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Thoughts on the "House of M" Marvel storyline
- Thread starter PhoenixAKG
- Start date
God.
I'm not gonna go "Old Good New Bad" but like, the blatant disregard for established mechanics of the universe just didn't happen nearly as much in the old days. It's unfeasible to worry about continuity to such an extent it hampers interesting stories, but you're still writing for an established universe with its own rules.
The comic or Rick Remender? He hasn't come out and gotten Warren Ellis'd or anything and he's moved on to have a lucrative and successful career as an independent comic writer optioning his stuff for TV, but his time on Uncanny Avengers was just some straight culture "guys we're all just people and trying to identify otherwise only divides us" bullshit and when everyone raised an objection to this he told them all to go drown in hobo piss.
This one got reversed with the Empyre X-men book where Wanda is desperate to find some way to atone for the decimation and massively fucks up resurrecting millions of mutants in the worst way possible.
Secret Wars was marvel's attempt to reconcile a ton of old continuity while still giving the writers latitude to write new stuff without being shackled by it.
In the most technical sense, they WEREN'T writing for an established universe. "Universe-8" *looks* a lot like Universe-7 and shares a lot of history, but it's not the same one.
Universe-7 is dead and so is everyone from there (with about a dozen exceptions). Terrigen being poisonous in Universe-8 isn't really that crazy a retcon since Infinity would have/could have played out differently- the incursions never happened in Universe-8 where they did in Universe-7.
Now I'm confused lol. So Magneto didn't know she wasn't a mutant nor his daughter? Then that is quite different.
It's an interesting story, maybe not good, but it led to an interesting time in the Marvel universe for the X-Men. I love the Messiah story that followed everything. Layla Miller and X-Factor, X-Men Legacy, Cable, X-Force, Necrosha, Utopia, etc. Great stuff.
Yeah at this point I just want Wanda to be kept away from X-Men writers. Nothing good will come of it. The actual consequences of her actions have finally been nulled, she's got a ratings hit TV show, we don't need to be shackled by a 15 year old story anymore.
So at the time of House of M the canon was that Magneto was her father, and she was a Mutant. Then a few laters in AXIS Wanda miraculously discovered she had no relation to Magneto at all and wasn't even a Mutant.
yeah remender, thought you were saying he was problematic or w/e
guess comic dudes just have a really hard time taking criticism
Correct. He didn't find out until Wanda tried casting a spell in AXIS that was intended to attack those of her blood (because she had been inverted into a villain and Magneto and Quicksilver were interfering with her.) Only quicksilver got hit by the spell, meaning Magneto wasn't her father. The "not a mutant" reveal came shortly after that in Uncanny Avengers when speaking with the high evolutionary.
Fun Fact: High Evolutionary made a hybrid Wanda/Pietro superhuman named "Luminous" that has the abilities of both to a greater degree but has been mysteriously absent since then.
I mean...the inhumans are *fine* for what they are. The inhuman royal family isn't exactly new and Black Bolt himself goes back to 1965.
What didn't work was turning the inhumans into a competing and nearly identical "race" with mutants via a roaming toxic gas cloud.
THAT was a massive misfire and everyone seems to be happy to forget it ever happened and move on.
I know that Juggernaut wasn't a mutant and that was the point of my comment
also yes Juggernaut has been part of the Brotherhood at times
It was definitely a last minute attempt to boost the profile of the inhumans as a property by revamping them in direct opposition to the X-men post Secret Wars. There was going to be some rather drastic character assassination involved that Marvel very wisely backed off of.
It's honestly one of my favorite stories they've done and I reread it multiple times.
Plus it gave us Son of M which was much better than it had any right to be
Plus it gave us Son of M which was much better than it had any right to be
Wasn't that only Chuck Austen's Brotherhood 40 years later? He wasn't a mutant while on that iteration of the team.
