By Brian Michael Bendis, Olivier Coipel, Tim Townsend & various (Marvel)
ISBN: 978-0-7851-1721-6
When mutant Avenger the mutant Scarlet Witch married the android Vision they conceived – through the agency of magic and Wanda Maximoff”s undiagnosed ability to reshape reality – twin boys.
Over the course of time it was revealed that her sons were not real and, as the years passed, the shock of that revelation slowly drove her insane.
After tipping completely over the edge Wanda engineered the destruction of her other family – the vast and varied assemblage of the Avengers – orchestrating the death of her former husband and some of their oldest friends.
The World’s Mightiest Heroes were shut down and rebooted in a highly controversial storyline known as Avengers Disassembled, which resulted in the formation of both The New and Young Avengers. That publishing event also spilled over into the solo titles of team members and affiliated comicbooks such as the Fantastic Four and Spectacular Spider-Man, which all ran parallel story-arcs to accompany the main attraction.
The tale told of the worst day in the Avenger’s history as the Witch manipulated people and events: betraying her oldest, closest companions and causing the destruction of everything they held dear. The chaos-storm was only ended when mystic master Doctor Strange and mutant patriarch Charles Xavier took the dazed and crazed Wandainto their personal protective care.
This follow-up company crossover conjunction – by Brian Michael Bendis, Olivier Coipel & Tim Townsend and released originally and primarily as an 8-issue miniseries from August to November 2005 – saw reality rewritten again when Wanda apparently had another major lapse in concentration; reformatting history such that Homo Superior now dominated a society where mere humans (“sapiensâ€) were an acknowledged evolutionary dead-end living out their lives and destined for extinction within two generations.
Moreover her true father Magneto ruled the mutants; regal head of a glorious dynasty which exerted political control over the entire planet.
It took a dedicated band of heroes and a great deal of luck to put that genie back in a bottle, but the repercussions of the repair job were both profound and world-changing…
Re-presenting the core fortnightly miniseries House of M, and The Pulse: Special Edition, this collection also contains covers and variants by Esad Ribic, Joe Quesada & Danny Miki, Terry & Rachel Dodson, John Cassaday, Brandon Peterson, Mike McKone, Greg Land & Matt Ryan, Salvador Larroca, Chris Bachalo, Joe Madureira, Tim Townsend & Olivier Coipel, and The Pulse – an inspired 12 page faux issue of M-world’s top mutant gossip mag, which offers engaging and pertinent snippets of congruent stories in other titles…
Following a handy scene-setting recap page the drama begins in devastated former mutant homeland Genosha, where Xavier is at last forced to admit that his psychic surgeries are not helping Wanda.
The desire to restore her non-existent children is too strong and the traumatised Scarlet Witch constantly tinkers with reality to make her dreams real. After much impassioned debate with her despondent father Magneto and brother Quicksilver, Professor X finally weighs up the horrific potential consequences and considers other options…
Meanwhile in New York Wonder Man, Ms. Marvel and The Falcon visit the New Avengers at Stark Tower preparatory to the latest assemblage going public. Thus they are on hand when the X-Men come calling: rallied by Xavier to discuss the final fate and disposition of the Scarlet Witch.
In Genosha her father and brother argue on: one seeing no option but the final sanction and the other determined that Wanda must not die.
Opinion is just as divided amongst Avengers and X-Men. Unable to reach a decision, the huge group opt to visit Wanda and try to get through to her one last time.
By the time they reach Genosha she has vanished. Fearing the world might end at any second they frantically search until they are all consumed by a blinding light…
The second chapter begins in a very different New York, where decrepit nonagenarian war hero Steve Rogers draws a well deserved pension, millionaire celebrity Peter Parker, his wife Gwen, son Richie and close relatives May and Ben Parker all live in lofty luxury and teeming billions of mutants run the world, safeguarded and policed by colossal robotic Sentinels…
All the heroes who sought out the Witch now live perfect lives that match their deepest, most secret hearts’ desires, but there is a painful undercurrent of tension amongst the rapidly declining, soon to be extinct Homo Sapiens…
Wolverine awakes screaming. His greatest desire has always been to recover his lost memories: destroyed and discarded by more than a century of brainwashing, mind-wiping and intervention by a succession of sinister enemies. As consciousness returns he remembers everything.
