Comics! Siege 2

A bunch of comics came out this week, but in the superhero world, only one of them mattered much, and it would matter even if it didn’t matter, if you know what I mean – because the writing features Brian Michael Bendis doing his choppy, impressionistic, weirdly beguiling thing with dialogue (he’s the best of the current bunch of ‘no exposition’ comics writers), and because it features the stunning, mind-warpingly great artwork of Olivier Coipel. These two could make Scrooge McDuck matter.

The series of course is “Siege” from Marvel, and naturally it matters for reasons other than its creative team, although it should be stressed that said team has seldom been in stronger form. No, this four-issue mini-series matters because it’s the culmination and climax of the company-wide “Dark Reign” story that’s been playing out in Marvel’s comics for the last few years. Some of you will already be familiar with that scenario (from previous Stevereads entries, if nothing else – just follow the tags!): Norman Osborn, the ersatz Green Goblin, has wormed his way into the country’s good graces and taken command of H.A.M.M.E.R., a gigantic paramilitary force of stormtroopers. And when he’s wearing his super-powered armor and going under the code-name Iron Patriot, he also commands his own team of Avengers, composed of villains dressed in hero costumes – plus the Sentry (think: Superman only biddable and psychotic) and Ares, the Greek god of war.

In the lead-up to “Siege,” as we’ve seen, Norman Osborn, manipulated by the evil norse god Loki (and drunk on power the old-fashioned way), has declared war on Asgard, the home city of the norse gods, which is currently floating above Oklahoma. Osborn talks about how the city forms a real and present threat to America just by being there, and in the first issue of “Siege” he gathers his troops and invades.

So “Siege” #2 starts off in the chaos of general battle, with Osborn’s troops and Avengers fighting a city full of enraged and not all that out-gunned Asgardians (swords and spears are pretty damn effective if you’re super-strong, which every single Asgardian is). Coipel’s pencils are magnificent – he’s able to convey the huge sweep of what’s going on without taking any drama away from the one-on-one encounters throughout the book, the first of which is key to this issue: the Asgardian warriors Balder and Heimdall convince Ares that he’s been duped, that Osborn is really his enemy.



There’s other stuff going on in this issue, but that’s the core story: Ares turns on Osborn, knocks him out of the sky, and is about to cut his head off when the Sentry intervenes, beats the stuffing out of Ares, and then, well … takes him out of the fight entirely, let’s say. The issue ends with Osborn unleashing the Sentry on Thor, Asgard’s greatest warrior and resident super-hero – and with Osborn himself coming under attack by none other than Captain America, alive again and fighting mad, leading his own group of reinforcements into battle. It’s a great cliffhanger ending to a great issue, but it leaves me wondering two things:

First: if Bendis is going to portray the Sentry as so powerful – able to dispatch the god of war with relative ease, likely to pound the stuffing out of Thor in the next issue – then why would Osborn need this mysterious reserve operative he’s been darkly hinting about for the last year? We don’t know who that mysterious operative is (although if you follow the aforementioned tags, you’ll see where I made my own prediction, months and months ago – a prediction I’m sticking with), but he hardly seems Needed, if this is what Osborn’s pet psycho can do all by himself.

Second: Even at the breakneck pace this thing is developing, how can it possibly wrap up in only two issues? Captain America re-entering the fray; Thor fighting the Sentry, this mysterious operative entering the fray, Iron Man presumably showing up at some point … not to mention the fact that if long-term grudge-matches are going to be honored here, Spider-Man (currently just a background member of Cap’s reinforcements) should surely take pride of place, no? Osborn killed his beloved Gwen Stacey, after all! How Bendis can possibly resolve all this in only 50 more pages is beyond me.

But I’ll certainly be along for the ride. This issue erases all my slight misgivings about the first issue of this series: this is epic-style Marvel done just right.

Comics! Siege begins!

This week sees the first installment of Marvel Comics’ next Big Thing: a four-part series called Siege. The back story will be familiar to those of you who’ve been paying attention here at Stevereads – Norman Osborn, the murderous ersatz Green Goblin, has professed to be a changed man, wormed his way into the President’s good graces, and been placed in charge of the super paramilitary organization known as H.A.M.M.E.R. He’s recruited his own team of ‘dark’ Avengers, and for several months now readers have been treated to a surprisingly entertaining dystopian version of the usual Marvel continuity … the bad guys have been in charge, hunting down, torturing, and even killing the good guys.

