House of M: Others

Since my original House of M post, I've been tracking down the various tie-in issues and miniseries from that event, to see how they might alter my impression of the story as a whole. And ultimately I've found it's not just the changes from the Marvel universe we know that make the House that Bendis Built so intriguing. Often it's the things that haven't changed at all.

Bruce "Hulk" Banner spends his alternate reality vacation (Incredible Hulk, Peter David) in Australia, bonding with Aborigines who are helping him make peace between his "two minds," and claims he's never been happier. So his dream reality doesn't involve a reunion with his deceased wife Betty?

Similarly, in the main miniseries, Jean Grey is still dead, and Scott Summers is instead married to Emma Frost - something even Emma wonders about when their memories are restored. I was all set to blame Jean Grey's "Live, Scott, live!" brainwashing from the end of Grant Morrison's New X-Men run, and then I read Christos Gage's House of M: Civil War miniseries, about Magneto's rise to power in the Houseverse. Here we learn that even in this Magnus family fantasy world, Magneto's first child (Anya) still died, his wife Magda still left him, and Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch still grew up orphans. And I started to wonder.

Perhaps the writers were suggesting that most of us, on a day to day basis, don't really wish for a life so different from the one we already have. The Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver didn't sit everyone down and ask them for their alternate reality wish-list, they had a telepath scan everyone's minds. So the lives they made were just a little better than the ones people had been living before. Lives people believed they could have, with just a little luck, or a little more work, with a few telling exceptions.

In House of M: Iron Man (Greg Pak), Tony Stark's dead, demanding father is alive again, but a villian, so Tony can face and reject him on his own terms. And in Mark Waid's House of M: Spider-Man, Peter Parker was married not to Mary Jane but to his murdered first love Gwen Stacy (and they have a son!), and Gwen's dead dad and Peter's Uncle Ben were both alive again as well. The tragedy of Peter is that he lives his whole life in regret, carrying ghosts everywhere he goes. It's enough to bring Gwen, Captain Stacy, and Uncle Ben back to him in the House reality, but when the world is restored, Peter is left wondering what it means that Mary Jane was left out of his other life and mourning a son he never actually knew. Even Peter's dreams, in the end, are just another reason to be emo.

Wow. When I put it like that...I'm kinda depressed now. Get over yourself, Spider-Man! Go look at pictures of some Giant Flemish Rabbits: http://z.hubpages.com/u/109006_f260.jpg or something.

- JC

World War Hulk: Incredible Herc

It's a well known fact that no one really likes a boy genius. If Star Trek: The Next Generation and Doctor Who couldn't pull it off, there's not much hope for other examples of the genre (though I'm one of the weird fans who actually likes both Wesley Crusher and Adric, so I could be on shaky ground with this argument).

Marvel has a new character, Amadeus Cho, who is a really fascinating boy genius. He's aware of the physics in everything around him, so when he's going to do something we get these colorful equations around his head, which is artistically very exciting. In one book, a man with a gun is running toward Amadeus, who sees a pipe on the ground in the man's path and calculates the exact time and place to throw a pebble so the man slips on the pipe. Other heroes could hit the pipe with a superstrong throw or create an energy field to knock the man over; Amadeus simply puts Archimede's theories into action.

Unlike the traditional boy genius, the key difference is that Amadeus isn't just a goody two shoes out to help the good guys. He becomes fixated on the Hulk, and sees a very noble person even when the Green Goliath is coming to carry out a mission of vengance against other superheroes. Amadeus is in a place where he can use his powers of brilliance to help people or get people hurt because of a misguided and very realistically young view of the world. He paints some people as fascists and others as heroes, and as intelligent as he is, he's not really wise enough to tell the difference.

I also like how Amadeus is used to make the Hulk more of a hero again. Some recent writers fixated on the idea of Hulk as a monster, asking how he can cause as much destruction as he does and not have some civilians get killed. The kid faces Hulk down and says he's hacked into S.H.I.E.L.D. and read his files, and found that Hulk has never killed anyone. The only time people have died as a result of Hulk's actions was when they separated Bruce Banner's personality from the big green guy. As many tanks as he's thrown across the desert, as many helicopers as he's pulled down, no soldiers have died - and Amadeus says it's because Hulk is like him. He sees the math in everything, and uses that to make sure no one gets hurt. With that speech, he restores Hulk to the character I find most interesting, the gentle giant I first met on Saturday morning cartoons.

I'd also love to see Hulk's longtime nemesis General "Thunderbolt" Ross acknowledge this. I want to see a scene where he says, "Look, I know you're not actually a bad guy, but in the current economy we can't afford all this property damage."

It's nice to see Marvel make a tired old trope new again, introducing a boy genius and making it work by adding enough of the actual teenager back in to make it interesting, and using him to bring a fresh perspective to classic characters we've had for years.

And now Amadeus is running around with Hercules, so that's going to be interesting.

- JC