Especially how a moment ago the world was completely different…
In this new universe he is leader of an elite team of mutant peacekeepers. The Red Guard are the prime enforcers of the House of M and agents of the Royal Family of Magneto: de facto rulers of Earth.
Appalled he leaps from the ominous floating aircraft carrier dominating New York and plunges to Earth…
Healing factor in overdrive he then lurches through the streets of the city searching for Xavier and a solution to this insurmountable problem. Hard on his heels are his former subordinates in the Red Guard, all convinced their formerly ruthlessly rational commander has gone crazy.
In his frantic flight, the desperate fugitive stumbles into other-world old comrade Luke Cage who is, in this place, a cunning gangster leading a band of human rebels fighting mutant oppression. Shockingly, amongst his motley crew is masked archer Hawkeye – one of the cruellest casualties of the Scarlet Witch’s first killing spree…
Playing with his grandchild in the idyllic paradise of Genosha, Magneto is unaccountably troubled at the perfection of his existence even as, in New York, Sentinels track and attack Cage’s “Human Avengersâ€. Thanks to teleporter Cloak, Wolverine and a few of the gang escape, taking with them a strange little girl named Layla Miller.
She is a mutant and amongst her arcane and undisclosed power-set is the ability to reawaken a person’s memories of the world Wanda overwrote…
Convinced Magneto used his crazy daughter to remake the world to his advantage, Wolverine is exultant to have a weapon to offset all the dictator’s advantages and with Cage begins tracking down and restoring former allies.
The game plan remains unchanged: find Xavier and use his telepathic powers to force the Witch to restore the real world.
In Genosha, meanwhile, Magneto again finds himself drawn to the simple tomb of his greatest friend and occasional enemy Charles…
The next stage in Wolverine’s campaign is to use his now restored and grimly determined Avenger and X-Men allies to take control of the Helicarrier dominating New York, piloting it to Genosha and engaging the House of M’s forces as Layla works her own special mutant magic and reawakened mystic master Stephen Strange attempts to deal with Wanda…
Throughout the horrifying ordeal everybody involved has assumed that Magneto made his daughter reorder reality to suit his dark ambitions, but the magician’s confrontation shockingly reveals a different hand and motive behind the grand change and, as the universe begins to unravel once more, the appalled and furious Master of Magnetism unleashes his own power against the traitor who betrayed his friends, family, species and planet…
…And at the heart of the chaos and carnage Wanda Maximoff, whether at the peak of her madness or in a chilling moment of clarity, utters three little words.
“No more Mutantsâ€â€¦
Dawn breaks on New York City and all the battered participants at the centre of the apocalyptic struggle awake in their own – as far as they know – proper beds. For those that remember, the world seems back to its true state, but when the shell-shocked protagonists gather together to compare notes they realise some things don’t jibe.
Wolverine still has all the memories of his long and previously clouded life; Wanda has utterly vanished again; there is evidence that Hawkeye might be alive again and, most unbelievable of all, the almost one million members of the mutant sub-species are now just human…
Across the Earth less than 200 super-powered Homo Superior remain. Governments are scrabbling to process the fact and form policies whilst the pedagogues of the religious right claim God has smitten the unclean and exhort decent – human – men and women to finish the good work…
Scientist Henry Pym has an even more chilling warning. Reminding us of Einstein’s dictum “Energy cannot be created or destroyed, it can only be changed from one form to anotherâ€, he ominously ponders on where all the powers, radiations and assorted exotic energies formerly wielded by the ex-mutant population have gone…
Although Marvel continuity was skilfully interwoven throughout the event, this particular tale stands alone perfectly without any need to refer to the many attendant miniseries: offering an engaging, fast-paced thriller brimming with tension and stuffed with bombastic spectacle.
House of M is an action-packed, spectacular adventure that will delight lovers of epic Fights ‘n’ Tights fantasy and beguile casual readers looking for an easy but enthralling entry into the madcap world of Costumed Dramas.
© 2005, 2006 Marvel Characters, Inc. All rights reserved.