It’s yielded some good stories, and one of the things that made those stories good was the background current of tension that’s been building the whole time. Norman Osborn has been written consistently as a smarmy psychopath with only a tenuous hold on his own sanity, and his team of Avengers have for the most part been written as unabashed scumbags. Readers like me have been both fascinated and appalled, and every month the prospect of Osborn’s fall from power – and the face-stomping his team of storm troopers so richly deserves – has grown just a little more delicious in the aniticpating.

Marvel’s in-house ads hint pretty strongly that Siege is the story of that downfall – that the core trio of the real Avengers, Thor, Iron Man, and Captain America, will reunite to bring about the return of the so-called Heroic Age Marvel’s been touting lately. We’ll see if that turns out to be true, but in the meantime, this issue opens with a bang.

Bang as in explosion. Osborn and the evil Norse god Loki conspire to orchestrate an catastrophic incident involving a bunch of energy-wielding bad guys and one Volstagg, a warrior who’s left the fabled city of Asgard (which now floats ten feet above some empty scrubland in Oklahoma, as seen in last year’s new run of Thor’s own comic) in search of adventure. The catastrophic incident involves a crowded football stadium, and Osborn uses its aftermath to justify launching a full-scale invasion of Asgard, spearheaded by his own super-powered shock troops. That invasion is launched in this first issue, which is written by Brian Michael Bendis in his usual spastic way and gloriously illustrated by Olivier Coipel.



Osborn’s surveillance intelligence tells him Thor is not in Asgard at the moment (readers of Thor’s own book will recall that, for the millionth time, he’s been exiled from his hometown), so his hopes of success are high. His ‘dark’ Avengers move in with Air Force fighter jets and catch the Asgardians by surprise, and the fighting is in full fury when Thor does indeed show up – only to get rather unceremoniously knocked around by the bad guys. The issue ends with things looking fairly bleak for Asgard.

The two main problems that usually afflict comic book Big Things are a) inconsistent characterization of the major players, or b) incoherent plotting, and Bendis avoids both those pitfalls in this first issue, and he does quite a bit right besides. The elements are in place here for a tremendously satisfying story – not only the prospect of Thor, Captain America, and Iron Man reuniting but also the classic overreaching Osborn has been doing all along, culminating in this issue when he angrily delegates to an assistant the task of telling the President that he’s going to invade Asgard (“I’m done talking to that man,” he snarls, and a later scene in the White House makes it clear the President feels the same about him). And certainly attacking an entire city full of warrior gods can be classified as overreaching.

So: a fine strong premise-issue (marred only by the inclusion of some script-pages for a fairly pivotal scene in which Osborn explains his decision to his Avengers – no explanation is given as to why Coipel didn’t draw these pages, like he did the rest of the issue), and the ball is Bendis’ to fumble. My fingers are crossed that he doesn’t.

Comics!

Just a brief note here on two current issues, since a) they represent polar opposites in terms of conception, b) they possess some exact similarities in terms of conception, and c) somebody's gotta talk about comics around here! Worry not, all you non-comics readers: we'll be brief.

First up is issue #7 of the new J. Michael Straczynski/Olivier Coipel relaunch of Thor - only ooops! Coipel has already decamped for fresher coke-fields! Leaving Straczynski to bravely soldier on alone - for the two or three more issues it takes before he's bored and twitchy too, or until some slightly-larger relaunch paycheck is waved under his nose. We here at Stevereads have bemoaned before this mayfly tendency among comic creators these days, so we won't belabor the point here. We're only glad the book's new artist - Marko Djurdjevic - is almost as good as Coipel; in the bad old days, the art chores would have fallen to George Tuska or Herb Trimpe - Marvel hacks who lacked talent but could at least be relied upon.

And the storyline in this issue had an interesting twist as well. At the end of the previous issue, Thor had expended all his Asgardian power in a gigantic planet-wide effort to revive all his fellow gods (currently slumbering inside mortal hosts) ... all perhaps save one. As he confesses to his own mortal host Don Blake, Thor is hesitant to revive his father Odin, because Odin only knows 'the old ways, the old patterns,' and Thor wants to break free of them. The issue left us unclear whether or not Thor had decided to bring his bat-shit crazy daddy back to life.