I liked it at the time, but I wasn't happy with what the fallout did to a vareity of other books/characters I really liked. Also I find Bendis' style has aged poorly with me. I think it would have been better as a more self contained alt. universe thing, like "Kingdom Come". Though it also ultimately led to the current line of X-books so I'm torn lol. I think I'll need to re-read it.
Wanda though is an interesting character as she's often on the side of the heroes, but her being someone who has God-tier powers + mental instability issues to deal with does make her terrifying.
Wanda though is an interesting character as she's often on the side of the heroes, but her being someone who has God-tier powers + mental instability issues to deal with does make her terrifying.
Which is kinda weird, like what was their justification for straight up murdering Mutants again? Where their people gonna die without this gas?
The Terrigen Mists were sacred and part of their ritual for Inhuman society.
That was their justification.
I don't think they even knew it would kill Mutants Black bolt released it to make more inhumans and inhumans kept it because it was sacred
When the inhumans found out they pretty much act surprised iirc
As far as I'm aware he never joined under Magneto, and other incarnations like Mystique's Brotherhood were more about personal gain.
Plus he got to hang out with his tree husband, Black Tom Cassidy.
Charles Soule, writer of the Inhumans vs. X-Men story, claimed in an interview that it was kinda like a person with a peanut allergy having to deal with other people who wanted to eat their peanuts, and if the Mutants wanted to live then they can stop being Mutants or go hide in a hell dimension forever.
They didn't need to flood the world with the mists either. They literally had their own way of making new Inhumans, and sometimes this way created slaves for their caste society.
There has to be a story somewhere other than that Fox had mutants & FF. Like, did an exec at Fox have an affair with a Disney exec's wife & they decided to go scorched earth on some of the most beloved characters in comic books? It's so weird how Marvel treated them.
He knew he wasn't their real father, he didn't know they weren't actually mutants if I recall.
The method they were given their powers basically created a false positive for the X-Gene.
Nope, it really is that simple. That's why MvC Infinite couldn't have Doom or the X-Men.
They even edited out the X-Men from T-shirts of cover art featuring them.
I'm being literal about the hell dimension by the way. The whole world had been flooded and the Mutants were congregating in a zone of Limbo.
Anyway it all worked out in the end when Medusa just turned the gas off and explained that the Mutants didn't have to be such jerks and instead told her that she was causing global mass murder, despite Storm telling her this exact thing months ago.
I went to check again and it was under Exodus and then under Magneto's clone
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anyway Wanda being a mutant was always iffy
she always had actual magic powers, not psionics or whatever
she always had actual magic powers, not psionics or whatever
It's not good. There are a million things wrong with how they handle Wanda and everything surrounding her. But even aside from all that, what really takes the cake is Magneto. Just think about how Magneto ends up as a fascist ruler, and then remember the House of M universe is supposed to be based on everyone's dreams coming true. There's a lot of horrible internalized shit that story just thrusts upon Magneto without a second thought.
Her powers is fucking complicated I don't know where her hex beguns and her magic ends
but isn't psionics only an mcu thing because it makes it easy to explain unless you count bad luck powers as psionics, her powers were she causes bad luck but then she learned magic and now her powers is basically magic
Nah it was just probability manipulation. She'd cause bad luck.
She only became an actual magic user in I want to say the 70s.
No I mean that "supernatural" powers achieved "scientifically" usually fall under the category of psychic powers, but wanda (at least in the comics) instead has affinity for actual magic so getting magic powers from genetic mutation instead of the classic esper is odd
According to her wikipedia article she was gifted an infinity for magic by the Elder God C'thon, separate from her probability powers. Her current origin is that she was genetically altered by the High Evolutionary.
Anyway X-Men has characters who were born with the power to control the weather as good as the actual god of thunders and shoot lasers from a dimension made of concussive force.
This is a LOT of speculation on my part, and I may not remember everything 100%, but this should give you the gist of it.
It's important to understand that at the time this all started, Marvel Entertainment as a whole was under CEO Ike Perlmutter, and Perlmutter was a combination of being extremely hands on, extremely vindictive and petty, AND an absolute nutcase.
