I'm a day late and still very pressed for time, so we'll take it very quickly this week.

Generation M is a five-issue miniseries following up on some of the characters who lost their powers as a result of M-Day.  Or more accurately, it's a miniseries which seems to exist because none of the actual ongoing titles with Decimation crossovers wanted to deal with the fallout of M-Day - the X-Men books are panicking about Sentinels, New Excalibur is off in a little world of its own, and Wolverine is more worried about Logan getting his memories back.

So, despite the fact that it's a seismic cultural event with global effects, and really ought to be a central story theme, the real follow-up on M-Day instead ends up in Generation M.  If nothing else, this at least qualifies it as one of the more plot-significant miniseries of the last few years, since it's dealing with a major storyline that everyone else is quietly sidestepping in favour of focussing on their title characters.

Based on the covers, a lot of people were (perhaps understandably) expecting a series of profiles of the characters on the cover.  Well, that's not what this is.  Chamber may be on the cover, but he's only actually in three pages of the issue.  And that's a non-speaking part.  Then again, it looks like all Chamber's parts are going to be non-speaking from now on.

For the first time, this issue gives us a coherent explanation of the effects of M-Day (and makes me wonder why on earth this information wasn't set out clearly in the Decimation one-shot).  Some mutants lose their powers and become normal humans.  Others are deeply unfortunate, and lose their powers while keeping their weird appearance.  Poor Chamber, having blasted his face off some years ago, does not turn into a handsome young man.  He turns into a guy with an enormous hole in his chest, and no jaw.  The X-Men duly stabilise him - which strains credibility in itself, if he's now supposed to be basically human - and dump him at a hospital where, for some nebulously unexplained reason, he will apparently be safer than he would be at the mansion.

But it's not Chamber's story - which means his fans will find this a doubly annoying issue, come to think of it.  Instead, it's about Sally Floyd, a journalist covering the aftermath of M-Day, who achieves massive success with her articles about de-powered mutants.  She's our point of view character for this series, and the actual protagonist.

Unfortunately, she comes across as a bit off the peg.  Not only is she a journalist character used to justify a largely expository plot, but she combines feisty righteousness with personal tragedy.  We've been here many times before, and she really does feel like a stock character - created because the series needs a structural device to fulfil its remit, and endowed with some default "troubled heroine" settings.  The strings are visible.

Art comes from Ramon Bachs and John Lucas, who take the low-key, relatively realistic approach that something like this requires.  They can pull off the giant dragons when need be, but for the most part this is a series about the general public, and it doesn't need to be brightly coloured spandex.  It's a story about the characters who got kicked out of that world on M-Day, and if the X-Men look a bit out of place in their cameo, well, they probably should.  It's strong art, and right for the material.

This is a story that needs to be done if Decimation is going to come off, and it certainly has plenty of strong moments along those lines. Chamber's fate, while horrible, does the necessary job of selling the importance of the event - and let's face it, reasonably well known characters who have had two titles cancelled out from under them were always going to be in the firing line for this story.  Sally is a bit clunky as a protagonist, but perhaps that will be less of a problem in future issues where the guest ex-mutants can actually participate in the plot.

Rating: B

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