(or did it? One of Coipel's final panels on this title he told everybody he'd be with for years was an indistinct shot of somebody looking vaguely Odin-like, materializing in a busy city square)

This issue begins with Thor so exhausted from his efforts that he has to go into the Odinsleep (or, more properly now, the Thorsleep), a kind of mystical coma designed to restore his strength. In this coma, our hero (who, so far in this title, has yet to do anything all that heroic - with the single exception of beating the living snot out of Tony Stark) exists in a state between life and death - and in that state, he sees his father re-fighting the epic battle with the flame-demon Surtur that claimed his life before this re-boot began. Odin is victorious, and he and Thor have a father and son chat - about how Asgardian sons always kill their fathers (heartwarming stuff). Odin relates a time eons past when he had a chance to revive his own father, Bor, and didn't - because, he tells Thor, it's perfectly natural for sons to want to step out of their fathers' shadows:

If you had wished to recall me from the darkness, my son ... you would have made some effort before now. Would have summoned mages. Would have asked questions. Would have tried. You did not. As I would have not, in your place.
Figures - the first time in the title's history where Odin talks straight with his son, and he's DEAD.

The issue ends in mid-flashback (and a record LOW number of pages of artwork) with a hearty 'to be continued...' teaser, and we here at Stevereads have a STUNNING PREDICTION for you all to mull over for the next month: the shadowy figure revived by Thor in the previous issue isn't Odin - it's BOR! Get ready for some grandfather-grandson trash-talking!

The second title we're taking up today is issue #172 of Robin, written by Chuck Dixon and drawn with wonderful low-key detail by David Baldeon. This issue continues the book's ongoing storyline which finds Robin dealing night after night with a new 'mask,' Violet, who steals from the rich and corrupt and gives to .... herself. Our current Robin, Tim Drake (here portrayed by Baldeon as in his late teens, on the verge of no longer being a 'boy' wonder), has had lots of experience in the run of this always-excellent title with young women who wander back and forth over the sharp line of right-and-wrong he learned from Batman, and Violet is no different: he's fascinated by her, but he's also compelled to stop her.

The issue's most interesting wrinkle is that he's being aided in that goal by two Gotham detectives, who want to partner with him openly, as an agent and confidential informant, as sort of a ground-level Jim Gordon sans bat-signal. Tim is suspicious of them, and even though their in-car patter (which we hear and he doesn't) seems innocent enough, the device has lots of potential for future complications.

The end of the issue finds Tim no closer to catching Violet, but the takedown of an illegal casino that is the issue's main action is expertly done and consistently fast-paced.

Which is where the similarities and differences of these two titles come in. The differences are obvious: Thor's the most powerful super-hero either Marvel or DC have to offer (no matter what INSANE happenings might have taken place in the famous Avengers/Justice League team-up from a few years ago), and Robin's the least powerful. Thor's title is now pretty much entirely involved in introspection and house-setting (the actual storylines are obviously being kept back for the second graphic novel), whereas Robin's book is humming merrily along on the strength of plot and character.

But the similarities are greater: both books are really good - among the best their respective companies currently put out. Thor is still in an epic holding pattern, but we here at Stevereads have faith (how can we not, him being our favorite Marvel character and all?). And Robin - through pretty much the entire run of this book - is finally getting the consistently excellent treatment the character has always deserved.

So until other voices should resume talking about comics (ahem ...), we'll let those two stand as our recommendations of the week. Even coming in mid-story in both, you'll find lots to entertain you.

House of M

Our book today is the Marvel Comics graphic novel House of M, which would more properly make it a subject for our esteemed colleague Gianni over at The Latest Issue, but we can't help ourselves. The more we re-read this book, the more convinced we become that it's the best thing Marvel's put before its readers since Marvels came out a decade ago. This book's storyline was the last gasp of the grand old Marvel style, a style that played out bittersweet Stan Lee style 'what if's against a backdrop of decidely unglamorous heroism.

Some of you will need some backstory. You can dig around on Gianni's site for it (we assure you, his postings are more enjoyable the second time through), but we'll provide a quick thumbnail sketch here in case any of you are too lazy to click over and do the requisite hunting.

One of Marvel's master villains is Magneto, an Eastern Eurpopean Holocaust survivor, a mutant with complete control over Earth's magnetic fields and a fanatic who believes, ironically enough, that mutants constitute nature's true master race. Non comic-fans among you will know the character's name because he was brought to masterful, indelible life on the big screen by Ian McKellan, clearly having the time of his life.

