Well, here we are.  Eight issues down the line, House of M finally comes to an end.  Issue #8 is, basically, a whole issue of fallout.  It's an issue where people react to the mass loss of mutant powers, and the Avengers feel a bit hung over.  But mainly, it's the mutant powers.

However, I already wrote about that plot idea when I reviewed issue #7, and I'm sure I'll be covering it a lot over the next couple of months as we get into all the Decimation crossovers.  In the meantime, let's focus on the House of M miniseries itself.  As a story, how does it hold up?

Frankly, not very well.  Looking back, in the knowledge of where Bendis was heading, House of M is a bizarrely structured story.  It's honestly difficult to see what Bendis was trying to achieve by presenting the plot in this way.  The story is built around two big events - in issue #1, Wanda remakes the world and creates the House of M reality.  In issue #7, after it all collapses, she tries again and restores the real world, but this time with most of the mutants missing.

Now, there's one big problem with this, however you play it, which is that the second reality warp isn't an ending.  There's no sense of resolution at all, and little sense of pay-off.  Basically, we've spent seven issues waiting for this series to cancel itself out.  Issue #7 gives us an important event, but it's important because it starts future stories, not because it really resolves this one.

But moreover, what we have here is a series which is built around two events, both of them decisions of the Scarlet Witch.  It's Wanda that creates this world in the first place, and Wanda who decides to change everything at the end.  She's the single most important character in the story.  And yet Bendis keeps her off panel right to the very end.  As a result, not only do we never get into her head, but the series never properly dramatises why she feels this world has failed.  Magneto gets into a fight with Pietro, and that seems to be enough for her.

The nominal heroes of this book - the Avengers and the X-Men - really contribute very little.  They show up and provoke a fight with Magneto, but that could have been done in any number of ways.  They don't truly influence Wanda's actions, and so the climax of the book doesn't arise from anything the protagonists did.

Framed as a story about the Avengers and the X-Men, House of M feels pointless - the world gets changed, the heroes run and around for a few issues and achieve nothing, and then Wanda puts everything back.  For this story to feel meaningful, it needed to be a story about Wanda, the only person in the whole series to take any significant decisions at all.  Instead she's marginalised, and as a result, the story simply doesn't work.

Having said all that, this is an unusual example of a series that fails on the grand scale, but largely succeeds on the details.  Taken individually, many of the scenes are good; they only falter as a whole.  This issue is a good example of that.  Nothing much really happens, other than to note that certain characters have lost their powers and everyone is quite upset.  But there are plenty of good moments along the way.  The school seems appropriately chaotic (although it's a shame more space wasn't given to the cast of New X-Men, some of whom are effectively written out here), and the Avengers' reactions come close to selling the whole story as important.  Magneto's scene in Genosha as a broken man is a lovely moment, and it's good to see the book establishing a couple of A-listers among the depowered.

Taken as a whole, it's been a strange book.  There are good scenes and good moments, and this issue has plenty.  But at the same time, they're just not arranged in a very compelling order.  The result is a book which is eminently readable but just doesn't seem to have taken us on any particularly memorable journey.  The Decimation is a memorable event, of course, but only because it's the opening of the next storyline, not because of the way it's used in this one.  This issue benefits, to an extent, from the fact that it's a segue into that storyline and consequently the events in this issue feel important in a way that events in earlier issues did not.

Overall, the series has to be considered a disappointment which failed to deliver on the promise of a perfectly good concept.  This is not a bad final issue by any means, especially if you take it as a prologue to Decimation rather than an epilogue to House of M.  It's a perfectly readable issue which largely achieves what it sets out to do.  But the series as a whole could and should have been an awful lot better. 

Rating: B

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