With the broadcast debut of Marvel's Inhumans, it's the perfect time to reexamine the comic-book history of the ABC dramas stars, the Royal Family.

The origins of the Inhumans date back to the very earliest days of Homo Sapiens living on Earth. The alien Kree had established an outpost near Earth more than a million years ago for their war with the shape-shifting Skrulls. When the Kree saw the rise of Homo Sapiens on Earth, they recognized their potential for genetic experimentation. That led to the creation of the Inhumans. Over time, the Inhumans decided to isolate themselves, but early on, they lived alongside other Homo Sapiens (that would cause a bit of an issue a few millennia later). So fast forward down the line, and that's when we first meet the current Inhumans Royal Family.

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Of course, when you're introduced to members of a Royal Family, there are different customs. The one that the Inhumans used is to have one of the members have amnesia and get tricked into becoming a supervillain. Yes, oddly enough, the first time that we met an Inhuman was when Medusa showed up in a cave in 1965's Fantastic Four #36 (by Stan Lee, Jack Kirby and Chic Stone).

They asked her to join their supervillain team, and she was basically, like, yeah, sure, whatever...

The odds are pretty decent that Medusa wasn't created to be part of the Inhumans, but rather was then incorporated into the group when Kirby came up with them. Interestingly enough, the Inhumans initially were intended to have their own comic book, which Kirby was going to write and draw. Marvel decided against it at the last moment, however, and so instead, they began showing up in 1965's Fantastic Four #44 (by Jack Kirby, Stan Lee and Joe Sinnott), where Gorgon arrived to bring Medusa home.

The Fantastic Four aren't thrilled with just letting him take her, so they end up getting into a confrontation with Gorgon, and then Johnny Storm meets a beautiful young woman, Crystal, as well as the rest of her family, including Karnak and Triton (and the teleporting and adorable Lockjaw). Note the very-much-of-its-time reference by Johnny to The Munsters, in describing Crystal's Royal Family...

Eventually, we get the basic gist of everything. Black Bolt was deposed as king of the Inhumans by his brother Maximus after Black Bolt's powers developed to the point where he couldn't speak. So Black Bolt went into exile. However, when Maximus wanted to consolidate power by marrying his cousin Medusa (whom Black Bolt intended to wed), it was enough to spur Black Bolt to get his act together and return to the Inhumans' home to take back the crown. If Maximus had just left Medusa alone, Black Bolt might have never returned. Instead, Maximus' reign was a short one...

Maximus, however, did succeed in cutting off the Great Refuge, a hidden valley in the Himalayas that was then the site of Atillan, from the rest of the world.

The next year or so, the Inhumans were all about trying to get back into contact with human society, especially because Crystal and Johnny were rocking their "Romeo and Juliet" vibe pretty heavily. Eventually, Black Bolt cut loose with his powers and freed the Inhumans.

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Near the end of Kirby's tenure at Marvel, he pitched a new Inhumans series in which he planned to introduce new characters, for which he would receive a portion of profits from their use. However, Marvel wouldn't change the terms of his contract, so instead, Kirby launched the Inhumans feature in Amazing Adventures and then left Marvel after the second issue.

Kirby opened the series with the Inhumans being tricked into going up against the Fantastic Four, but when Roy Thomas, Neal Adams and Tom Palmer took over the title, it quickly became about Maximus once again assuming control of the Inhumans -- this time through the use of his newly rediscovered mental powers.

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The Avengers helped put Black Bolt back in charge while they were in the middle of the Kree-Skrull War.

Another notable occurrence took place in 1973's Fantastic Four #132 (by Roy Thomas, John Buscema and Joe Sinnott), where Thomas explained away the awkward little facet of Inhuman society that they basically had slaves called Alpha Primitives working for them. The Alphas were freed in this issue, because, well, come on, that was just gross.

Crystal ended up marrying Quicksilver soon afterward.

The Inhumans then received their own series in 1975, with Doug Moench and a young George Perez as the creative team for most of the run. Here, the Kree showed up and worked with Maximus to rule the Inhumans. Eventually, though, Black Bolt and the Royal Family took control of their people once more.

The next major event in the life of the Inhumans was when Black Bolt transported the entire Inhuman home on Attilan to the moon in 1982's Fantastic Four #240.

Then, in Fantastic Four Annual #18 (by John Byrne, Mark Gruenwald, Mark Bright and Mike Gustovich), Black Bolt and Medusa were finally married. (It's shocking they took so long; Marvel had been treating them as if they were married for many years before this issue.)

The next major event of the 1980s for the Inhumans was a graphic novel written by Ann Nocenti in which Medusa and Black Bolt were actually exiled when they decided to have a child even after the Inhuman council determined that Black Bolt's genes were just too worrisome for him to reproduce.

Eventually, though, by the mid-1990s, the Inhumans were back to their normal status quo, although with Crystal having left her family to join the Avengers (she took along her daughter and her Inhuman nanny). But that status quo was about to be thrown out of whack.