In the comics, Magneto had two children, both mutants like himself: his hot-headed son Pietro, codename Quicksilver, who can run at fantastic speeds, and Wanda, codename the Scarlet Witch, who can cast reality-altering 'hexes.' Magneto is a thorough-going bad guy (he wants his species to succeed, after all! What else could he be? It's a well known scientific fact that homo sapiens gained ascendancy over Neanderthals - and half a dozen other species of modern human - through diplomacy and tea parties), but Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch, after a rocky start, become full-fledged heroes, members of the Avengers, Earth's most prestigious superhero team. Quicksilver can't travel anywhere near as fast as DC's Flash, and the Scarlet Witch at first can only cast three 'hexes' at a time before becoming exhausted, but there they are, mutants, fighting alongside Captain America, Iron Man, and Thor against all manner of threats to Earth's very survival. Full-fledged four-color heroes, but it wasn't destined to stay that way.

The Scarlet Witch fell in love with the Vision, the Avengers' android member, and because these stories are written piecemeal by many different writers - some significantly brighter than others - there came a storyline in which she became pregnant and gave birth to twins.

Well, of course future writers had to deal with That. An android and a mutant? Obviously, those children, who couldn't have been conceived in the tried-and-true birds-and-bees method, had to be accounted for somehow. Hack writer John Byrne made an attempt twenty years ago, chalking it all up to the machinations of an extra-dimensional demon, but that was never very convincing. Years and years later, our present writer Brian Michael Bendis came up with an entirely better scenario: it turns out that the Scarlet Witch's probability-altering hex-spheres were always more powerful than she or we knew, little bubbles in which her subconscious got to rewrite reality itself. She wanted children, and so she made them, and what was the harm?

Except that in the comic book world, if you're a woman, you always lose control of such awesome power, and the Scarlet Witch is no exception. And when she loses control of her ability (than which there can be, realistically speaking, none greater), all Hell breaks loose. In an Avengers story that need not delay us long here, she loses control and several Avengers - Ant-man, the Vision, and Hawkeye - die as a result. But all along she's aware of what she's doing to her friends, and it agonizes her. When the surviving Avengers converge on her, she offers no resistance - but her father Magneto shows up and demands the custody of his daughter. And since this particular team's roster has no Thor to challenge a being of Magneto's power, they stand by and let him take Wanda away to the ruins of his mutant state of Genosha. But all parties concerned know this is not the end of the matter.


This is where House of M - written by Brian Michael Bendis and drawn by Olivier Coipel - begins. The book opens in the ruins of Genosha, on such a subdominant note as might a great symphony begin: two old friends, battered by time and circumstance, are talking on a shattered rooftop. The one is Magneto, but old and broken, without his metal helmet and scarlet cloak, rangy hair hanging in his face. The other is Charles Xavier, erstwhile leader of the X-men and the world's greatest telepath. These two have been the closest friends and the most bitter enemies, and Bendis' dialogue is a marvel of workaday compression. We can't keep drugging her and psychically putting her to sleep, Xavier wearily tells his old friend. It's inhumane. And it's hardly foolproof. And it's barely working.

I put my children through hell because of what I believe, Magneto confesses. I destroyed whatever hope they ever had, at a decent life ... because of what I believe. My war against the humans. And the truth is - I waged my war against the humans and I lost. And now I've lost my war and my children.

They're talking about Wanda, of course, who's been removed from the battlefield but still remains the prize of it: a biddable young woman who shapes and reshapes reality itself to her whim. Xavier and Magneto know she can't control her power, and Xavier - at least in front of her grieving father - can propose no alternative to what they're aleady trying.

But there are others no less involved, and when Xavier turns to them, this fantastic story starts in earnest. Because of course the two other groups of people concerned with the fate of the Scarlet Witch are the Avengers, her former teammates, and the X-Men, her fellow mutants. Xavier calls an extraordinary gathering of the two groups, telling them, I have made this special trip to New York to discuss with you an almost impossible matter. We need to decide the fate of Wanda Maximoff.

It's a mixed group he's talking to - there are idealists like Spider-Man, moralists like Captain America, and cold-hearted pragmatists like former villainess telepath Emma Frost and perennial fan favorite Wolverine. It's the latter two who immediately answer Xavier's question with hard reality: the Scarlet Witch must die. Someone do the math for me, Wolverine says, How many more of you does she have to kill before you snap out of it?

