It's strange how things work.  House of M, which was presented as a crossover, was really just a core miniseries which a whole load of unrelated stories clustering around the edge.  "Decimation", on the other hand, has been presented as more of a marketing bracket.  But, thus far, it reads rather more like a crossover.

In some respects, this is a good thing.  If you're going to do a story where the concept is "most mutants lose their powers overnight", then the fallout has to be consistent across the X-books.  Inevitably, that's going to mean a certain degree of overlap.  In itself, that isn't a problem, so long as it's done right.  It doesn't have to mean storylines bouncing about randomly from comic to comic, as it did back in the nineties.  But it should mean that the books are all on the same page and all seem to be taking place against a common backdrop

This is something the X-books - and for that matter, Marvel generally - have been rather bad at for the last five years or so.  Which is a shame, because it's not simply a question of continuity as an end in itself.  The Marvel Universe is a fantasy universe, and an extraordinarily complex one at that, because it has to accommodate so many diverse concepts.  For that sort of universe, it becomes particularly important to keep the details straight.  Noticeable discrepancies, even if they're trivial, nibble away at the credibility of the universe because they undermine our suspension of disbelief.  Marvel don't really seem to grasp this point, which is presumably why the Nick Fury continuity fiasco has gone uncorrected and unaddressed for months.

Against that background, the snappily-titled Decimation: House of M - The Day After one-shot is an unusual comic.  Although it's presented as an epilogue to House of M, it's really more of a prologue to the various Decimation stories, doing its best to ensure that everyone starts off from a common plan. 

Perhaps the most encouraging thing about this comic is that it suggests there actually is a common plan, which would be a nice change.  The Decimation concept, as intended, shakes up all the X-books by giving a good hard kick to the underlying mutant concept.  If nothing else, it gives the X-books direction, which has been noticeably lacking ever since the Grant Morrison era.

Chris Claremont gets the task of writing the issue, together with the perfectly adequate Randy Green and Aaron Lopresti as pencillers.  By the nature of the beast, it's not a story as such, so much as a collection of various characters reacting, and assorted new storylines being given a nudge in the right direction.  We check in on Mutant Town, which will presumably get more thorough coverage in Mutopia X #5.  New Excalibur and X-Factor are obligingly trailed.  Everyone reacts to the big event with appropriate hand-wringing.  And the new government agency, ONE, is unveiled in what really amounts to a teaser for their upcoming stories in Uncanny and X-Men.

Despite this, it certainly feels eventful - more so than House of M itself ever did.  Perhaps in part that's because the book can always chuck in another character who hasn't been mentioned yet, and keep up the pace by telling us what their status is.  But the scenes with the Blob and Jubilee reacting to their power loss are very nicely written, and the whole book hits the appropriate tone of blind panic to convince us that we're reading about a genuinely significant event.

The biggest stumbling block with this concept is the way in which the surviving mutants have been distributed.  We're asked to accept that the overwhelming majority of mutants have lost their powers, but for the leading characters, precisely the opposite is the case.  A few sacrificial lambs have been selected to lose their powers, but aside from Iceman, the X-Men themselves escape unscathed.  For storytelling reasons which are to some extent unavoidable, Wanda seems to have predominantly wiped out faceless nobodies.  The Decimation one-shot largely skates past this, and gets away with it, but at some point this is surely going to have to be addressed properly.  Even if the X-Men are just lucky, you'd have thought their remarkable luck might attract a bit of cynicism.

On the whole, an issue that succeeds in its task - namely, laying out the new status quo, selling the importance of the changes, and kicking off new storylines.  The remit effectively prevents it from telling a proper story in its own right, but that isn't really the point.  It's here to lay out an agenda and, yes, it does convince me that these could be stories I want to read. 

Rating: A-

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