Top 10 Marvel Comics Events Of All Time

6. House of M (2005)

Why it was good: The Scarlet Witch was becoming a problem, and while the heroes of the world were eventually coming to a (final) solution, they waited too long. What happened next was like holding a funhouse mirror to the natural order of things, with mutants in the ascendency and humans were the inferior species. The best part was that Brian Michael Bendis managed to give us an alternate reality that wasn’t a dystopia or a utopia. Just different — and with Magneto in charge, so maybe leaning just slightly toward dystopia. The series helped put penciller Olivier Coipel on the map, and it had an ending that flipped things around yet again with regards to the status of mutants in the Marvel Universe.

Why it didn’t rank higher: In the grand Bendis tradition, some parts were a bit slow and talky. There’s also the whole question of whether taking Scarlet Witch’s powers to their logical extreme was really the best idea (though he wasn’t the first writer to go that route), and it certainly left the hero who could manipulate probabilities far behind. Extenuating circumstances or not, should the rest of the mutants ever have forgiven Wanda for what happened at the end of this event? It’s a fair question. It was also kind of vague as to how wide-ranging the effects of House of M were. Did Earth bear all of the impact, or did the whole universe get changed?

How it had lasting effects: Obviously, getting rid of the vast majority of the world’s mutants was kind of a big deal. It certainly didn’t last, at least with respect to most members of the X-Men and their associated teams, but M-Day reset the situation for mutants in dramatic fashion. Marvel tried making something of the “missing energy” from all of the mutants who lost their powers, turning them into the villainous force known as the Collective (sorry Alpha Flight!), but that didn’t result in any memorable stories. The whole messing with reality thing served as a useful plot device to put some other players back on the board, like Onslaught. But most of all, this event made Scarlet Witch and the scary potential of her powers a going concern moving forward, something that continues to impact stories to this day.