House of M - Atop the Fourth Wall

Welcome to Atop the Fourth Wall, where bad comics burn. In this episode, Linkara continues Event Comics Month 3 with Marvel's mutant-shattering event House of M!

Originally released July 13th, 2020.

ORIGINAL DESCRIPTION: House of Meh.

#at4w #HouseOfM #EventComicsMonth

[amiablereaper]

I love how Scarlet has next to no agency *in a story where she rewrites reality*

[jamiekyrin]

Linkara, as a DC fan, you should know that the discipline of psychology is not highly regarded in comics. Easily half the people that Batman has punched over his whole career have had advanced degrees in psychology.

[ZeldaTheSwordsman]

Magneto's dark, emotionless face about the boat could have worked of a symbol of "This is a puppet-show fantasy and deep down part of him resists the false happiness"

[themaplesamurai]

Funny thing about Linkara's joke about how superheroes come back to life so often that murder shouldn't even be prosecuted in comic book universes: when Metamorpho died at the start of Grant Morrison's JLA run, they show his funeral's poor attendance, and the pastor at said funeral admits that not a lot of people come to superhero funerals anymore because no one expects them to stay dead.

[comicking]

Fun fact: Magneto's outfit in House of M is based on Spanish King Juan Carlos. It was originally going to be his DLC costume in Ultimate Marvel vs Capcom 3, but Spain threatened legal action upon seeing it, leaving Magneto as the only character in UMVC3 without a DLC costume.

[artemiswolf]

I love how casually Peter’s trauma is thrown in, as if he needed any more.
I imagine a movie version of this event where there’s a scene of wolverine and the others talking and in the background you can see Peter miserably banging his head against the table.

[kallisto]

No matter how bad a day you're having, you've still got it better than Scarlet Witch

[cafeterialoca]

"Bendis forgot to double check"
Silly Linkara! Bendis never reads other writer's books!

[SwiftGundam]

"Energy can not be created or destroyed." Yeah, because superheroes haven't done the physically impossible or just said 'no' to the currently understood laws of physics/the universe before.

[eggman]

Yes, Jessica Drew was indeed still a Skrull at this point, and that's why she was on board with the "let's just let this reality be" plan, because the Skrull empire was better off there.

[carloszapata]

11:34
Charles Xavier has a PhD in Psychology and an M.D. in Psychiatry.
Unfortunately, he is not allowed to show that outside of the movies for some reason. X-Men: First Class was probably the movie were his talent shines the most.

[SCWRMComms]

Fun fact: this was the starting point of a very terrible period for Jubilee, out of which she got only very recently. Basically, with M-Day she lost her powers, then got a generic gadget suit when she joined the New Warriors with the name Wondra for a while, and then got vampirified by Dracula's son, Xarus, using her as a tool for trying to overthrow his father. It took the pity of Quentin Quire (Kid Omega, in case you need another name) and some of the Phoenix Force to restore her to pre M-Day mutant, powers and all, and out-of-universe, this lasted for more than a decade.
The only respite was that in all of this, she adopted a baby, and stories about that period were generally well written, but still. I know that she didn't had too many fans especially thanks to her portrayal in the '90s animated series, but she got hit hard by all of this.

-Teo

[ZWolf]

A bit late, but here's a list of reasons why there genuinely might not be civilian specialists catering to superhero stuff, all of which kinda support each other, please try to read the whole thing the first point is definitely the weakest, but it leads into others:

1. Economies of Scale - The Marvel universe has an insane number of heroes... by the standards of a narrative. But in absolute terms take every named, established hero and you've got maybe a small town's worth of people stretched across the entire planet. 'Superhero Doctor' would not be a feasible career path; if a total of like 20 people took that route, the industry would already be filled entirely; and so nobody can feasibly offer such a facility and DEFINITELY can't offer training for such.

2. Dangerous Power Imbalances - continuing on from the last one, obviously Tony Stark or some other quite frankly insultingly rich super could just pay for an entire illogical industry to exist, but in doing so it would basically give him the kind of power over the greater superhero community that they've fought against him getting like three times now. Breaking doctor patient confidentiality is a high crime, but throw a doctor to ALL the superheroes in the mix - particularly someone who's normal and therefore can't defend themselves when the villains come knocking - and the crime actually becomes so high that it can no longer be punished. A therapist can't ruin a hobo because the police will come down on him. Superheroes are already effectively the highest enforcing body in the land, and there's no big brother that can watch over them if some of their dark secrets start getting out.

