The Cheung/Dell/Ponsor team is back this month, with Jay Leisten pitching in on inks. And we’re in House of M, and Jessica Drew is still Queen Veranke.
Veranke looks out the window, sees the sentinels flying alongside the helicarrier, and feels sick. Like, literally, and excuses herself to go throw up and cry. They tell her to find Logan while she’s gone. Then we cut to Hank Pym Skrull, as he’s being told by Hank McCoy that he can’t isolate the mutant gene in House of M #2. This time, we see Hank Skrull thinking about all that’s happened to him as part of the invasion, and then the meeting in HoM 1, and then traveling to Genosha, and we see his reaction to Beast’s speech has nothing to do with what they’re talking about. I mean, how slick is that?
It all works! Before we go on, this is just for me, but I have yammered on this blog before about how some people fundamentally cannot draw the Hulk, and look at this:
Michael Turner could not draw the Hulk. That’s almost funny, it’s so off the mark. But, there’s plenty of other people who can’t do it, either, it’s not just him by any stretch. I think of myself as one of them. Well, anyway, we hop ahead to the big battle in House of M 7, same dialogue and all, with Veranke narrating to Hank that she couldn’t be the only one who wanted to kill Wanda. In the chaos, she broke away to go find her, and found her right as Hawkeye was struggling with whether to shoot her or not and got dissolved. Then she’s there as Wanda says “No more mutants,” and the world switches back in a big panel over which someone says “He loves us all.”
Veranke speaks of the Annihilation Wave. While all this stuff was going on in the comics people actually read (That’s mean, that felt rude. But true), Marvel was relaunching its space books with an event called Annihilation. Its structure was a wholesale copy of a DC thing called Seven Soldiers of Victory by Grant Morrison, which, rather than your typical crossover, was 4 separate miniseries, each by different art teams and focusing on a different DC property that could use a new coat of paint, but all working toward the same climax. Annihilation found Keith Giffen stealing the structure whole cloth, with minis focused on Silver Surfer, Nova, Ronan the Accuser and Super-Skrull all culminating in the Annihilation Wave, a cosmic apocalypse which, among other things, obliterated the Skrull Throneworld. This page is followed by a 2-page splash of the carnage in space before…
In a recent (As of this writing in 2024) edition of his newsletter, Marvel Executive Editor Tom Brevoort talked about the genesis of House of M. How Astonishing X-Men was late due to Joss Whedon being busy with his real job (Marvel just kept putting themselves in that position with Hollywood guys), and House of M was developed in part to make sure they didn’t lose money by not publishing expected issues of that book, and also to give them a chance to get caught up. The basic idea of a followup to Disassembled was put together, and eventually they got Bendis to write it. So it wasn’t even totally his idea, let alone something he had planned for when he came up with this Skrull plan. And yet, look how easily he made it fit. And Annihilation… he had nothing to do with that! But look how well it works with this! Good writers of superhero comics are sometimes able to make a bunch of separate decisions look like a grand plan, and it’s always prrrrrrrrrretty cool when they do. More recently, in the instant-classic Immortal Hulk,, Al Ewing did some truly remarkable stuff to unify the weird and winding history of the Hulk, especially an issue devoted to the life of the Leader that recontextualized 60 years of comics by dozens of writers into a narrative so coherent you could almost pretend it was the plan all along. It’s like a magic trick.