Je me suis procuré l’Omnibus, d’autant que j’avais d’assez bons souvenirs de cet event, à l’époque. Punaise, presque 20 ans déjà! Le temps file à une vitesse…
Alors s’il est indéniable que les conséquences de cet event ont été importantes (je trouvais même que ça durait trop longtemps cette absence de mutants), le récit est moins bon que dans mes souvenirs.
On retrouve les travers de Bendis, à savoir son impossibilité à gérer une équipe. Les traumas du nouveau monde? On va se cantonner aux états d’âme de Spider-Man et Hawkeye. Certains personnages ne sont là que pour décorer, et d’autres juste pour montrer une version alternative. L’Ere d’Apocalypse était mieux foutue quand même, et là-dessus Bendis n’a donc rien inventé. Wolverine le chouchou est donc la pièce maitresse qui permet de recruter la nouvelle équipe, avec la ptite Layla Miller. Et puis une fois que tout ça est fait, grosse baston, grosse mêlée vite expédiée (en fait on s’en fout des pouvoirs des uns et des autres, on te fait une mega page et c’est torché), mais on a un petit twist quand même avec Quicksilver.
Bref, on a quand même 8 épisodes, mais il y a un sérieux problème de rythme et de narration.
Dramatiquement parlant, on est aussi à des années lumières de la saga du Phenix Noir.
Ce n’était pas la même approche : hormis les numéros de lancement et de fin, AoA concernait des séries avec des personnages limités et ces titres ne racontaient que leur histoire.
HoM a une mini-série qui gère « tout », donc très généraliste, et des tie-ins qui doivent creuser plus.
Bon, après, ce n’est pas la saga du siècle mais ça fait bien son office. La révélation finale sur Pietro fonctionne encore bien.
Et ceci expliquant peut-être cela
Trop généraliste. Mais même comme ça, ça traine trop en longueur sur certains trucs et ça raccourcit trop sur d’autres. Y a un problème de dosage.
Je vais m’attaquer aux tie-ins de toutes façons.
Je ne m’en rappelais pas et je ne m’y attendais pas. J’attendais pas grand chose du dénouement de toutes façons, mais oui ça fonctionne.
Le tie-in sur Peter complète bien.
Ils ont corrigé les horribles lettrages autour du moment clé du septième épisode ?
Parce que, sérieux, s’ingénier à placer les bulles sur des éléments du dessin alors que Coipel a ménagé des espaces afin de faire circuler les bavardages de Bendis, c’est un peu de l’acharnement dans l’amateurisme.
(Et pourtant, c’est Eliopoulos, pas un perdreau de l’année en matière de bullage.)
Jim
Il était peut-être en train de buller pendant le briefing.
A Comic I Worked On That Came Out On This Date
HOUSE OF M #1 came out on June 2, 2005 and was the first line-wide crossover that Marvel had done in about five years. Departed Marvel Publisher Bill Jemas didn’t have any interest in such things, but his replacement Dan Buckley , having worked at Marvel during the 1990s, was well acquainted with their sales power. But it didn’t start off as a big Event at all. After AVENGERS DISASSEMBLED had run its course, we had another of our regular Creative Retreats where we talked about stories and projects for the next couple of months. For whatever reason, in that Retreat there was a bit of a discussion about our big villains, with a desire to do some projects that would spotlight them. Ed Brubaker was convinced to do a Doctor Doom history called BOOKS OF DOOM , and it was a short hop from there to thinking about a similar Magneto-based project. As Magneto had taken off with the Scarlet Witch at the end of AVENGERS DISASSEMBLED , there was a definite interest in following up on that situation. We had the name HOUSE OF MAGNUS or HOUSE OF M before we even really had the story.
But there was a little bit of a problem. Both the X-Office, under editor Mike Marts , and the Avengers office, headed by me, wanted to be the ones to work up HOUSE OF M . And we argued over it for a week or two. Finally, one morning, I had an epiphany and went to Marts to tell him that he could do HOUSE OF M , and that I didn’t want to fight about it any longer. Of course, that’s not how things worked out in the end.
You see, the recently-launched ASTONISHING X-MEN was already having scheduling difficulties. I forget which show Joss Whedon was working on at that point. DOLLHOUSE maybe? FIREFLY ? Anyway, whatever it was kept him busy enough that he wasn’t able to steadily get John Cassaday scripts. But ASTONISHING X-MEN was a part of our publishing budget for the year, so something had to be done. The solve, as it turned out, was to do HOUSE OF M as a big Event series, and to brand it as NEW AVENGERS/ASTONISHING X-MEN . That way, the revenue derived from it would make up for any shortfall from ASTONISHING not coming out regularly. Joe Quesada did most of the legwork on this, approaching Brian Bendis and asking him to take this on, and agreeing to have Olivier Coipel draw the project.
And at that point, I looked up and realized that this was going to be a NEW AVENGERS project written by my NEW AVENGERS writer and drawn by an artist I had brought over to draw AVENGERS . And so I went back over to Mike , and told him that I had no problem ceding the project to him when it was just going to be a Magneto-centric series. But given these circumstances, I was going to be the one to do it. In this case, Joe Q agreed with me, and so HOUSE OF M became my project, the first in a long string of Event series that I would work on. (I had previously done MAXIMUM SECURITY , but that had been half a decade earlier. Still, it gave me some needed experience.)
HOUSE OF M was created as an 8-issue series that would ship twice a month, but by the middle of it, Coipel was dragging in the manner of John Cassaday , and so the decision was made to spread it out further. It was selling really well, and definitely more than covering ASTONISHING X-MEN’s nut.
The ending was conceived relatively late in the game. Brian had put forward from the start that we could use the transformation of the world into the House of M reality and back to correct any aspects of our continuity that we may have wanted to. I don’t know whether he had Hawkeye’s resurrection in mind the whole time or not—in every outline, the idea was that Hawkeye would be alive in the world of M, but would fight to restore the natural order even though he’d wind up dead again in it. It was only at the last minute that Brian turned in the final script that indicated that Hawkeye was still alive in our world. It had only been maybe a year since we killed him off, but I had no complaint with his return.
The bigger move here was in correcting what Joe saw as a mistake that was permitted to happen during the Grant Morrison run on NEW X-MEN . In that series, grant had increased the number of mutants in the world by at least a factor of ten, the end result of which was a feeling that mutantkind was no longer a minority, but a majority. Wanting to scale things back, it was decided that the Scarlet Witch would utter “No More Mutants” and an enormous swath of mutants would lose their powers in the restored world. I don’t remember who came up with the idea for The 198, but that quickly became the number of mutants still remaining in the world, most of whom would be gathered up at Xavier’s in what was essentially a reservation. I had thought that there were too many mutants as well, but I thought that 198 was too few, but that wound up being the status quo of the X-Books for several years, so it all worked out.
Wolverine also got all of his lost memories back, another thing that Brian dropped into a script without checking with the X-Office and which I had to untangle after the fact a little bit. But this led to the WOLVERINE: ORIGINS series and the introduction of Daken, so that was a plus.
