House of M

[Velorath]

If I see the line "It was the worst day in Avengers history" one more fucking time...  The worst day in Avengers history was the day the people at Marvel got together and decided to do all this Disassembled and House of M crap.

So anyway the first issue of the House of M mini came out this week.  If you've read the preview pages or the multitude of interviews Marvel has been throwing out there the past several months, you don't even really need to read this issue to know what's happened.  Professor X and Dr. Strange can't seem to do much to help Wanda and won't be able to hold back her powers much longer.  The New Avengers (and a few old ones) as well as the Astonishing X-men team have been called together to decide if they should kill Wanda or not.  Anyone who has been reading comics for any length of time of course knows that with a few exceptions, pretty much nobody on either team is going to vote to kill a friend of theirs.  So instead they decide to go to Genosha and ask Wanda if she wants them to kill her (because asking someone who has gone insane and can't control their reality altering powers if they want you to kill them is always a great idea).  Quicksilver, who was apparently in the room for just a split second to see the Avengers and X-men getting together, decides to jump to the conclusion that they've decided to murder Wanda, and runs to Genosha to warn Magneto and beg him to do something. 

Long story short, the X-men and Avengers go to Genosha, try to find Wanda, and apparently end up in an alternate reality.  Yes I know Bendis insists it isn't an alternate reality.  It's the actual Marvel reality it's just been altered, which common sense would dictate makes it an alternate reality but I guess Bendis is special and when he does a cheesy alternate reality story it's really something new and different.  I know it's not professional in an unbiased review to say this, but fuck that prententious asshole with a hardbound collection of the entire House of M story (including all the fucking mini's, one shots, special newspapers, and art books).  This story is just the self-indulgence of someone who has bought into his own hype.

I also know how much Haemish enjoys his company-wide event stories being released out of order so it should make him happy to know that we see Sentry in the background a few times as a New Avenger (even though he hasn't joined up yet in New Avengers which of course is also written by Bendis so no excuses there).  We also get a scene between Professor X and the Astonishing X-men which I can only assume will make sense after the next issue of Astonishing comes out.  Also included in this issue are the usual filler pages, with almost a full page of Genosha, and 3 wordless pages near the end of Spiderman watching a portal open (which as many have pointed out does look a lot like a mystical vagina) creating the not-alternate universe.  This is one of the few situations where I'd advocate downloading a comic if you really just have to read it.  I'd hate see Bendis or Marvel getting the idea that people actually pay money to read this stuff because it's good and not just because they're curious as to how bad the Marvel Universe is about to get screwed up this time.

[Ironwood]

OK.

You make that all sound horrible.

Especially the Vagina.

[HaemishM]

Just read it. Yes, it's that bad and much fucking worse.

I have a bone to pick with Bendis and Geoff Johns especially. Lots of bones, really, but specifically the use of wordless panels. Now, not every panel needs words. A lot of older comics were TOO wordy before the 90's, with too much reliance on omniscient narration. But now we've swung the other way, where 1/4 of a book is made up of panels that do nothing to advance the story, or even serve the story. But I'll be damned if they don't pad the entire story arc out to 6 issue chunks suitable for graphic novelization. Johns is bad about this, because in every book of his I've seen lately, no matter the artist, there are 2-4 pages that have the exact same design: large image at the top covering half the height of the page and spanning 2 pages, with 4-5 panels on the lower half. The spread panel really doesn't need to be there, but it sure helps pad out the issues.

I like long story arcs, but I want their length to be organic, NOT padded just for novelization. This feels that way.

It's also written as total and utter shit. Really, Bendis just doesn't have any business writing team books. He can't do it. More than 2-4 characters together at once and his dialogue just falls totally flat. Dr. Strange is a fucking cipher in this book, he's like the mystic tricorder, only consulted when they need to ask a magic question. The scheduling issue Velorath mentioned above with Sentry has been repeated at least twice now that I know of. Through Avengers #5, he STILL ISN'T A FUCKING MEMBER AND NEITHER IS WOLVERINE. Yet, both are pictured here and everyone knows them, even though the readers are confused. Sure, through marketing and metabook stuff, we know these two are members (no matter how fucking silly that is). But we haven't read it. It's just shitty, shitty scheduling and lazy writing.