3. Logistics - so, you can solve the first two by just finding a rare and special individual who is naturally geared to do it; rather than trying to pick from an industry; and you can solve the second by just ensuring perfect - PERFECT - secrecy AND finding an individual of inhuman ethical standard. Great! ...How? How could somebody who did want to set up a superhero doctor possibly go about finding an appropriate candidate across the whole entire world. How exactly would they vet a candidate for a field that does not exist without creating public awareness of what they're making and thereby endangering the whole project? Just ask Heimdal really nicely and trust what he says? Just because it makes sense that a specific thing exists doesn't mean you can find it.

4. Different Superheroes are not the Same - Nephrologists exist because a kidney is pretty much always going to be a kidney. There are different diseases that affect it. There are different blood types and allergies that affect how the body reacts to treatment. But it's always pretty much gonna be a kidney and you can use the same knowledge set for each. Get a superhero dermatologist to try and look at The Thing, Mister Fantastic, Luke Cage, and The Hulk and he's gonna be telling at least one of those guys 'I have no fucking clue what I'm looking at and don't know what you want from me.' This isn't as big a problem for pure psychology, per se, but it absolutely is for pregnancy given that even in the examples you mentioned one of the pregnancies is caused by a disembodied demon soul, and the other one is caused by *subtly different demon shenanigans*. You could find a specifically demon-based pregnancy specialist, but then you're asking for somebody trained in a deliberately difficult skillset that has come up a single digit number of times ever.

5. 'Normal' doesn't work that way - So to tie up all of this; in order to have a doctor for superheroes that would realistically work out; you would have to find somebody of perfect morals, who can keep things secret that everybody wants to know for like fifty years, who just seemed to show up when the world needed somebody with those qualities because there'd be no story otherwise, whose idea of a science degree is being amazing at dealing with like 20 wholly disparate concepts that should really all require their own training and at best fit a general theme, and who has enough luck and general favor of the universe to not just die during any of the myriad unreasonably dangerous things that probably shouldn't be survivable. You know what we call people like that? A SUPERHERO.

Yeah, it seems if there's a demand for something it should probably exist after fifty years; the problem is that at some point it did have to START existing and there are a lot of reasons why that'd be a disaster.

[Djinsin]

Here’s a thought: WHY HAS NO ONE MADE A SERIES ABOUT DOC SAMSON BEING A THERAPIST/PSYCHIATRIST TO SUPERHEROES??? Seriously, I would read the crap out of a series where Doc Samson has a session with well-known superheroes, or even lesser known ones, and discussing what it’s like to live their lives alongside their superhero duties, how it’s affected them personally, and why they still fight the good fight despite all the pain and heartache it’s caused them (provided it didn’t suck and was handled properly). AM I THE ONLY ONE CLAMORING FOR THIS IDEA????

[nicodemusedwards]

House of KAIBA BOY!


Edit: I’ll leave now.

[spyrofan]

The saddest part in this for me is all those little mutant kids at the academy at the end who lost their powers, who just lost a huge part of their identities and who are probably about to lose this really close knit family they have at the school.

[sammcguire]

"I don't think any of them are coming back."

*Laughs in Jonathan Hickman*

[michaelkeenan]

11:25 I remember a What If? comic where jessica jones joins the avengers and basically figures out that the scarlett witch is going through trauma off the bat and pushes for psychiatric help for her negating the whole incident, but then elseworld comic.

[LILFOC]

Considering Quicksilver was desperately trying to save his sister's life with no gain to himself when half the heros did vote to kill her doesn't really seem that villainous to me. Everyone in House of M is culpable for what happened...it's just the Maximoff twins get the blame for everything!
Also the magneto parentage retcon was stupid AF

[kyuven]

House of M as a story was OK to me.
House of M as an event ROYALLY pissed me off. Because my favorite comics at the time were the X books, and reducing mutants to only 198 individuals effectively killed (metaphorically for most, LITERALLY for others) all storytelling potential of a school for mutants that had been running in comics before.
Joe Quesada effectively did to the X-books what he did for Spider-Man: He forced them back to a time when they were limited to a smaller cast while at the same time giving the entire setting a brand new deluge of pointless conflict that distracted from the pre-existing conflict.
It also, for SEVEN YEARS, limited the number of new X-Men characters that could enter the setting. Sure having a lot of mutant characters was a bit of a problem, since there were so many, but that was also the appeal.
IMO an event comic should create the potential for MORE stories, not reduce it. Crisis on Infinite Earths did it too, but they only trimmed universes, they didn't remove an entire character archetype from ever appearing again.
House of M was to Marvel what devastating the Green Lantern Corps. was to DC.

Also by making mutants the dominant number, House of M basically created My Hero Academia almost 10 years early.