In a rather odd piece of scheduling, this week brings not one but two issues of New X-Men.  This is the end of the road for writers Nunzio DeFilippis and Christina Weir, who've had a fairly lengthy run by today's standards - nineteen issues of New X-Men, thirteen of New Mutants, plus the four-issue Hellions miniseries and this week's Yearbook.

As it turns out, their final New X-Men arc was "House Divided", a House of M crossover totally removed from any of their ongoing storylines.  If you're looking for closure, you won't find it here.  (That's what the Yearbook is for, but I'll come to that later.)

Instead, we've had an odd little story on the fringes of the crossover.  Generally this book specialises in gentle, conversation-driven teen soap, but the last few issues have gone flying off in a totally different direction with globetrotting action sequences.  This final issue is basically a huge extended fight scene, as the New Mutants fight the Hellions for a bit and then team up to battle evil.  As with quite a few of the House of M crossovers, there's no real resolution - the second reality warp hits, and that's the end of that.

The problem for most House of M crossovers, of course, is that since none of this is real, it's not clear why we should care.  DeFilippis and Weir have sidestepped that problem by using the concept to show completely different sides of their characters.  While most titles have given us characters who were essentially the same people in different circumstances, New X-Men throws itself into the idea that society shapes the way people think.  As a result, although the characters still draw a moral line at some of the secret projects they uncover, they basically have no problem with the idea of Magneto's mutant utopia.  After all, they're doing just fine.  Wallflower, in particular, turns out to be an unrepentant villain in this world.

All of this is quite interesting, but never quite answers the question of why we should care about an evil scheme of the Japanese government which ceases to exist by the end of the issue anyway.  Consequently, the extended fight sequence seems a bit unnecessary.  The idea seems to be that the New Mutants and Hellions put aside their differences for the greater good, but that's hardly a massive insight.  Also, as with a lot of New X-Men stories, there's an incredible amount going on here, and a ton of characters wandering around battling for space on the page.

The other oddity about this story is that, unlike the other crossovers, it's merrily killing off characters.  It's true enough that some of these are ambiguous enough that they could be legitimately ignored, but even so, this issue is an outright bloodbath, especially by the demure standards of the title.  It's less than clear at this stage whether characters who die in the House of M world can expect to come back later, which leaves me uncertain as to how I'm supposed to take this.  Writers on What If? used to engage in mass slaughter all the time because they could get away with it and it added artificial weight to the stories.  Is that what we're seeing here, or are DeFilippis and Weir simply gunning down a bunch of characters who were scheduled to get wiped out in Decimation anyway?

There's also a very obvious back door which could be used to bring back Illyana Rasputin, and I have trouble believing that that's a mere accident.

Some interesting ideas here, anyhow, but it doesn't quite work.  There's too much being crammed into four issues, and yet at the same time it's not truly apparent what's at stake.  Fortunately, this doesn't have to stand as DeFilippis and Weir's swansong on the book.

Rating: B-

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