What is Marvel's Illuminati?

By request, the time has come to explain Marvel’s Illuminati. I don’t know the group that well since they started well after I bowed out of current comics to relive the past but they do factor a lot into my other writings so I’ll take a shot.

The Illuminati is basically the smart club of the Marvel Universe. It’s a group of highly intelligent and powerful people who focus on major threats rather than just worry about saving civilians from danger. They’re kind of overlords who make tough decisions “for our own good.”

The Illuminati consists of Reed Richards, super-intelligent leader of the Fantastic Four; Iron Man, wealthy industrialist and founding Avenger; Black Bolt, king of the Inhumans; Doctor Strange, Sorcerer Supreme; Black Panther, king of Wakanda; Namor the Sub-Mariner, king of Atlantis; and the Beast, the scientist and X-Man who replaced Professor X in the group after his death.

What do these people all have in common? They are intelligent and powerful people who have sometimes come undone due to their hubris. That is why Captain America, one of the great leaders of the Marvel Universe, is conspicuous in his absence. Cap does not believe in lording over the Marvel Universe from the shadows as this group sometimes does. The Illuminati mid-wiped Captain America after he challenged them, which is a major ethical violation.

One of the Illuminati’s greatest hits is how they dealt with the Hulk. Finally fed up with his destruction, the group launched the Hulk into space, but the plan backfired. The Hulk ended up conquering the planet and coming back for vengeance against the Illuminati. Great work, everybody. More recently, there has apparently been a story that involved other Earths nearly colliding with ours. To save our planet, the Illuminati decided to blow up the alternate Earths. The moral implications to this are staggering. You could say they made a tough decision that nobody else was willing to make but it never should have come to that.

That’s my philosophical problem with the Illuminati: It never should have come to that. Blowing up a planet is just too dark for heroes. I don’t mind some darkness and moral ambiguity in the Marvel Universe as I certainly don’t need everything to be happy-go-lucky like some Superman story from the ‘50s. But in recent years, nobody seems very heroic. Rather than saving civilians from danger, they just fight with each other.

The Illuminati both illustrate and contradict the difference between Marvel and DC. As brilliantly illustrated in the Avengers/JLA miniseries, Superman visits the Marvel Universe and sees the despotism of Doctor Doom and the prejudice against mutants and rages that heroes like the Avengers do too little to fight evil. Captain America visits the DC universe, sees how people worship their heroes, and feels the Justice League of America parades around like gods and almost rule the planet as overlords. Both heroes exaggerate, and both heroic models have pros and cons, but the story was a fascinating look at the contrasts between the two universes. The Illuminati, however, stray too far into the DC “too much intervention” model, going far beyond anything in DC to become tyrannical. It’s something Captain America, a World War II veteran, would certainly recognize and warn against.