Professor X and the X-Men are supposed to have left on bad terms? PIKA? Since when? From what I read during the shitty X-Reboot after Morrison left, Xavier just wanted to deal with the death of Magneto (oh, which wasn't really Magneto and NO ONE HAS EXPLAINED THAT OR CARED ABOUT IT IN OVER A FUCKING YEAR). And why the fuck does no one in the room, Avengers or X-Men included, bat a fucking eyelash when told that MAGNETO IS FUCKING ALIVE AND BEING HIDDEN AND AIDED BY XAVIER? WHAT THE FUCK? Just like in Disassembled, Magneto's death and attempted destruction of New York must never have happened, because no one even cares that he's still alive and unpunished. The Excalibur book, which is one of the worst at ignoring this inconsistency, has been total shit from the beginning, the equivalent of Bosom Mutant Buddies. But to take that big of a continuity fuck up into a supposed company wide, sales heavy crossover event is just inexcusable. I seriously do not know what the fuck Marvel is thinking, but it isn't writing a good story.

The art work is good, though it suffers from the same muddy coloring issues that New Avengers does.

[Johny Cee]

Heh....

Fucking Magneto.  When I read comics in the early 90's, this guy or Jean Grey was constantly alternating between dead/MIA/ally/enemy/coma state, or whatever.  Hell, for a while there was some young pseudo-Magneto clone kicking around I think....  His "deaths" could never be taken seriously,  since they usually follow close on the heals of a mysterious resurrection.

That, and the problem that the whole "Mutant as repressed minority" allegory just can't work when it takes place in the same world as regular superheros.  I could never figure out why people went apeshit about the Hulk and the X-men/mutants,  but the Avengers amazingly popular public figures.

[Velorath]

OK.

You make that all sound horrible.

Especially the Vagina.

I've read plenty of horrible stories before, many of which are even worse than this.  What makes this so much more worthy of derision than those other stories though is that Marvel has locked themselves into this story and the ramifications of it until at least 2007 according to their interviews.  Marvel's hype machine has gotten so out of hand in recent years that they were in a position where they felt they had to try to top DC's current Crisis stuff by just pulling some shit out of their ass (read the interviews and you'll see that none of this was really planned until sometime after Disassembled had finished).  The story has become less important than the hype.  Bendis and Quesada spent so much time blowing each other in press releases (in the guise of interviews) and telling us how great the story was going to be that the actual writing became secondary.  The sad thing is that much like New Avengers, this will probably outsell Runaways, G.L.A., the current volume of Captain America, and probably Gravity, combined.

Ultimately, the lesson here is that it's always Raging Douchebag Week somewhere in the world and that's the real reason we can't have nice things.

[Ironwood]

I like Ultimate Fantastic Four.

[HaemishM]

Just read issue 2. Yep, this truly is an alternate reality world, with mutants on top and humans, or sapiens, as they are referred to being considered almost second class citizens. The Wasp is Storm's fashion designer, Kitty Pryde is a school teacher of mutants, Logan is a nutjob shacked up with Mystique, Dr. Strange is a shrink to the Sentry (I assume since the man he's talking to is none of the other heroes I know), etc.

Each character is given about 2 pages, and the "plot" is advanced... nil, really. You could summarize this issue with "the characters end up in an alternate world where mutants are dominant and humans are subservient" and you'd have just about all of this issue down.

Sigh.

[Velorath]

Not much I can say about this issue since it really didn't go anywhere.  This is the kind of "story" the should have given away with an issue of Wizard to promote House of M.  This isn't the kind of thing you put out as the second part of what's supposed to be a major storyline.  This is sloppy writing.  All of this could have been shown while actually advancing the plot.  We sure as fuck didn't need a full wordless page of Colossus plowing a field or a near worldless page of old Cap.  3 pages of Ms. Marvel stopping a criminal Gambit is neither exciting nor important to any sort of plot.

Lazy storytelling and insulting that Marvel expects people to buy phoned-in filler crap like this just because they hyped it up.

[Jain Zar]

This is why I stick to the Ultimate Marvel line and try to avoid mainstream continuity as much as possible.
Its much more entertaining.  Then again, now that Bendis is full of himself Ultimate Spider Man is probably gonna start sucking.  Gwen Stacy's death in it was probably the harbinger.  Sigh.

[Ironwood]

Hey, cheer up.  You get Moon Knight.

ffs....

[Velorath]

Just read issue 3.  Still crap.  Until something important actually happens I'll be skipping further commentary here.

[Raguel]

But the last page of issue 3 was supposed to break the internet. 

[Velorath]

But the last page of issue 3 was supposed to break the internet. 

Bringing back a character the same writer killed in his last major event story, in an alternate reality where other dead people like Gwen Stacy and Uncle Ben have already been shown to be alive, doesn't crack the Internet or even jostle it.

