House of M: Now with spoilers!

I'm not going to review House of M so much as ruin the last page of the third issue for those of you who haven't read it. Before I do that, though, I do have a couple of comments:

This is an 8-issue miniseries which, so far, looks like it should have been planned for 4 - 6. I thought that six issues was the ideal size for a trade. If this is so, why didn't they solicit six issues? That way, Bendis could have written the events of the first two issues into a single issue. House of M #3 has all of the marks of a second issue. All of the setup has been done and now the action starts.

I have no problem with an entire issue in which "nothing happens" as long as that nothing is interesting and well-written. I don't need constant action and fight scenes but I do like to get to the meat of the story before all the exposition becomes tedious.

Now for the "spoiler":

Hawkeye shows up at the end of issue #3. That's cool and all but it's not really a big deal. Gwen Stacy appears in the first issue and she's dead in the "real world", too. Mutants are running the world and we're supposed to be amazed that Clint Barton shows up after being dead for about five minutes in comics time? Not really.

Having said all that, there is some cool stuff in House of M and I'm a sucker for "Elseworlds" stories but I'm not really impressed with what's going on so far. I had to restrain myself from calling this post "House of Meh". Oops, I guess my restraint is "Just OK".