Big finish! Pretty mig fake out of a cover, which was necessary since we see covers months before the comic they’re attached too in this day & age. Kind of a funny one, tho. Wolverine killed Magneto right before Grant Morrison started on X-Men in 2001. Morrison revealed Magneto was alive, then had Wolverine kill him again, full decapitation, no wiggle room. Then you know, he was revealed to be alive. Again. Maybe Logan could shoot for 3. Same inking trio as last issue. Well, anyway, establishing shots of Manhattan seem to indicate we’re back in the real world, and we zoom in on Layla Miller in her room, being yelled at from another room that she’s gonna be late for school. THE most random assortment of cover art from other comics is passed off as posters on her wall as she opens a window and looks outside.
What a thing to have lived through. You’d expect Peter to be haunted by this for a long time, but continuity is less of a thing now, so it’ll only really be referenced in New Avengers, I think. Meanwhile, in Westchester, Emma wakes up on the lawn of the X-Mansion, hears panicked screaming, and runs inside. For all that things were bad for people like Peter and Luke and Dr. Strange…
Kurt flashes all over the grounds until he finds Logan face down on the ground. He rouses him, and then there’s a page as famous as that “no more mutants” panel.
After decades of being a mystery man so mysterious that even he himself didn’t know where he came from. Wolverine knows his own history. This was prrrrretty big stuff. It also essentially ruins Wolverine, who is never as cool or interesting again. As with so many huge swings in the 2000s, it’s exciting at the time, one of the absolute most major “we can literally do anything now” moments of the era, but maybe not a good idea in the long run. Back inside, in the midst of the confusion, Emma runs into the “Cerebra” room (It wasn’t Cerebro anymore for some reason) and reveals to herself, the X-Men and the comics reading public that, on a planet Earth that used to contain a million or more mutants, their infallible mutant detecting device can find almost none. 198, to be exact, it will later be revealed. None of them were killed, just depowered…
…even the original X-Men can’t escape unscathed. And Xavier and Wanda don’t show up in a scan, not even as humans. At Avengers Tower, the gang is watching as the news all over the world reports on the sudden loss of power by nearly all mutants. And if you think that would mean a rosy outlook for the ones left, we see William Stryker, the anti-mutant religious fanatic from the famous God Loves, Man Kills graphic novel, saying this is the cleansing as foretold, and it’s up to the humans to finish God’s work. Strange says it appears only people who were in the psychic link and mystic protection of the good guy team remember what happened, and that he can find no trace of Wanda. He’s taking it hard, he feels he’s failed the world on this one.
So, the answer to “ if you died in an explosion in the real world created by Wanda’s hex, and then she reshapes the entire world and brings you back, and then she kills you in that world, also… are you dead?” is “no.” Hawkeye is alive. Somewhere. Meanwhile, in Genosha, an absolutely destroyed Magneto wanders the dusty streets, revealed to have lost his powers, too, when the Astonishing X-Men team arrives.
Rather conveniently, no active member of the flagship X-Team was affected.
“Where did all the mutant energy go?” is a question that is answered, then re-answered later via retcon. Well, there you have it. Perhaps the single most consequential Marvel event ever published, then or now. I mean, as I said, all stories with the X-Men in them are, by nature, X-Men stories, and thus the big changes are almost entirely to the X-Men world (This issue advertised the new “DeciMation” status quo for the mutant books start immediately after this), but it still stands. The scope of this was really off the wall. Some things important elsewhere happen, too, like Hawkeye coming back, and some other stuff that we’ll see later, but it’s mostly X-Stuff. But, I mean, recap it: Grant Morrison made mutants abundant, and to some degree, celebrities, and revealed that humanity would go extinct in 100 years, tired of the old “feared & hated” thing and trying something new. And like so many of the massive status quo changes of the 2000s, that was cool, for awhile, and then people kinda went “hey… being feared & hated is kind of the point of the X-Men…,” so this happened. Now there’s less than 200 in the whole world. People as iconic as Iceman and Magneto lost their powers. Wolverine regained his memories (And would go on a sort of quest to deal with a lot of his past, and meet the dopey son he didn’t know he had, Daken, all thanks to Daniel Way). Pietro becomes a villain, doing all kinds of crazy stuff, starting with a book called Son of M for maximum brand recognition. That’s some major, major stuff. Layla Miller would appear the very next month in an all-new X-Factor #1, and, now firmly ensconced in the X-World, would proceed to go to the future Bishop is from, come back a grown up, marry the Multiple Man and various other X-Men-style shenanigans.
This issue also finds Bendis beginning a thing I really think is silly where, when characters refer to an event story in-world, they use its name. Like what just happened wasn’t “House of M,” as people already called it in this issue. It was a world where the House of Magnus was in charge. People in comics never used to be like, “I remember when we were in those Secret Wars…” They would say they remembered being on Battleworld, or that they remember when the Beyonder kidnapped a bunch of them and made them fight. Now people routinely use the copyrighted name of the storyline, while in the story themselves, and I just think that’s goofy. And it’s not just Bendis, it becomes pretty commonplace. Well, anyway. There it is. The event they run the following year, starting a mere 6 months from now, will make this one look dinky in terms of scope, and it will have a huge impact on the publishing line, but in terms of massive change to beloved characters, not much tops House of M. And we’re not quite done with it yet…