[HaemishM]

I have only 3 words for House of M #3.

Fucking cock monkey.

[Velorath]

I have only 3 words for House of M #3.

Fucking cock monkey.

I liked that it didn't even deserve the big red letters.

[Velorath]

Top 300 for June 2005

No surprise that the first two issues of House of M and Issue 6 of New Avengers top the charts.  Of course the fact that HoM and New Avengers are both massively hyped and have variant covers every issue couldn't possibly inflate the numbers.

[schild]

To correlate, it probably cost more to market it. Madden, for example, may very well sell more copies (since it's on all platforms) than Halo 2 in America. Even without competition they're spending millions and billions of dollars advertising it. Me no Understando.

[Velorath]

Comics are easier to market (at least in regards to marketing to the fanboys on the Internet).  Marvel has been hyping HoM for months prior to its release in the guise of interviews on  Newsarama and the like (which have no problem printing shit like that because really, how much actual fucking news can you post about comics.  Quesada has a weekly column on Newsarama), and on panels at conventions.  They certainly don't spend money placing ads or anything (they don't even tie a comic book ad to their movies).

[Velorath]

Yawn-inducing look at some of Marvel's post-HoM stuff.

House of M: The Day After (still a working title): “This will be the one that I think everyone will want to pick up. It’s a double-sized one-shot that Chris Claremont is writing, with Randy Green illustrating, but we’ve had help from everyone else involved in the other books that are surrounding this. This will pick up immediately after the events of House of M #8, and will be centered around, but not limited to the Xavier Institute. We’ll see more mutants in this issue than you’ll know what to do with, and there will also be a spotlight, in a way, on each of the new projects that come out of House of M: X-Factor, X-Men: Deadly Genesis, Excalibur as well as the new direction in New X-Men with Craig Kyle, Chris Yost and Mark Brooks taking over. It will also highlight the other X-books as well.

Claremont is almost like the George Lucas of comics.  He hasn't written anything good in a long, long time, and the stuff he writes now is so shitty it makes you wonder why you ever even liked his old stuff.  He should have just given up writing comics and accepting his place in comic history rather than tainting his work churning out crap like X-treme X-men, X-men:  The End, and the recent Excalibur series.

Generation M: “This is a five-issue limited series directly spinning out of House of M. Paul Jenkins is writing it, and we’re nailing down the artist right now. This project examines the biggest single repercussion of House of M the most. There is one big phenomenon that happens at the end of the story, and this will deal specifically with that, and with all of the characters that are directly affected by it. We’ll see a log of guest stars and familiar mutants in this series, and in true Paul Jenkins fashion, it’s a story that gets into the meat of the characters – their inner workings, and examines them from the inside out.”

According to Quesada, Generation M will be a tour of the mutant world post-HoM, to which writer Paul Jenkins, added, “It’s a reexamination of many familiar Marvel mutant characters.”

Jenkins said in a sense it’s a series of vignettes that allows him to take a look at individual characters that have gone through extraordinary circumstances and see where they are in their lives.

Five issues for what sounds like it will amount to seeing the various new status quos of characters I probably don't give a damn about.

Wolverine: Origins and Beginnings: For this, we move over to Wolverine editor Axel Alsono. “The creative team is Daniel Way, whose writing the Wolverine: House of M story that comes out in September, and the artist is Mark Texeira, with Javier Saltares doing breakdowns.

For those of you who were wondering when Marvel was going to give the tragically underused Wolverine some more exposure.

Son of M Limited Series

I guess that would sell more than calling it a Quicksilver mini.

Looking forward to the new X-Factor series (Madrox was surprisingly good), and Brubaker's X-men:  Deadly Genesis mini (mostly because of Brubaker).  Other than that, all this HoM aftermath stuff seems rather pointless.

[Llava]

Madrox was surprisingly good

Multiple Man is alive again?

I still have the comic where he died to the Legacy Virus.

If everyone who died from the Legacy Virus keeps coming back to life, they might as well start calling it the Legacy Surprise Vacation.

[Velorath]

Multiple Man is alive again?

I still have the comic where he died to the Legacy Virus.

If everyone who died from the Legacy Virus keeps coming back to life, they might as well start calling it the Legacy Surprise Vacation.

I think it ended up being one of his dupes that died of the virus or something.

[stray]

It's always the dupes. Damn the dupes. Even if a hero isn't capable of duping like Multiple Man, he's still going to have dupes....Somehow.

