The comics industry works like a pendulum.  Congenitally incapable of finding the happy middle ground, it lurches awkwardly from side to side in one overreaction after another.

At the moment, Marvel has belatedly decided that perhaps it had better try and do inter-title continuity after all.  But rather than just, well, doing inter-title continuity, it means that we get a string of ludicrously large crossovers.  Civil War, for example, clocks in at over 70 chapters.

Son of M started out as a Decimation tie-in, and now finishes with a lead-in to Civil War.  Somewhere along the line the actual end of the story seems to have been excised.  I'm not hugely impressed about that.

Which is a shame, because I was rather enjoying the book up until now.  It's one of the few books to have followed through properly on the fall-out from Decimation, rather than just giving it lip service and wheeling on the Sentinels.  Quicksilver lost his powers along with most of the other mutants, and he's struggling badly to adjust, since he has no normal life to fall back on.  Eventually he resorts to stealing the Terrigen Mists from the Inhumans and giving himself new superhuman powers with those.  Then he sets himself up as a sort of saviour who plans to travel around restoring mutant powers.

The story seemed to be building to a big climax on Genosha, as Quicksilver tries to restore the powers of Excalibur's supporting cast, only to be pursued by the Inhumans on one hand and O*N*E on the other.  But what we actually get is a squabble between O*N*E and the Inhumans, as the US government seizes the crystals and refuses to give them back.  That leads the Inhumans to declare war on America, which presumably fits into Civil War somewhere.  Quicksilver, meanwhile, slinks quietly off to the epilogue, having somehow got kicked to the sidelines of his own series.

As with a depressing number of Marvel stories lately, this series starts off with a very interesting premise, only to pull back halfway through and turn it into a set-up for the next big event down the line.  It does achieve the purpose of changing Quicksilver's status quo and leaving him as somebody who can restore the depowered mutants - conveniently, he turns out to have some spare crystals lying around that he never previously mentioned, fuelling my suspicions that he was originally meant to escape with them and that the Civil War tie-in has been nailed on at the last moment.  At the very least, the Inhumans declaring war on America just doesn't fit in this storyline, and certainly doesn't work as a climax.  It's a completely new idea barging in from left field.

This is the sort of thing that gave inter-title continuity a bad name in the first place - perfectly decent storylines being derailed by wider events that they could quite easily have ignored.  If this was the planned finish all along, on the other hand, then it hasn't been set up at all well.

As tends to be the way with these stories, it's certainly readable.  If it were the opening act of a storyline, I'd probably be fine with it.  But it's the final part of a six-month miniseries, and that makes it ultimately disappointing, even if it's technically okay as an issue in its own right.  Son of M could have been much better, but it's drifted badly off course in the last leg.

Rating: B-

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