With House of M now well underway, the usual bizarre Marvel scheduling is in full effect.  This week's crossover books: House of M #3, Uncanny X-Men #462, Incredible Hulk #83, Fantastic Four: House of M #1 and Iron Man: House of M #1.  Next week's crossover books: Mutopia X #1 and... er, that's it.  You'd have thought that spreading the books out might be a more sensible way of doing it, wouldn't you?

Anyway, we're now three issues into the book, and I'm starting to get the sinking feeling that Marvel has rather misjudged things.  We're repeatedly told that this story is, in some way, hugely important and will have lasting effects.  It's good of Marvel to point this out, because god knows you'd never guess from the actual comic.

The problem here is that this is a set-up we've all seen a thousand times before.  The world is transformed.  The heroes must set it right.  We all know the standard ending: they succeed, everything is restored to normal, nothing matters.  Since Marvel insist that big changes are going to come, we can probably infer that they're not going down quite that route.  But that points to "everything is restored with a few changes."  That makes the process of restoration important - but still does nothing to suggest that the actual events of House of M are going to matter in the slightest.

For most of the tie-in books, oddly enough, that doesn't seem to be a problem.  They're not concerning themselves with the overall storyline.  Instead, they're just trying to do an alternate-universe story about their characters in a different context.  But the House of M miniseries bears the burden of trying to make the event into a story, and thus far it isn't really doing that.  Issue #1 was pure set-up.  Issue #2 was a scene-setting tour of the world, in which nothing of any obvious importance transpired. Issue #3 ignores most of it, and devotes an entire issue of Wolverine wandering around wondering why everything's different before blundering into the characters who can help him out in the closing pages.  Three issues to get to this point?  Is Bill Jemas script editing again?

It's irritating to have to give this book a negative review.  There's a lot to like about it.  The art is lovely.  The individual scenes are generally just fine.  Bendis writes a rather good Wolverine.  But the whole is considerably less than the sum of its parts, because it doesn't seem to understand what needs to be done in order to turn this concept into a compelling story.  Instead, it's spent two issues on world building - something that this series didn't need to do in so much detail, given the number of crossover books that will be fleshing out the universe - and done relatively little to advance the plot.  In a book supposedly starring half the Marvel Universe, Wolverine is the only character with an actual storyline here.  Everyone else is just standing around admiring the scenery, and patting themselves on the back for living in such an interesting world.

The supposedly controversial ending sums up the extent to which the creators have misjudged the audience response.  It's the return of Hawkeye.  This is supposed to be shocking and exciting.  It's neither, because this is a universe which has already brought back Gwen Stacy and Ben Parker (in Gwen's case, in this very series).  In other words, "dead characters come back" is already established as a ground rule.  We don't seriously expect most of them to stick around, and there's no in-story reason to think that Hawkeye's going to be any different.  Plus, Hawkeye's death scene in Avengers was so inept that it serves little purpose to remind people of it.  They'd have got away with this if they'd simply run the ending without hyping it; but by promoting it as a seismic event, they've made it look like a damp squib.

I can see why Bendis is so proud of his universe.  It's an interesting place.  Other books are telling interesting stories there.  It's a nice twist that Magneto's mutant paradise isn't just a fascist dictatorship, and everything's ultimately running rather smoothly - just the way Magneto doubtless imagined things would turn out.  But this book needs a story, and it's being written like a tourist guidebook.

Rating: B-

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