Somewhere around 2013 or 2014, Marvel (and read that as Perlmutter) began butting heads with Fox over the licensing rights for the FF and the Xmen. It's unclear exactly *when* this started, but the complete lack of any merchandising for Days of Future Past (2014) (which *should* have had a ton) was the first big indicator. Coincidentally, 2013-2014 was ALSO the same time that Marvel began a big push for the Inhumans on the print side with the Inhumanity event, which explored the aftermath of Terrigen released across the planet as a result of the Black Bolt/Thanos fight in Infinity.
The aftermath? Superpowered Inhumans began popping up across the planet, exactly like Mutants did. This was setting the stage for Inhumans to work as a "4th pillar" of books as the X-men are and eventually lead to an Inhumans feature film that was Perlmutter's pet project, because Fox wasn't willing to play ball. The problem? It didn't really work. Inhumanity as an event and the follow up books were plagued by delays and the entire thing went over like a lead balloon.
Perlmutter aside, the print books had plans in place, and just about EVERY book was more concerned with setting up for the Secret Wars (2015) event that would "end" the marvel universe as it existed and soft reboot it into something else. Secret Wars was (and still is) the most ambitious crossover event *anyone* has ever done (it had an insane number of tie-ins) and as a result no one really cared about Inhumanity or the inhuman thing while that was ramping up and going on.
The inhuman books were SUCH duds by then that of the 50 or 60 (!) tie-in books that were developed for Secret Wars and ran for a solid year, exactly ONE of them had anything to do with the Inhumans.
So Secret Wars concludes, earth is rebooted, and as an attempt to salvage the Inhumans into something people would read by tying them to the X-books as antagonists, the terrigen cloud that had been roaming across the planet for about 3 years was retconned as being completely toxic to anyone with an X-gene, giving them an incredibly painful disease called "M-pox" AND sterilizing them in the process, returning mutants to the status of "endangered species" immediately after the Decimation had been undone and reversed that in AvX.
The obvious answer to this would be "then get rid of the cloud" but the in-universe response was a hard "NO" from the inhuman royal family. If this sounds totally indefensible, it is- and there's a reason for this.
The post secret wars "reboot" came with an 8 month gap containing a number of mysteries which would gradually be revealed over the coming year or two. One such mystery was Cyclops not only being dead, but also having committed some sort of insane atrocity that put him up there as the "worst mutant terrorist" of all time- past such genocidal maniacs as apocalypse, magneto, sinister, etc. The implication being that whatever Cyclops did was SO bad that the Inhumans wouldn't entertain the thought of working with the X-men for any reason.
now, keep in mind this storyline began in 2016, but was likely planned a bit earlier than this. Fortunately for all of us, there was a MASSIVE blowup between Kevin Feige and Ike Perlmutter (because Perlmutter is insane, crazy, vindictive, and controlling) sometime in 2015 that would have led to Kevin Feige leaving Marvel Studios entirely, had Disney CEO Bob Iger not personally intervened and restructured marvel studios completely so that it was no longer under the oversight of Perlmutter at all. Feige and Marvel Studios reported directly to Disney boss Alan Horn instead. This functionally killed the "Inhumans" movie that Perlmutter had been pushing to get into production as a way to promote Inhumans as an X-men alternative. It still existed, but would do so under the "marvel television" label as a much, much, lower profile effort that was in no way equivalent to the Fox films.
So- we have all this backstage drama with Perlmutter losing control of the moneymaking portion of Marvel entirely, and his pet project with the Inhumans that was meant to compete with Fox's X-men movies strangled in the crib and dead in the water. Perlmutter was obviously on his way out and the writing was on the wall.
Given all that, does it make sense to massively character assassinate Cyclops (and the rest of the X-men by association) into mass murdering terrorists to make the inhumans more compelling? Absolutely not. The "Death of X" crossover event that was to explain what actually happened between the X-men and Inhumans released in late 2016, revealing that not only was cyclops not involved in the inhuman/mutant conflict at all (he had died almost immediately to terrigen exposure, with emma frost impersonating him) but the "event" that caused the schism was the X-men turning one of the TWO roaming death clouds into...harmless rain that didn't hurt anybody.
