Back to Decimation, and Son of M #1.  It's a Quicksilver miniseries, in other words.  But he's lost his powers now, and he's feeling kind of down about it.

In some ways, this is an odd idea for a miniseries.  Hey, kids, it's a comic about a depressed guy who isn't a superhero!  Place your orders!  Issue #1 will sell on the House of M tie-in, but the question is whether David Hine and Roy Allan Martinez can deliver something sufficiently compelling to bring them back.

Their solution is to keep Quicksilver with one foot in the superhero world.  As a career superhero who's been working with altered perceptions of time since he was a teenager, the poor guy has no idea what to do as an ordinary person.  He tries to stop muggers but just gets beaten up.  Eventually, he finally comes up with the idea of calling in the Inhumans - the idea presumably being that he's going to try and get hold of the Terrigen Mists and make himself superhuman again.  (And if that isn't the idea, it should be.)

Fair enough.  We're in classic set-up territory here.  Quicksilver's life has been turned upside down, he sets out to put things right, and strikes out with a reasonable plan.  Usually this sort of thing would lead to him failing to realise his goal but learning an Important Lesson about what he really wanted (and then either realising that goal, or failing in it because of his earlier errors, depending on whether the story is a tragedy or not).  It's all good solid story material, and precisely what they ought to be doing with Pietro at this stage.

Since the Inhumans aren't going to show up until the cliffhanger, Spider-Man guest stars to keep up the superhero quota.  He's very upset about the whole House of M thing, since he found the Gwen Stacy stuff rather distressing.  This is the sort of scene which, while perfectly sensible in theory, falls flat because of poor editing and a failure to impose consistency.  Spider-Man can't be that bothered about her, after all, or he'd have mentioned it in his own titles.  Hell, it's not like they couldn't have worked it in - they've been stretching the wafer-thin plot of "The Other" to breaking point in a desperate attempt to fill the pages.

Martinez' art veers closer to the real world than the fantastic, and the muted colouring makes the superheroes look a bit out of place.  The balance isn't quite right.  It's intermittently successful, but there are points where it doesn't click.

Overall, though, a pretty strong start - there's certainly plenty of story material in the premise, and they're going about it the right way.

Rating: A-

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