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

X-Men: The Complete Onslaught Epic

Marvel recently published a four-volume graphic novel set of the massive 1990s Onslaught Epic (Scott Lobdell & Mark Waid, various), and there's a really cool idea there, buried under everything that can go wrong with a crossover.

The basic germ of it all is the idea that Professor X's pent up frustration (caused by human bigotry and furthured by mutant stupidity that made the situation worse) actually creates a psychic entity. Onslaught, as it is called, is a powerful being who tries to take every dark thought Xavier has ever had and go conqure the world with them.

For complicated plot reasons, there are elements of Magneto in Onslaught. The idea was that Xavier used his abilities to shut down Magneto's mind after some of the villain's crazier antics, during which a dark part of Magneto's psyche was absorbed into Xavier's mind. It was this act of crossing the line and controlling his friend's thoughts that brought Onslaught into being. This is one of the ways in which a really interesting idea begins to fall apart; Xavier didn't need a part of Magneto to have his own dark side - the story is stronger if Onslaught is born purely of Prof. X's own frustrations.

Side note: it's also interesting that current X-comics have no problem showing that Xavier is no saint; practically every storyline is revealing some horrible secret he's kept from the X-Men. But back in the '90s if a writer wanted to make an evil being come out of Professor X, they had to get Magneto into his head first. Visually, Magneto's dark taint on Xavier's psyche was represented as a little demon on the psychic plane. Now that's just overkill.

The real problem is that once Onslaught arrives and begins his takeover of the Marvel Universe, the story becomes a really generic crossover. For some poorly developed reasons, Onslaught unleashes Sentinals across the Marvel world, and the middle two volumes of the epic - which doesn't include every issue of the storyline, just those that the compilers thought were important - is full of Marvel characters randomly fighting Sentinals. Spider-Man fights them. Hulk fights them. The heroic Green Goblin, who didn't even last very long, fights them as well. The Fantastic Four fight them. And then someone got the brilliant idea to turn the storyline into a launching pad for another convoluted plotline called Heroes Reborn.

What should have been a story about the X-Men and the frustration of their founder and Xavier's dream falling apart became a story about every hero ever bravely sacrificing himself in a lot of sound and fury. All so Marvel could temporarily reboot all the Avengers and Fantastic Four comics and have really popular artists draw new versions of the characters' origins.

I doubt that's what the Onslaught story was initially meant to be. The final volume in the epic has pages from the story pitch that outlined Onslaught's motivation and plan, and it bears little resemblance to the current story. Originally, the dark entity's goal was to force the entire human race into one giant telepathic hive mind, which would not only destroy free will but also original thought. I suspect some editor saw that as too convoluted. Instead Onslaught decides that humans have no right to live for the way they've treated mutants, and mutants have no right to live for failing to stand up for themselves. Onslaught becomes a bog-standard nihilist, which is simply boring. I prefer villains who have motivation, not those who are simply destrutctive because they're insane.

I would love to see an Ultimate version of this storyline that's closer to the original, with Xavier's frustration at small-mindedness and intolerance becoming a force that the X-Men have to fight. The idea that the world's most powerful psychic, no matter how benevolent he seems, must have within him the temptation to force everyone to think as he does still seems very much worth exploring.

All that said, it was great hanging out with the '90s X-Men for a bit. I miss that family dynamic. These days they're all so mired in angst all the time, and we rarely get to see them just goofing off as friends do, getting Beast stuck in the bathtub or making the pancakes go ka-blooey.

- JC

Spidey Meets Obama

So today I read Amazing Spider-Man #583, more commonly known as the Inauguration Special where Spider-Man meets Barack Obama. The artwork is fantastic. Todd Nauck is a brilliant artist, I've loved his work ever since the old Young Justice series. He's never let me down and I doubt he ever will.

The script by Zeb Wells, on the other hand... I understand this story was put together in about a week's time, but this guy does not write well under pressure. I was hoping for something more like the Colbert issue, but instead we got a plot that revolves around a famous Spider-Man villain written as a complete buffoon.

Neil Gaiman talks frequently about how newspaper articles about comics far too often use headlines ripped from the 1960s Batman TV show - Wham, Pow, Comics Aren't Just for Kids Anymore! For at least the last 20 years that we've had a lot of great comics for adults, and even those like Batman and Superman that were traditionally for kids have intelligent storylines now, able to hold up to other forms of literature.

The Obama story seems like it was meant to be an over-the-top old school crazy comedy, a deliberate pastiche of silver age comic adventures, but the script sadly isn't clever enough to pull that off. With only six pages to tell a story, you need a plot outlandish enough to be charming and jokes that are actually funny.

I can't help but feel that Marvel dropped the ball a bit on this one. I work in a bookstore. We're featuring this special issue on our Obama Inauguration display table, and we've had people calling or coming in to ask about it for the last couple of weeks. People will definitely be picking up this issue who don't usually buy comics, who probably haven't read a comic book since they were kids. They'll flip straight to the Obama story, ignore the rest of the comic--and instead of being turned on to how clever and intelligent modern comics can be, they'll assume they're just as ridiculous and cheesy as Adam West in a grey leotard.

- JC

(I didn't read the book, but "Barasket Oballma" cracked my ass up. - RD)