Decimation: House of M - The Day After

[history79]

13 pages of 40

Comments

[lordultimus]

Blob got his powers back, though, right?

[beyondthefringe]

Yup. He got better. I forget how... mutant growth hormone treatments, maybe?

While I do agree that the number of mutants in the Marvel universe had increased significantly over the years (remember how in the early days, the X-Men and Hellfire Club would literally fight over every new manifestation, and every mutant was treated as a world-shaking threat, even if it was just Toad or Blob?) I do hate this storyline and what it did to so many otherwise good characters, as well as how it utterly ruined so many good ideas.

Xavier's School as a -school-, kaput... along with dozens of students who were depowered and killed, some of whom never even got to be more than a face in the background and a name in the yearbook.

The X.S.E as a team of official mutant police... gone.
The X-Corporation as a series of offices across the world to handle regional threats and issues... no more.
So many fan-favorite characters depowered, some of whom never recovered (Dani Moonstar), some of whom have taken YEARS to fix (Jubilee).

"No more mutants" was a hell of a game-changer, but it's always annoyed me for just how callously it handled so many characters.

[dr_archeville]

So here's what I've always find weird: according to Joe Quesada, the "Decimation" event was designed to reduce the number of mutant characters in the Marvel Universe, which he felt had gotten out of hand after forty years of publishing. This happened in 2005/2006.

But in New X-Men vol.01:no.115, published just four years earlier (August 2001), Cassandra Nova's Wild Sentinels slaughtered over 16,000,000 Mutants on Genosha. This was more than half of the world's Mutant population at the time.

So they'd already had a big culling.

[obsidianwolf]

Yeah I mean honestly at the time mutants were less than a fraction of a percent of the world population so that excuse always seemed like an after the fact explanation.

I'd imagine they came up with this new storyline and then the reducing the cluttered number of mutants explanation after the fact.

[thediiem]

The numbers are pretty bad around the whole thing. Even if you are generous and allow for for extra survivors of the Decimation, the number of mutants that retained their powers is no more than 0.01-0.02% (based on an overestimation of mutants keeping their powers from published numbers (400), the stated remaining mutant population before Decimation as "millions" (2 million), and the percentage that lost their powers in Decimation (originally published as "90%", later amended to "over 99%"). So given the pre-Genosha genocide, worldwide populations of mutants was at least 18,000,000 (there were probably nonmutants in Genosha, but we don't have any numbers for them), but probably not much more than that. I suspect the New X-Men writers pulled the 16 million number out of their desire to have it parallel the Holocaust in magnitude, but it'd be nice if that was actually dealt with somewhere. If 90% of a population with worldwide impact, that populated an actual nation just disappeared with physical evidence of their remains that still needed to be buried (remember Necrosha?), it would have an impact beyond being the hook for a book, and it just seems sloppy and lazy to handwave the repercussions of that away. Like, the Holocaust has social, political, and personal ramifications today. How fucked up is the Marvel Universe that this is a metaplot point that impacted lots of future stories and no one cares?

[icon_uk]

But, in fairness, almost no one in Genosha was a character anyone had ever heard of.

Quesada wasn't talking about the mutant population as a whole needing to be reduced, he was talking about mutants as neamed, usable characters in the MU.

I sort of liked the explanation offered in the Quasar title in the 80's/90's which introduced the character of "Origin" a cosmic entity who basically caused superbeings to be motivated to use their abilities, arranging the sequence of causality which would lead to people gaining powers (like Spider-Man) or be motivated to become a hero/villain (like the X-Men).

She was getting on in years in her then current incarnation, and tended to default to mutants because it was easier and less work for her! :)

[matrix_dragon]

"Quesada wasn't talking about the mutant population as a whole needing to be reduced, he was talking about mutants as neamed, usable characters in the MU."

Which always bugged me, to be honest. If you have a problem with writers using an easy, in-universe origin for characters power sets, tell them that they're to try and incorporate more science and/or magic origins for a while. Don't punish, encourage!

[icon_uk]

Oh agreed, it was NOT a good creative move, don't get me wrong on that score.

[mastermahan]

Decimation threw away so many good ideas, and replaced them with worse ones. Take Mutant Town, for instance. A majority-mutant district in New York City is a brilliant setting. and one well worth nurturing.

The biggest casualty, though, was the Minority Metaphor. Prior to Decimation, mutants felt like a minority. They could come from all walks of life, and they weren't all heroes or villains. Some were just teachers, or housewives, or fashion designers. Mutants had a culture.

How do two hundred people camping outside the mansion or hiding on an island isn't a minority, it's a statistical fluke. That's Tobias Fumke shouting "There are dozens of us! Dozens!"

[lbd_nytetrayn]

That's Marvel for you: They never had an idea they wouldn't walk away from.

[deh_tommy]

As much as I liked vampire Jubilee, why did that take nearly a decade for her to get her fireworks back?

[cainofdreaming]

Yup. He got better. I forget how... mutant growth hormone treatments, maybe?

I dunno if there was a period when he used MGH, but he was one of those mutants that Miss Sinister gave their powers back (or enhanced) with the Mothervine. He kinda turned into a blob when it malfunctioned, though. Dunno if he's been seen after that.

[broblawsky]

He definitely got his powers back before that, though. Either it was MGH or the High Evolutionary - not sure which.

I can't help but feel that declaring that repowering Decimated mutants was impossible was writing oneself into a corner. Making the treatment merely hideously time-consuming, expensive and unreliable would have been a lot smarter.

[nightauditguy]

Anyone else think that having Dani shed a tear is a little too on the nose?

