Marvel's erratic scheduling strikes again as only one House of M tie-in makes it to the shelves this week.  Last week: four.  Next week: five.  I'd say that they were choosing the shipping dates with a dartboard and a blindfold, only you'd expect that to generate a more even distribution.

Anyhow, Mutopia X is a weird five-issue coda to District X.  It's not immediately clear quite what the point of the exercise is.  Perhaps when this was commissioned, the hope was that District X was going to return for another arc, and that the House of M tie-in might boost its sales.  Or maybe somebody just thought that it would be a good idea to have a street-level title somewhere in the crossover.

Regardless, after a brief (and surely superfluous) recap of ongoing storylines in District X, we're dumped into the House of M world.  The mutants are in charge, the humans are in the ghetto, and you get the general idea by now.  In the strikingly, incredibly different world of House of M, Bishop and Izzy Ortega are - brace yourselves, now - still policemen.

If the idea was for this book to focus on the plight of the humans, nobody seems to have told David Hine.  For obvious reasons, Hine is far more interested in following up the characters he created for District X, and of course, most of them are mutants.  So it's not a story about Sapien Town at all; it's Lifestyles of the Mutant Famous.

Minor drug dealer character Jazz is now a top rapper - in the book's best gag, House of M hip hop turns out to consist of mutant liberals bleating about how they really identify with the humans.  Crimelord Daniel Kaufman is, er, a crimelord.  Lara the Illusionist is an actress instead of a prostitute.  And Bishop is still a cop.  Even Izzy, who you might think would be struggling in this world, seems to be doing just fine.  There's an increasingly obvious problem with this whole world, which is that nobody really seems to have lost out, even though the entire human race is supposed to be struggling.  Fine, they're not in chains, and that's a nice departure from the norm - but shouldn't at least some of the characters be worse off as a result?  Was Wanda really setting out to fulfil the dreams of a supporting character from District X who she's never met?

The fundamental difficulty facing all House of M tie-ins is that we don't believe that this world will stick around, and therefore we have no stake in the outcome of the story.  We don't have a reason to care what happens.  Uncanny X-Men has dealt with the problem head on by doing stories about characters trying to reverse the warp.  Hulk, Spider-Man: House of M and Fantastic Four: House of M at least offer familiar characters in unfamiliar surroundings, and work on some level as character studies.  Mutopia X has Bishop and Izzy in much the same scenario as usual, only less interesting, and with all of the soap opera subplots about Izzy's personal life rendered redundant. 

It's not bad at all, but the concept just never seems as compelling as the one from the parent book.  Unfortunately, the strongest impression that Mutopia X leaves behind is the feeling that I'd rather have read another arc of District X instead.

Rating: B

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