Civil War #1-#2

 

Welcome, nerds and nerdlings, to my review of Civil War, a.k.a. Marvel’s Identity Crisis.  Why yes, yes it is that bad, thanks for asking.

In case it wasn’t clear, hate is not a strong enough word for how I feel about this comic.  I think a lot of people feel that way, and that attitude is entirely justified.  Not only does it blow in its own right, it had such a huge impact on the characters that we are still dealing with the fallout today, despite the fact that it was published way back in 2006-07 and also that I really wish Marvel would sweep it all under the proverbial carpet.  I guess there’s not much room under there, what with One More Day and all those Chuck Austen comics hogging all the space.

In addition, I will not be reading any of the tie-ins because a) why would I want to, and b) I shouldn’t have to.  Tie-ins should be supplementary material that enhance the original story, not a crutch for the story to rely on or essential reading that is necessary to help readers understand what the blank is going on.  Let’s dive right in and see how well that goes.

…

So, how’s the weather been for you all?  Finally warmed up?  Yeah, me too.

…I guess I should stop stalling and get started, huh?  Sorry, this comic just makes me all kinds of sad.

We begin on the worst possible note, with a psychopath murdering a bunch of kids at an elementary school in southwestern Connecticut.  NOW YES I KNOW this comic came out years before Newtown, but that doesn’t make it any easier to read.  Let’s just gloss over this part, shall we?

Because the killer had superpowers, superhero Goliath predicts that things are about to get ugly for the cape-and-cowl community.  And I don’t mean the Hank Pym version of Goliath (Hank is Yellowjacket right now); this version is Bill Foster, a.k.a. the guy who spent 60% of his first appearance getting the tar kicked out of him by a KKK-style hate group.

 
I’m sure he will survive to the end and be totally okay and nothing terrible will happen to him at all.

To be fair, this isn’t a bad premise.  (Not the part about Goliath, the part about the public being angry at superheroes.)  It’s not entirely original, because we all know how civilians in the Marvel Universe have traditionally responded to mutants and/or people with powers, and it doesn’t involve complimentary fruit baskets.  Still, that negative response is what could have made this story work.  The public’s perception of the line between heroes and villains isn’t always clear or accurate, so it makes sense that the sins of a few—the Avengers weren’t called in to stop Nitro from blowing up the school because a superhero-centric reality show wanted to capture him themselves for ratings—would end up affecting everyone else thanks to widespread fear, ignorance and bigotry.  Heck, I’d go so far as to say that I like that premise.  The Incredibles started with a similar idea, and that movie kicks butt.  No, the premise isn’t the problem here.  The execution is what dooms this comic, and we’ll discuss exactly why in the next few weeks.

We skip ahead an unspecified amount of time to the memorial for the children who died at the school.  And the priest specifies “the children who perished,” so I guess no teachers were killed?  Anyway, not important.  Tony Stark is attending the memorial for some reason—I assume it was to show solidarity with the victims or something, but if the public is so mad at super-people right now, wouldn’t his being there just make them even angrier?  And if that’s the reason he attends, why is he the only superhero there?

Big surprise, someone at the funeral doesn’t react well to his presence.

Does... does she have one of Spider-Man’s web shooters in her mouth?

And now we know where J. Michael Straczynski got the idea for Superman: Grounded. 

This explains why Superman: Grounded was also terrible.

Spit Lady is Miriam Sharpe, the mother of one of the dead kids, and she makes it perfectly clear that she blames Tony—not superheroes in general, just Tony—for the tragedy because he funds  the Avengers, thereby encouraging kids with powers to do whatever they want.  Or something.  I’m gonna go ahead and assume she never read Young Avengers #6.

 

Yeah, that’s real encouraging.  Plus, as we all know, it’s always the rock music or the video games or the celebrities that cause people to do awful things, not the fact that they’re just hateful assholes, right?  Right.  But hey, the lady just lost her son.  We can cut her some slack and easily forgive this outburst with the understanding that she is justifiably distraught and therefore not thinking clearly.

Or you can accept what she says as totally logical and betray all of your friends based on her grief-stricken ranting.  Decisions, decisions.

Things escalate from there (or, as the comic helpfully informs us, “things get ugly”) when the Human Torch, a.k.a. Johnny Storm, is attacked by an angry mob while on a date.  In the wake of this attack, all the heroes gather at the Baxter Building to plan their next step.  Even now, it’s quickly becoming obvious that they will not present a united front on this issue.

 

Gee, I don’t know, maybe because it helps you do your job and protects your loved ones from the retribution of your enemies?  Didn’t we have this discussion in Identity Crisis?  And wasn’t it just as stupid there as it is here?  Face it, comic book writers: as much as you may dislike the idea of secret identities, they have always been and will always be a crucial part of superhero culture.  Stop trying to be edgy by insulting their usage with pseudo-philosophical questions like this.

Oh, and I couldn’t resist:

You all know Tony is an alcoholic, right?  That’s a trick question, of course you do.  You want to know what his moment of clarity was after he relapsed in the early eighties?  Nearly freezing to death on the streets of New York while sitting next to the corpse of a homeless alcoholic friend who died giving birth to her son in a stairwell during a blizzard.  And yet that was STILL less depressing than Civil War.

