, Lockjaw served as Crystal’s pet dog who allowed her to travel between the hidden city of Attilan and modern society of Manhattan, which enabled her to continue her relationship with Johnny Storm. Lockjaw has been a faithful companion for the Inhumans since their introduction and is almost certainly the most popular member of the franchise, which is less an indictment of the Inhumans and more a testament to how much people really like dogs.

For a time, it was unclear if Lockjaw was an Inhuman dog with teleportation powers or an Inhuman citizen who transformed into a dog following exposure to Terrigenesis, but it was eventually revealed that the latter was a prank played on The Thing to see if he’d believe it. The recent Lockjaw miniseries by Daniel Kibblesmith and Carlos Villa dug into Lockjaw’s origin in more depth, taking the lovable dog on a multiversal mission with D-Man to find Lockjaw’s long lost siblings and defeat the Negative Zone’s evil ruler, Annihilus.

Leave The Dog Alone

Just because Lockjaw may not be dead doesn’t mean this is a cynical and all-too blatant attempt at emotional manipulation on Cates, Olivetti and Marvel’s behalf. It’s something Cates has already done in another title, having introduced a pet dog named Bats to be Doctor Strange’s sidekick only to kill him off for the pathos, which was followed by Bats’ return as a ghost dog not long after. It brings to mind Matt Fraction’s promise after he introduced Lucky aka Pizza Dog to the pages of Hawkeye, that no matter what happens in the book, the dog won’t die because introducing a cute animal only to kill it off one of cheapest attempts at pathos a creative work can muster.

RELATED: Death of the Inhumans Variant Debuts a Deadly New Character

There’s other factors to consider with Lockjaw’s death, and that’s his role in other Marvel titles; namely, Ms. Marvel. Lockjaw is a key supporting character for Kamala Khan, who has proven to be a breakout character for Marvel and killing off her pet dog in a completely separate comic which revels in a dour tone almost completely opposite to Ms. Marvel is hardly the way to hook new readers into the larger Marvel Universe.

While no-one is ever really safe in superhero comics, Lockjaw is probably as safe as a character that can be and if the publisher has killed him off, it has made a massive error in judgement. The upcoming issues of Death of The Inhumans will reveal the extent of Vox’s massacre and there’s likely to be more high-profile deaths to come; but for now it seems that there’s more going on with Lockjaw’s “death” and Vox’s plan beyond the indiscriminate death of every Inhuman.