But you don't care about any of these piddling little C-list books!  Not when House of M #1 is on the shelves!  Yes, at last the hype is over...

Actually, come to think of it, that's not right.  The hype is still going.  But the book is here, at least.

I'm a bit hesitant these days about Brian Bendis' ventures into big superhero event books.  He's a great writer, of course.  Capable of being a great superhero writer, over in Ultimate Spider-Man.  His Ultimate X-Men wasn't bad either.  But then, there's Avengers, which was self-consciously aiming for epic, and was absolutely unreadable.  New Avengers started out with similar problems, although it's been improving somewhat.  Even so, it leaves me a little nervous about whether he's really the man for the job when it comes to a book like this.

But this is better than I'd expected.  It's the set-up issue, of course, and it's going to be at least one more issue before we find out what this story is really going to be about.  But as set-up goes, it's pretty solid.  It's largely an issue of talking heads, but that plays to Bendis' strengths, so I'm not complaining.

The Scarlet Witch has been cooped up in Genosha for a while now, and Xavier and Dr Strange are running out of ideas.  Well, really, they've run out of ideas - Strange is wading through some books in the hope of hitting on something, and Xavier is just plain stumped.  And since a psychotic Wanda is insanely dangerous to everyone around her, that presents a problem.  So the X-Men and the Avengers are roped in for a meeting to discuss whether she should be quietly killed.  You can imagine how that goes down with Captain America.

Apparently unlike some readers, I actually don't have a problem with the idea that most of the heroes would be willing to consider this.  If she's dangerously uncontrollable and she's likely to tear the world apart without realising it, it's entirely easy to believe that pragmatists like Wolverine and Emma Frost are going to vote for the lethal injection.  As for Xavier, it's not like the guy's ever been a saint.

Where Bendis perhaps falls short is in establishing the severity of the threat.  It really depends on you having read "Chaos" rather than on anything shown in this issue.  For the moment, Wanda seems more concerned about re-enacting the family photo album.  It's also questionable whether the story does enough to properly rule out alternative ways of dealing with her.  Can't Reed Richards just shove her in suspended animation, or something like that?  You'd normally expect the situation to get a little more urgent before the heroes start considering drastic solutions like "Kill her."

But that's mechanics; I'm happy to run with the basic premise.  It's an issue of Bendis dialogue, light on his usual tics, and Olivier Coipel's artwork reads nicely enough.  And for all my cynicism, I'm genuinely interested to see where they're going with this.

Rating: A-

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