The rest of them aren't so sure, and eventually pity wins out and they decide to go to Genosha and try to talk to Wanda directly. But when they get there and approach her tower, the world goes white.

And when it resumes, it's radically changed. Mutants are no longer a feared and persecuted minority - they're the majority, walking openly among dwindling and well-treated humans. Emma Frost is a successful lawyer living in (where else?) Connecticut; Spider-Man, known openly as Peter Parker, is married to his childhood sweetheart and beloved of his Aunt May and Uncle Ben (the latter of course being alive in this world); Wolverine (and many others) are contended government agents; and then there's the biggest change of all: Magneto is no longer an outlaw master villain - instead, he's the internationally recognized leader of Genosha, ruling alongside his children and grandchildren - the House of M. At first glance, it looks like a mutant's paradise.

Naturally, it's Wolverine who starts to unravel it all (Bendis' only explanation is that Wolverine's had his memories altered so many times this new reality can't really take root ... ignoring what seems to us the more likely explanation, Wolverine's ever-present healing factor, constantly restoring him to 'normal'). He wakes in the arms of a woman he doesn't love, on a great government heli-carrier high above Manhattan, with flags of the House of M flying everywhere. In response, he does the only thing he can: he jumps overboard.

He survives the catastrophic landing, of course, thanks to his healing factor, and he immediately sets about learning the truth - i.e. stealing some mook's bike and going to Salem Center, to Graymalkin Lane: to the Xavier School for Gifted Youngsters, where the whole X-Man dream began. He finds it occupied by a normal suburban family who've never heard of Charles Xavier.

The government wants Wolverine back, and they send super-powered mutants to track and retrieve him. He's running from them when he's abducted by another group of super-powered mutants, this time a group of underground counter-agents who've monitored his escape and think he can help their cause.

The root of their cause is a little girl from Hell's Kitchen named Layla ("Like the song?" "No.") who can cause people to remember the previous reality and their lives in it. She's given each of these underground renegades that vision, and with Wolverine's help, they go looking for other recruits.

Their first stop is Connecticut, where they awaken Emma Frost. Bendis gives her reaction all the visceral punch he an, ably assisted by Coipel's enormously powerful visuals. With wild rage in her eyes, she growls:

House of Magnus! House of Magnus? Logan, we're gonna - we're going to find Magneto and oh! That is it! This is it! We're going to kill him! And his kids!

They awaken Cyclops too, but the real tragedy is still to come: Peter Parker. As long-time Marvel fans will know, the core set of Stan Lee/Jack Kirby characters from the 1960s have one thing in common: deep down, they'd rather not be heroes. With the possible exception of Thor (although even he would probably have preferred not being exiled from Asgard and physically bonded with a crippled surgeon), each of these core characters was turned to heroism by tragedy: the Fantastic Four (especially the Thing) want their normal lives back; Tony Stark wants his healthy heart back; Stephen Strange wants his surgeon's hands back; the mutants of course would like their afflictions lifted - but most of all, most heartbreakingly, there's Peter Parker, whose life is so full of tragedy that he can only benefit from the curse of the Scarlet Witch. His beloved uncle Ben is shot to death at the beginning of Peter's career as Spider-Man, and a little later his first great love Gwen Stacey dies during a pitched battle with the Green Goblin.

Say what you want about him, Bendis knows where his Marvel drama is to be found: the prolonged scene in which our renegades confront Peter Parker and awaken him is the most moving and harrowing sequence in the whole of the graphic novel. They find him out for a stroll with his Aunt May and Uncle Ben, his wife Gwen, and their little boy - long-time fans can't help but wince at the perfection of the picture that our renegades are duty-bound to rip apart.

And when they do, Peter's response is predictable: he freaks out worse than anyone has so far. But when Wolverine calms him down and gets him past the initial shock, what the normally-gentle Peter has to say is reminiscent of Emma Frost:

Logan, I swear to God ... I think I'm going to kill them. Magneto. His stupid daughter. I'm gonna kill them with my bare hands. I'm not ... I'm not going to be able to stop myself.

They organize (under the tactical leadership of Cyclops, since in this altered reality Steve Rogers was never frozen in suspended animation as Captain America and is a 100-year-old pensioner) and decide to take the fight directly to Magneto in Genosha. But before they do, some team-members voice classic Bendis misgivings (at least, they were once upon a time: these days it's sadly less in evidence):

My point is - when something of this magnitude happens - you have to step back for a second and and say: maybe this was time for this to happen. Who are we to decide how the world's supposed to be? When the meteors hit the earth and destroy a species - it's natural selection, right? Maybe this is how mutants become the next dominant species.