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In the classic 1998-1999 maxiseries Inhumans, by Paul Jenkins and Jae Lee, everything is thrown up in the air. Attilan returned to Earth, and Maximus used the fact that the world now knew the Inhumans exist as a reason for why they would suddenly distrust this giant city filled with superhumans. Meanwhile, the whole Inhumans caste system is thrown into disorder as a genetically "superior" Inhuman underwent Terrigenesis (the process in which Inhumans are exposed to their famed Terrigen Mists and mutated into new beings) and became an Alpha Primitive.

Inhuman society almost collapsed over that revelation, and Black Bolt's refusal to respond to the threats of the United Nations (Maximus sure did know how to turn a crowd against someone). In the end, though, both issues settled themselves ... for now.

A year later, things were thrown out of whack again, when Ronan the Accuser showed up to bring the Inhumans back to the Kree Empire, where they were intended to be used as the weapons for the Kree as they had originally been designed.

Naturally, Black Bolt resisted and he ended up winning the Inhumans' freedom by defeating Ronan in battle. The problem was that Black Bolt didn't realize how many of his people sort of liked the idea of being tied to the Kree and having a purpose. It was an uneasy situation when he returned the Inhumans to Attilan (which they moved back to the moon). The Royal Family was exiled once more. They, of course, then came back soon after.

Next, Quicksilver caused some trouble when he stole the Terrigen Crystals to regain his powers after his sister, the Scarlet Witch, had temporarily stripped the powers from most of the mutants on Earth. When Quicksilver was captured, but the United States wouldn't give the Terrigen Crystals back? That led to a brief war between the Inhumans and the United States...

The end result was a rise to power again for Maximus...

However, it was then revealed that this Black Bolt was actually a Skrull and so the Inhumans fought the Skrulls to return their true king to them...

Now that he was back in charge, Black Bolt made a dramatic decision. Before, the Kree had tried to take control of the Inhumans, but if the Inhumans were designed to be the perfect weapons of the Kree, why then, shouldn't the Inhumans just take control of the Kree? So Black Bolt turned Attilan into a giant space ship and headed to Hala, the homeworld of the Kree, and promptly took over. They also worked out a political marriage where Ronan and Crystal would marry, to signify a new era between the two eras of the Kree Empire. The problem with the timing of this particular decision is that it happened right when the Kree Empire was about to be pulled into a conflict with the Shi'ar Empire, now ruled by the insane Emperor Vulcan (the brother of Cyclops and Havok). In the end, Black Bolt sacrificed himself to kill Vulcan to end the conflict and that left discord among the remaining Inhumans as to who, exactly, should be their leader. Medusa? Ronan? Maximus, perhaps (Maximus answers "Maximus should rule!" to pretty much any situation)

This is the Inhumans, however, so every time that it seems like their status quo had dramatically changed, they eventually go back to their old ways.

And sure enough, Black Bolt turned out to be alive and the Inhumans decided to move back to having Attilan be on Earth, but now it was a floating city in the skies about Earth.

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The next big change in the world of the Inhumans occurred when Thanos showed up on Earth to conquer the planet while the main Avengers were off in space fighting a great alien threat (working with Ronan and the Shi'ar Empire to do so) called the Builders.

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Thanos was looking specifically for his last son that Thanos had not been able to kill, a half-Inhuman. Thanos wanted Black Bolt to kill all Inhumans between a certain age for him and he also wanted Black Bolt to hand over the Terrigen Crystals to him. Black Bolt had other plans (Black Bolt tends not to involve the rest of the Royal Family in his major plans. It is kind of rude).

So in Infinity #3, Maximus first evacuates every Inhuman from Attilan...

And then Black Bolt destroys the city and the Terrigen Crystals, to keep them out of Thanos' hands!

What Black Bolt possibly did not factor into this decision is that such an explosion would turn the Terrigen Crystals into a giant Terrigen Mist. Said Mist would now float over the entirety of the globe. As we mentioned earlier, before the Inhumans sealed themselves off millennia ago, they had interbred with other Homo Sapiens. Now, thousands of years later, the descendants of those people were just living their lives around the world when suddenly they were contacted with the Terrigen Mists and were transformed into Inhumans...

Medusa had to pick up the pieces (literally in the case of putting Attilan back together) and become the new head of the Inhumans, who were now overflowing with new members (dubbed NuHumans) in an event called "Inhumanity"...

With their new, increased status position on Earth, the Inhumans soon had two ongoing titles, Uncanny Inhumans (starring Medusa and her main team of Inhumans) and All-New Inhumans (starring Crystal traveling the world, meeting NuHumans and letting people know that the Inhumans mean no one any harm).

Another problem crept up, though. You see, the Terrigen Mists, while fine for Inhumans, proved fatal for anyone who was a mutant. This, then, led to a confrontation between the Inhumans and the X-Men over the Terrigen Mists. It was the focal point of the Inhumans' heritage, but it was killing the X-Men!

In the end, Medusa shocked everyone by siding with the X-Men and getting rid of the Terrigen Mists. Now, the Inhuman Royal Family have decided to leave Earth on a journey to the stars to secure the future of their race...

There are clearly lots of interesting storylines over the years that the Inhumans TV series could easily adapt if they make it past this first season.