[Velorath]

It's always the dupes. Damn the dupes. Even if a hero isn't capable of duping like Multiple Man, he's still going to have dupes....Somehow.

Give the tpb of Madrox a try.  Here's aa full issue preview of the first issue.  Some good use of dupes there.

[Llava]

No!  It wasn't the dupes!!

Goddamnit!

All of his dupes were fucked up.  Madrox himself was the sick one, but he had two dupes who were becoming increasingly independent because he was losing control of them (they were arguing through the whole issue) and when it got really bad, his dupes didn't have faces or minds.  It wasn't the friggin dupes!

(Note that I'm sure that's how they explained it away, I'm not doubting you, but they put very little effort into that explanation.)

[Velorath]

No!  It wasn't the dupes!!

Goddamnit!

All of his dupes were fucked up.  Madrox himself was the sick one, but he had two dupes who were becoming increasingly independent because he was losing control of them (they were arguing through the whole issue) and when it got really bad, his dupes didn't have faces or minds.  It wasn't the friggin dupes!

(Note that I'm sure that's how they explained it away, I'm not doubting you, but they put very little effort into that explanation.)

I know all that.  I have those issues somewhere (probably came in one of those 50 packs I used to get from Price Club/Costco because I never went out of my way to buy X-books).  I didn't see the issue where he came back, but I seem to remember reading it was a dupe somewhere.  I do remember an issue after he "dies" where a mysterious figure comes into the X-Factor HQ and sees a group picture and is shocked to see Multiple Man in it.

[Llava]

 

He's dead! I saw him die! He's a witch! Burn him!

[HaemishM]

Blearg. Claremont was ok on X-treme X-Men, but everything else after that has been total shit. The reboot has been at best silly. At worst, it is absolute shit. Excalibur was one of the worst books I've read ever. Let's just totally invalidate the death of a major character (Magneto), not even explain HOW the death was invalidated, nor explain who the supposed Magneto imposter who almost turned the world upside down was, then just go along playing bosom buddies like NOTHING HAPPENED. WHAT THE FUCK? So now we get more Claremont stamp on the entire Marvel Universe? YAY FOR US.

Please, get Claremont away from comics. He's just not good for them anymore. I got excited about the X-Men when I heard he was coming back, enough that I tried to read as much on what had happened with the Grant Morrison run and others before the reboot. After the reboot, my interest is nil.

And Wolverine needs to die in all forms. Worst comic character ever.

[stray]

And Wolverine needs to die in all forms. Worst comic character ever.

If Lobo couldn't kill him, nothing will.

[HaemishM]

Fuck... Lobo, right up there with Carnage as second worst comic character ever.

[stray]

Fuck... Lobo, right up there with Carnage as second worst comic character ever.

Lobo was originally created to be a mockery of all that shit. Specifically Wolverine. It's supposed to be stupid.

[EDIT] The only reason why I say that nothing will kill Wolverine is that someone tried to do it with an even more "extreme" and retarded character --- and it still didn't work.

[Velorath]

Fuck... Lobo, right up there with Carnage as second worst comic character ever.

Lobo was originally created to be a mockery of all that shit. Specifically Wolverine. It's supposed to be stupid.

[EDIT] The only reason why I say that nothing will kill Wolverine is that someone tried to do it with an even more "extreme" and retarded character --- and it still didn't work.

The thing about that kind of mockery is that it only works the first time.  You can't keep reusing the character.

[stray]

You can't keep reusing the character.

Heh..Probably so. But money does strange things to people.

Actually, I'm not even sure if the creators were the ones who kept cranking it out or not. Could have just been DC's fault.

[Johny Cee]

Hmmm....

You guys have the same conversation going on in three threads in two different forums.  It's like the comics crossovers of old...

[Llava]

Soon we'll be putting asterisks in our posts.*


*See "Thomas Haden Church to be Spiderman Villain, post 67! 'Nuff said!

[HaemishM]

Just read #5. Still not getting the vibe. In fact, the vibe I'm getting is DECIDEDLY BAD. It feels like Heroes Reborn all over again, with Layla (?), the little psychic/not quite pyshic chick taking the place of Franklin Richards as the gateway back to the real world or something. I also normally like Copiel's work, but here it just feels off. It's got the same muddy coloring that I think mars the Avengers books. Also, the big surprise at the end of it (I won't spoil it) should have been the first fucking clue to the people involved as to what had happened. It also invalidates the lesson of Age of Apocalypse or something.

The whole "alternate reality" thing is just going to make this whole thing feel like Deux Ex Machina in the worst possible way.