Misgivings or no, they go, interrupting the grand proceedings at Thunder Bay, where Lord Magneto is being joined by dignitaries from all over the world: King T'Challa of Wakanda, Princess Ororo of Kenya, a conspicuously unscarred Victor Von Doom of Latveria, King Namor of Atlantis ... and last of all, the House of Magnus itself: Magneto, Quicksilver, Wanda, the green-tressed Lorna Dane and the two little boys who are Magneto's grandsons - Coipel renders them all in pathetic Prussian splendor, the women with hair heavily bedangled, the men in epaulets with breastfuls of gaudy medals. It's when they first appear in all their finery that we're given our first clear visual clue that everything they stand for is not only corrupt but powerfully, quintessentially wrong.

Their grand gathering is terminally interrupted when Wolverine and his counter-insurgents crash the party. A furious fight ensues (as Cyclops tells his troops, they're literally fighting for everything), during which Doctor Strange discerns that the Wanda they're seeing isn't the real one - he spies a light on in her tower window and spirits himself up there to see her, finding her playing with her two little boys. As the fight rages below, Doctor Strange eventually discovers that the evil genius behind the Scarlet Witch's re-writing of history wasn't Magneto at all but Pietro her brother, and Bendis shows us the heart-breaking scene: the two of them, brother and sister against the world as always, the perfect coda to over forty years of watching these two conflicted characters in one incarnation after another. I'll take you from here, Quicksilver tells his sister.

Wanda: And they'll follow. No.

Quicksilver: I will fight them for you. I won't let them take you from me again. I won't -

Wanda: It's over.

Quicksilver: No.

Wanda: It should have ended months ago.

Then, a little later, in a perfectly-done sequence (Coipel's artwork here is very still and very heavily shadowed):

Quicksilver: We never had a chance. Magnus chose his 'mutant race' over us. We were just little kids, and he abandoned us. Even so - we fought so hard to get out from under it all.

Wanda: How was it supposed to be?

Quicksilver: We were supposed to be a family.

Wanda: Yes.

Quicksilver: We were supposed to be great heroes.

Wanda: We were, for a bit.

Quicksilver: I liked being an Avenger more than I ever said.

[for old-time fans, that line is worth the price of the whole graphic novel]

Wanda: Me too. And look what I did to them. I would do anything to take it back.

This line gives Pietro his horrible inspiration: he tells her she can take it back - that with her vast reality-altering powers and access to Xavier's vast telepathic powers, she could re-make the world so that they get all the things they've ever wanted. That was the genitive moment of the House of M.

Back in the present, the course of the battle has brought Magneto in contact with Layla, and when he learns that Quicksilver, in rewriting reality, also re-wrote him, his wrath is limitless: he effortlessly brings the battle to a halt - and then kills his son in a fit of rage. This shatters whatever tenuous hold Wanda had on sanity completely: she restores Pietro to life, and then in a wonderfully escalating monologue that wanderingly follows its own logic, she reacts to it all:

Look what you've done to us, daddy. Pietro was right - you - you ruined us before we even had a chance. Why would you treat your own children this way? Babies. Why? Because you actually think you're better than everyone else. The arrogance of you. You think because we're mutants we're better than them. That we deserve to rule. That's what you wanted and I gave it to you. But look ... look what it becomes. Even when you get what you want, you're still this horrible man. We're not the next step. We're not gods. We're freaks! Look at us, daddy! We're freaks! MUTANTS! You chose this over us and you RUINED us! Daddy ...

Off to one side, Emma Frost whispers, "Oh no ..."

Then Wanda says: "No more mutants."

And the world goes white again.

Bendis' storyline goes on from there to a final chapter in which everything has changed again: the world now has fewer than 200 mutants, and most of our central characters now remember vividly not one but three different realities. Marvel is still spinning out stories based on this new reality, some good some not so good. But House of M stands apart for its intelligence and old-fashioned Marvel might-have-been mucking around. We can scarcely imagine a better rendition of the essential tragedy of Magneto and his children, but we'll wait ten years and see if Marvel surprises us once again. In the meantime, comic book fans and non-fans alike have our strongest recommendation for this sad, bittersweet book.