This was clearly NOT what the books had been building up to all year (a number of things were directly in opposition to it- such as Sinister straight up saying that Cyclops was resistant to terrigen!) and had all the hallmarks of a swift reversal by editorial. This left the inhumans on the wrong side of a lopsided conflict, refusing to do anything about the roaming death cloud on the basis of "but we won't get any more superpowered inhumans" which is an insane defense given the consequences that were happening to the other side.
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which are all psychic powers or dimensional portals achieved biologically, the problem with wanda is that she is explicitly regarded as using magic unlike other even reality warpers that are among the mutants
even Magik acquired her magic powers separately from her mutant power of opening spacetime portals
Yea it was odd as I read every Spidey book, and it was strange how none of this ever gets mentioned or was talked about at the time. I found out about this all much later when I put a little interest into the House of M stuff.
You could see what they were going for with HoM. To revive the Gwen drama for Mark Waid's upcoming title (while also sidestepping Sins Past). But the main books were off doing their own thing at the time and Waid didn't end up writing one of the Spider-titles at the time.
When Hickman's Secret Wars came out, Peter and MJ weren't in a romantic relationship, and they played that up as a part of Secret Wars by giving people a tie-in that featured the Spider-Marriage with a kid (one who looked just like the red headed girl from One More Day). We probably would have gotten something that resembled Renew Your Vows as part of HoM if it had come out after One More Day.
As I just said, Wanda's magical powers were never a part of her Mutant powerset, and her magical abilities came from C'thon. The only thing her X-gene gave her was probability manipulation, and in the 70s she started become an actual sorceress which eventually lead to her having full on reality warping power. Nowadays she's just flat out a normal human who can use magic.
Magik herself is a good frame of reference. She has a Mutant power, but she can also use magic.
Ah, yes. Renew Your Vows. People went crazy for that one when it happened and it ended up getting a post secret wars ongoing series. Weirdly enough, that married peter first showed up in Slott's Spider-Verse in 2014, about a year prior. The writers knew what the audience wanted to see there and it wasn't subtle.
This isn't a great explanation. The short story is that Marvel has never really been entirely sure what Wanda's powers are and it changes constantly. Hell, in house of M itself, marvel has Dr. Strange come out and say straight up that there is "no such thing" as chaos magic at all, and it's all been her mutation the entire time.
AVX went out and reversed this, establishing Wanda's powers as being a universal nexus for chaos energy/chaos magic that put her on a level almost as high as the phoenix force.
Uncanny Avengers went and rewrote this further, establishing that she was not a mutant, with the High Evolutionary creating a hybrid Wanda/Pietro superhuman named Luminous that had all of wanda's abilities to a GREATER degree despite never having any sort of interaction with C'thon.
The post secret wars "scarlet witch" series leaned harder on her "magical abilities" being inherited through her mother and passed down her bloodline and not learned at all- which of course is in direct opposition to all of the above.
It is incredibly difficult to keep up with and what wanda is has never been consistent.
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Nope. It was literally "Why are we promoting other people's movies?
I know that, I'm just explaining, at least until House of M, Wanda's Mutant powers and sorcery were separate things.
Any character whose backstory involves the High Evolutionary is not something I fuck with.
I've read every moon knight run and imho that one is hands down the worst. It's wildly out of character for Marc and really just spends a lot of time spinning wheels. In a lot of the online Moon Knight communities I know, that one often gets singled out for making fun of. Moon Knight fans also like to pick on the Max Bemis run, but I actually kind of enjoy that one.
It actually is a bit more complicated than that, since it was clear after 2016 that the animosity was more of a personal thing for Perlmutter and not an initiative across the entire company.
Not one of Konami's better efforts in the 80s. Like contra, but with jeeps? Why