[lordultimus]

Pretend the Sentinels are litter.

[crinos]

That's how they generally end up eventually anyways.

[tcampbell1000]

I'm sure others have already made a big deal of this, but what I can't get my head around is this:

Wanda said "No more mutants."

She didn't say, like, "just 200 mutants."

You could MAYBE read "no more" as meaning "nobody else develops mutant powers after today," but that wouldn't depower anybody.

There is no really convincing explanation for why this is a "Decimation" and not either a "Sterilization" or "Nullification," except the out-of-universe reason that Marvel wanted a more simplified mutant population and to change things up for the X-Men for a while, not to cancel all the X-Men titles or to give them such a long-range problem that it'd barely affect them at all before the next event reversed it.

Which, like, I understand! Books gotta sell! But... c'mon!

(I will stand corrected if this was in fact addressed somewhere. Can't read everything! But if it was, then I do feel justified in saying the explanation was severely under-reported.)

[flint_marko]

We saw Strange casting a spell when Wanda said "No more mutants", maybe he protected some of them.

[lbd_nytetrayn]

I'm pretty sure that was stated to be the case.

[icon_uk]

That might be at least a halfway sort of reason as to why so many X-Men kept their powers, they're the ones that Strange is most likely to remember well enough to specifically protect.

"There's the one with the wings, Cyclops, Storm, the hairy one with the feet... the one with the claws... crap who's the one with the sparkly firework-y things, oh no matter... rocekt kid, Magneto... Is the kid who does languages even alive? The girl who walks through walls, German teleporter guy... By the Vishanti this is hard...."

[tcampbell1000]

The image of Strange giving himself an impromptu pop quiz on X-Men continuity, and therefore a migraine, is the sort of thing that makes this all worth it. :-D

[deh_tommy]

What rather bothered me was how, much like Pro-Registration, what exactly "No more mutants" meant was inconsistent from author to author and book to book. Sometimes that just got rid of the X-Gene and turned you human, sometimes that just depowered you but for whatever reason still left you with your physical mutations, and sometimes that just straight-up killed you.

[icon_uk]

Tha's chaos magic for ya...

[matrix_dragon]

But Doctor Strange claimed there was no such thing as Chaos Magic, and it's certainly not something he ever used!

And then he lost his powers. And got better. And lost his powers. And got better. And lost his...

Strange isn't really that knowledgeable about magic, is he?

[agharta75]

As Senor Magico said, he's a pendejo.

[cygnia]

I really want Senor Magico on Netflix...

[scorntx]

(Ooft, but that's some terrible art there...)

Even by the astoundingly low standards of the Marvel universe's Bush government, Sentinel Squad O*N*E is a profoundly stupid idea.
First off, building Sentinels to police mutants, complete with a "yeah, we're totally a match for these superpowered beings who've been fighting our genocide robots for years!"
Then, having them built with Stark tech. Because Stark's got such a great track record anyway.
Then, they don't even seem to have any sort of screening process for who's hired. Even without assuming writer bias against the idea in the first place (which, given how ineffectual and / moronic the Squad were written as by most X-writers until they were finally written out...) the guy in charge is a racist nutbag, and blatantly evil anyway, raising all kinds of questions about how anyone allowed him to be in this position in the first place.
I mean, look at him. His introduction has him sitting in shadows so you can only see his shiny teeth. Only bad people can do that!


... shame that in the Marvel universe, this is barely even a blip on the Horrific-Shit-O-Meter of the Bush government.

[cainofdreaming]

Do 616 cops generally dress in SS-uniforms when they go to Jewish neighbourhoods too?

And they could have put some windows on the cockpits of those Sentinels, to keep people with powers from mistaking them as just robots which you can go to town on without any moral repercussions (You'll be hearing from the League for the Rights of Artificial Intelligences soon, Mr Summers.).

[icon_uk]

Hang on, LEGION was de-powered? I can't think of many people who have the haircut on the far right, except him, and early model Erg of the Morlocks, and it's definitely not him.

[scorntx]

Nah, that's Feral.
(There's a bit in the one-shot where she tries clawing someone, but she can't, because she's lost her claws. The tragedy of it all!)

Legion was still dead after AOA, and wouldn't show up again until 2008- 2009 ish.

[cainofdreaming]

I thought it was (the original) Penance.

Okay, I got 2 questions

[silverzeo]

1. In the cover-homage panel of mutants who still have powers and such, why is Cable's picture looks like he is in his teens?


2. The Sentinels. WHY make them huge and SO many in one open area? I mean, in the cartoons, they were big as houses, but they seem so huge that on the cover, the mansion is just half way up their shins... and that's just an angle shot! If this was used for the return of Godzilla, this would make since: He is a mutant that they would be design to fight. But no. These Sentinels are for security of the X-Men, which seems VERY impracticable to have so many in one area, it is like defending a house with cannons from a battle ship. Scary yes, but once a threat is in range, there is ALOT of blind spots to which they can miss, let alone those things would cause more damage to the house and area than needed security.

And I maybe jumping ahead... but HOW are these things helpful in way? I barely read any of the X-Men comics around then, but still, it seems like these things did NOTHING whenever something happened, they were just there for atmosphere and status quo.

Re: Okay, I got 2 questions

[scorntx]

-HOW are these things helpful in way-

They... weren't.
Okay, in fairness, once or twice they shot a bad guy who the X-Men probably would've been able to take anyway - some Shi'ar guy in Uncanny, and Apocalypse Sphinx-mobile in Adjectiveless.

But most of the time they stood around being useless, while Val Cooper and Cecilia Reyes' brother kept asking why the X-Men hated them.