House of M #1

Trivia · 8 facts

• Written by Brian Michael Bendis and penciled by Olivier Coipel (inked by Tim Townsend, colored by Frank D'Armata); cover painted by Esad Ribic. Released June 2005, with an August 2005 cover date.
• The series is a direct sequel to 'Avengers Disassembled' (2004), picking up six months after Wanda Maximoff's breakdown destroyed the classic Avengers team and killed several members.
• Issue #1 opens on Genosha, where Professor X and Magneto are failing to stabilize Wanda's reality-warping powers, then cuts to Avengers Tower where the X-Men and New Avengers debate whether to kill her — the moral dilemma that drives the entire event.
• The altered mutant-dominant reality created by Wanda is designated Earth-58163 in Marvel's multiverse, paralleling how the 'Age of Apocalypse' (1995–96) temporarily replaced Earth-616 as the main setting.
• Layla Miller — a young mutant with the ability to restore suppressed memories — first appears during the event in House of M #4 (not in #1), and later became a core cast member of the relaunched X-Factor series.
• Wolverine is established as the only character who retains full memory of the original Earth-616 reality when the world shifts, and the event grants him total recall of his pre-adamantium past — a development with lasting consequences for the character.
• The event's aftermath, 'Decimation,' was explicitly designed by Editor-in-Chief Joe Quesada to reduce the overcrowded mutant roster; the resulting 'M-Day' and the spin-off series it launched (X-Men: The 198, X-Factor, Sentinel Squad O*N*E, Ms. Marvel, X-Men: Deadly Genesis) reshaped the X-Men publishing line for nearly a decade.
• Issue #1 shipped with multiple variant covers, including a gatefold by Coipel, a wraparound by Joe Madureira (released at Wizard World Chicago 2005), and an incentive cover by Joe Quesada; a 'Director's Cut' printing added behind-the-scenes material including Bendis script pages and cover development art.

Full credits

Variants (3)