Justin Zyduck at MightyGodKing comes to the conclusion that Marvel's output may or may not be any good but the real issue is it's just not for him anymore. I bounced back and forth on this quite a bit myself before i decided to stop following Marvel. Since "no good" or "just not for me" ends the same way in terms of my personal collecting, it was really a moot question. But Zyduck had me leaning towards the latter.

But then i read Paul O'Brien's review of (heh) Civil War II: X-Men, or, as he puts it (double heh) Event Crossover: Non-participating Series. (As an aside, i actually thought World War Hulk: X-Men was pretty good; a better introduction to the new young X-characters than i'd seen anywhere else.) And in that review he gets to a larger point about the fact that Marvel keeps trying to make the Inhumans "happen" even though it clearly isn't going to:

But we long since passed the point where it was transparently clear that the Inhumans weren't catching on and where the main question came to be how long Marvel would drag this out. The decision to build their summer crossover around the Inhumans - and then see it squashed flat by DC Rebirth - would be the last straw for some publishers. But then lead-in times mean that major directional changes for the Marvel Universe take an age to feed through, so we're stuck with the bastards for the foreseeable future whether we like them or not, and the X-Men are heading for an extended crossover whose main - perhaps exclusive - interest lies in whether it will be used to finally draw a line under the whole fiasco.

And it's like, oh yeah, that's why i got sick of Marvel. Certainly not the focus on diversity, which i applaud. A lot of the writing and art was bad, but hey, i'm working through 1993 on my project right now, and nothing's worse than that. The overreliance on perpetual line-wide crossovers? See again 1993. Combine those two things with modern decompression and it's more of a problem, granted. But my investment in the Marvel universe was so ingrained that i don't think that alone would have been enough. The breaking factor for me was the disregard for continuity, especially when it was obvious that the continuity changes were to reflect the cinematic universe rather than because someone had a great idea that just couldn't be told in current continuity.

I don't know why i'm beating this dead horse at this late date anyway, but Zyduck and O'Brien's posts converged in my head. And i admit to a perverse and rude satisfaction in seeing Marvel's attempts to promote the Inhumans failing. I don't know why. I'm not a huge X-Men fan and i never got as outraged about Marvel downplaying the X-Men as others did. Maybe it's the way the Inhumans took over the SHIELD TV show; made me never want to see an Inhuman again.

So sick of inhumans in my SHIELD tv show. I just want spy vs spy with a dabble of super powers thrown in.