The summer crossover season is well and truly upon us, as House of M #2 finally gets the plot underway.  Or rather, it doesn't really.  But I'll come back to that in a second.

The most striking thing about House of M and, for that matter, its DC counterpart Infinite Crisis is that both events are aimed unequivocally at the hardcore fanbase in the direct market.  It's hard to imagine who else could conceivably care about either story, and both storylines are being written accordingly.  Even as a longtime comics reader, my knowledge of DC continuity is relatively sketchy and I genuinely can't follow large chunks of their summer event - which is why I've given up on the whole thing already, and won't be going near it again.

House of M #2 is similarly targetted at long-term Marvel fans.  When you get down to it, very very little actually happens in this issue.  It's an exercise in dotting around the revised universe and showing us what everyone is up to in this version of the world.  But in most cases, nothing particularly dramatic is going on.  The point is simply to establish what everyone is up to, in general terms.  The interest is supposed to come from comparing these versions of the characters to the ones we know and working out that, basically, everyone from the previous issue has pretty much got what they would have wished for. 

Steve Rogers is a retired geriatric (presumably because the whole thing with Bucky in 1945 never happened).  Mutants rule the world in a seemingly benign dictatorship, which comes as standard for Magneto.  Wonder Man's an actor.  Wasp is a fashion designer.  Emma Frost is working with kids.  And so on.  It's a world where it kind of sucks to be a normal human because you're at the bottom of the class heap, but it's not that bad, and besides, all of our protagonists are superhuman, so they're doing just fine, thanks.

But to get the point of any of this, readers would have to have at least a working familiarity with all of these characters in advance, because the story itself contains no details at all of what they were like in the mainstream universe.  And without that knowledge to draw comparisons with, you're left with a very bitty issue where sod all happens.  (One scene, in particular, is borderline incomprehensible unless you're reasonably familiar with the plot of the Sentry miniseries.)

This direction is a little surprising because for years now, both Marvel and DC have been trying to chase the wider market.  This is the exact opposite.  The interesting question is why both publishers are choosing to go in this direction.  The cynical view is that both companies are chronically incapable of taking a long-term view and have decided to chase the quick buck again.  A slightly more generous view would be that the last few years saw Marvel and DC trying to reach both audiences at once and, generally, falling between two stools.  Perhaps they've given up on that idea.

Anyhow, for those of us who actually know enough about the characters to understand the book, it's not bad at all.  Nothing much really happens, but simply setting up the universe has enough material for that not to be a problem.  It's got very nice art, and it makes a pleasant change to have an alternate reality ruled by the villains which seems like a more or less passable place to live.

Perfectly good for what it is, although a bit more plot would have been welcome.  But in many ways, more interesting for what it says about Marvel.

Rating: B+

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