Thank you very much for providing a multi-hour distraction. Now I don’t feel like I have to read the real thing (though it’s probably been 20 years since I last bought a comic book).
Very irksome. I wasn’t following Civil War closely, but I had enjoyed seeing Spider-Man able to consult Cap for the benefit of his Dad-like advice.
I don’t like the character, have never read a Captain America comic, and i’m not American, and I still think they screwed the character over. At least with him temporarily dead it’ll stop the OOC characterisation.
So who’ll be taking over for the short time Stevie-boy’s out? Bucky?
Actually, you’re supposed to feel good about it. Millar and Quesada were quite surprised to find that many of the fans, and their own writers, were actually against the team that attacked other heroes without provocation, drafted them into paramilitary action just because they had certain physical properties, and put folks who had put their lives on the line defending innocents into prison without trial, all to enforce a plan that whenever had been suggested previously always proved to work out to the benefit of the villains and/or was a racist plot against mutants.
This wasn’t a clumsy caricature of right-wing politics by left-wing writers. This is how TPTB at Marvel think America really works. Scary, no?
At the very least, they decided that registering superheroes was such a no-brainer (which is fair, the only thing really going against it is narrative inertia) that they piled on enough baggage to attempt to make it an even debate that Iron Man became only slightly more sympathetic than Stalin.
Well Millar is a Scottish socialist so how the hell do you expect him to portray America? If we had superheroes in the world then they would and should have to register. Now I’m not saying that we would make them fight in the military but then that’s just Millar trying to find some justification in making the pro-reg side the bad guys.
Anyways, terrible series that I’m glad I just shelf-read.
According to Wiki he’s not dead yet. In the one-shot Civil War: The Initiative, it is revealed that he is safe for now, but doctors are working to save him.
Thank you - I was starting to think I was the only one who hated that trash.
All the writers who are getting their asses kissed for being so great and so revolutionary and reinventing the super-hero comic and blah blah blah (I’m looking at you Millar, Ellis, Azzarello, and, to a lesser extent, Vaughn) are putting out shite as far as I’m concerned. None of the Ultimate books are even readable, and most of the standard books are headed that direction. I grew up on superhero books but I read almost exclusively indies and Dark Horse titles now. The only superhero books I can stomach at the moment are Hulk and Ghost Rider.
:Yawn:
Really. compared to Spidey revealing his secret ID, this is just not even shocking to me.
Besides, didn’t they just kill Cap off just a few years ago?
Anyway, it’s now obvious that Marvel is trying to destroy or heavily change all the mainline/616 trademarks. They’re not going to hit public domain soon, so I guess maybe it’s…
the Alan Moore-ization of superhero comics?
Erik Larsen’s mocking the “appearance of change” got to them?
some daft fool thinks the Ultimate line should be the “real” MU now?
or maybe by killing off the old stalwarts, they hope to invigorate the medium by getting attention on new characters?
Whatever.
No, it’s implied that Ms. Marvel’s lying through her teeth to get Spider-Woman to come back to Iron Man’s side, not knowing that the rift between Tony and Jessica is a bit wider than she thinks.
Marvel really screwed the pooch on this one.
They decided to keep it all a big secret, so they didn’t tell retailers that they were going to make a full media press. Didn’t print extra copies. They made some hints, late in the game, that something was going to happen, but the shops just assumed it was pure hype or that they were killing a secondary character like Bucky or the Falcon. So the retailers ordered their usual amount, and were unable to meet the demand.
Now, they’ll be second printings, but by that point people will have forgotten all about this, or will have downloaded the thing somewhere. This really only fuels the secondary market, which doesn’t help Marvel at all.
I roleplay with that guy on LiveJournal. Funny guy.
Wait a minute… Captain America was still alive? I thought that he and Bucky were blown up when they tried to stop that drone plane Baron Zemo was trying to steal.
It helps the industry. Any time comics are in the news - for any reason - people see it and go, “hey, I used to like comics - maybe I’ll go check out some new ones and see if I still do.”
I’ve never fully understood why so many superhero fans are antagonistic to superheroes with real world political opinions and real world social concerns.
I’m kind of flabbergasted people feel this way about Captain America; if there’s one character that’s a natural to critique the changing world, the political process, the power bought and sold for access and influence in Washington, the elites of the military, opinionmakers, media and corporate business, the frission between dying American traditions and newly championed values and grassroots political movements, the uniformed and apathetic, and how all that can be devalued and corrupted and what it means on several levels to be an American, you’d think Steve Rogers would be it.
It saddens me more creators don’t take advantage of the storytelling potentials of a superhero with political motivations beyond the obvious allegories of criticism of a sittig president’s policies and the trotting out of cliched approved stock villains, like Nazis. I liked the relevance issues of Green Arrow/Green Lantern, clumsy and clunky as they seem today. I like the environmental and social concerns in Paul Chadwick’s CONCRETE, I liked the vegetarianism of Grant Morrison’s ANIMAL MAN and Vaughn’s superhero as mayor conceit of EX MACHINA. It saddens me a bit more that more fans don’t seem to want to try more things along those lines.
Sometimes though, they are the easiest types of characters to portray. The loner, the rebel the guy with a social concscious etc. It’s a damn sight harder to portray the guy who just gets things done; who lives a good life and who believes in right and wrong. Imagine trying to write a nuanced, conservative super hero or someone with conservative or “middle America” ideals. That would take real risk.
Nuance is hard to get just right in a character, no matter what their political leanings (or the writer’s). I agree that youth-oriented angry rebellious characters are overrepresented and going to strike more of a chord with the typical superhero reading teenager than someone with middle American values. The only risk would be for comics companies to get a nuanced conservative character right. More often than not, most characters like that come off stogy and unrelatable.
Some characters, Superman, Captain America, and to a lesser extent Batman, are just too iconic to tie to specific political opinions. They’re larger than life, paragons of truth justice and the American way.
I mean, if you’re on the opposite side of Superman and Captain America, you’re wrong, just by default. Those guys are always right. You can’t have them take positions on controversial issues, or you’re putting half the population in the same category as Luthor and the Red Skull.
I agree that political stories can be told, and told well, with characters that aren’t so big that they’re automatically considered right.
Because 1)I don’t need a treatise on political philosophy from a shmuck who writes comic books and 2) I don’t need that treatise delivered by a character created by someone with more imagination and talent than the aforementioned shmuck will ever have, thereby bastardizing that character.
And that’s another very good point. Very well put.
Wait a sec…I just noticed on that parody page that anti-terrorist “Solo” was involved in the fighting. On the anti-reg side, no less.
Okay…what the hell is that guy even doing in the U.S, let alone getting wrapped up in this? Shouldn’t he be, oh, I don’t know, off fighting terrorists? Maybe I’m not a grandmaster tactician or a superpowered commando, but I’d think you’d have a lot better luck and a much better return for your efforts routing Taliban (or HYDRA) enclaves than you would at beating up Spider-Man for not getting his Spider-licence.
This is like—I dunno, a member of a superpowered intergalactic peacekeeping force roaming the backroads of a post-industrial backwater planet fighting civil rights abuses.