Another week, another House of M crossover.  This time, it's New X-Men's turn to join the big event - for four months.

It's an understandable decision, in that New X-Men sales haven't exactly been spectacular, and the book could use the help.  The down side is that it means putting all the ongoing storylines on hold - or at least gives that appearance, since for all the hype, Marvel still haven't done anything to truly convince readers that any of these stories are going to have lasting consequences.  And since Marvel have now decided to pull the plug on the existing creative team and take the book in a completely different direction under new writers, it would probably have been as well to spend the time letting them wrap up their storylines. 

Still, what's done is done.  DeFilippis and Weir's run on the title will end with this strange little storyline, and that's just the way things are going to be.

Since the House of M world doesn't even have any X-Men, there's a drastic overhaul to the set-up.  Instead of the Xavier Institute school, we've now got a hawks and doves division between the characters who are trainee SHIELD agents, and the budding diplomats at Karma's New Mutant Leadership Institute.  Although the cover art features the House of M Hellions, it's really not their story.  Instead, the regular cast continue to dominate the book, even though they're scattered around various teams.

This being New X-Men, there's a vast array of characters wandering around, and probably a few too many speaking parts for the book's own good.  Characters return from the dead almost casually - Synch and Magik turn up as Hellions, Cypher's a teacher, the Stepford Cuckoos are blissfully reunited, and Quentin Quire is up and about again.  All of this comes across as almost throwaway.  I can't entirely make up my mind whether it's a waste of good material, or just a good use of background detail, like the weird and unexplained recasting of Dust as a duplicate Jubilee.

More interestingly, none of the characters on either side seem to question the House of M set-up.  Although the characters are divided into hawks and doves, it's really just a squabble about methods.  Nobody's rebelling against the system at all, and everyone seems to think it's just great to be working for Magneto.  Of course, all the New X-Men characters are big winners in House of M, but it's still an unusual move to depict them as completely comfortable with Magneto's domination.  After all, he's made the trains run on time.  Conventionally the heroes would at least be slightly troubled by the state of affairs, but not these guys.  It's perhaps the most intriguing aspect of the story.

As is so often the case with this book, there's a lot of interesting ideas in here, but they're jostling for space.  Hopefully we'll see some of them developed more fully in the future chapters, because it'd be a shame to leave some of these as background details.

Rating: B+

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