While the meeting descends into personal insults and Daredevil flips a coin like a bad ‘30s movie villain, Captain America meets with the current head of SHIELD, Maria Hill, about a proposed law that would require all superheroes to register with the government before they go out to fight crime.  And while they’re at it, will someone explain what the helicarrier is up with this artwork?

 
I’m pretty sure the line work is okay… ish… it’s just the coloring that’s bizarre and unnerving.  I think Hill is supposed to be making eye contact with Cap here, but it looks like she’s staring at something above his head.  Is there a bee buzzing around the helicarrier or something?  (Bees.  My God.)

Excuse you, the Avengers have trained with Captain America who, in case you haven’t noticed, is a real soldier, a.k.a. the kind of person I assume you’d want to train superheroes in the first place.  Plus, most of the more established heroes have years of practical field experience by this point, so the only people you could semi-reasonably point to as untrained are kids like the Young Avengers, who like most heroes, aren’t in it for the money.  Offering to pay them isn’t much of an incentive.

If someone wants to sign up to be a government sanctioned superhero, then fine, but there is no way that forcing everyone to do so is going to end up anything but an expensive, dangerous, highly unsuccessful disaster.  Eventually, it’s going to be more trouble than it’s worth.  Case in point: when Cap refuses to arrest any superhero not complying with the new law, Hill sics several dozen SHIELD agents on him.  It ends precisely how you would expect.

Now again, this isn’t a bad premise.  (Well, except for the fact that Hill attacked a guy for refusing to comply with a law that hasn’t even been passed yet—good luck getting this to stick in court.)  We all know that the government does expensive, dangerous, highly unsuccessful stuff all the time.  But as we’ll see in a minute, this idea is executed so poorly with no thought to the characters’ actual personalities that it comes off as an ill-conceived excuse for cheap drama and yet another HERO VS. HERO BATTLE.  Because we haven’t had enough of those, right?

A few days later, in D.C., a group of anti-superhero protesters has gathered at the White House with badly copy-pasted protest signs.

Inside the White House, the Cabinet is concerned that Cap’s actions could inspire others to rebel against the impending Superhero Registration Act (SHRA), but Iron Man, Reed Richards (no way am I calling that dimbulb Mr. Fantastic) and Yellowjacket promise that they’ll take care of Cap.

And this is where we really start to run into problems.  There is next to no character development from any of these heroes to explain why they’re siding with the government.

Reed supposedly supports this because… um… actually, we haven’t really heard from him yet, so I have no clue.  We did hear from the Thing, who accused Wolverine of giving heroes a bad name (can’t argue with that, I guess), and from the Invisible Woman, who said this:

 
Because apparently we’re ignoring the fact that Johnny Storm’s—a.k.a. HER OWN BROTHER’S—public identity resulted in his being hit over the head with a bottle.  I think it is time to be concerned now, nimrod.  I see why you’re not the genius of the family.

Yellowjacket supposedly supports this because of the talking head panel I picked apart earlier, which still doesn’t make any sense.

Iron Man supposedly supports this because of what happened at the memorial service (I guess?), but like I said, Miriam Sharpe’s outburst was clearly borne of grief, not facts.  Even if she wasn’t aware that Iron Man already tries to keep inexperienced kids out of the crime-fighting business, Iron Man should be aware of this because he was there when he told YA to knock it off, and he was also there all the times he’s stopped supervillains from blowing stuff up.  He has nothing to atone for here.

I guess you could argue that, since Iron Man is obviously against letting any random kid with powers wander around doing what they want, it makes sense for him to support the SHRA.  Two things wrong with that argument, though.  One, Captain America was just as adamant about the Young Avengers hanging up their tights, and he doesn’t support this load of bull cookies at all.  Two, Tony Stark is now working with and for SHIELD.  Yes, that SHIELD.  The SHIELD that has frequently tried to convince Tony to go back to making weapons despite his repeated refusals.  The SHIELD that succeeded in taking over his company to manufacture said weapons themselves (if only for a day).  The SHIELD that TOOK ADVANTAGE OF HIS ALCOHOLISM to TRY TO STEAL HIS ARMOR. 

THAT FREAKING SHIELD.

My point is that I don’t care how many distraught mothers spit on him, Tony would NOT work with SHIELD so willingly.  Or at all.  Heck, he’s been confronted by distraught relatives accusing him of murder before—remember the O’Briens? (Anyone?  Please?)—and he’s never reacted like this.  Even if he did agree that some kind of official restraints on superhero activity were necessary—which, for the record, I really doubt—he’d find his own ways of supporting that idea, none of which would involve climbing into bed with the underhanded, self-serving tools he’s spent years fighting against.  That would be like Bruce Banner agreeing to work for the military because a little kid stomped on his foot.

See what I mean about execution?  Just like with Identity Crisis, we’re presented with plenty of arguments supporting the utility of The Mask™, but all the arguments against it fall absolutely flat, especially because Nitro, the guy responsible for this mess, didn’t even have a mask, and the idiots who tried to take him down were reality show stars who plastered their lives all over television.  How much more public do you want heroes to be?  The secrecy of the superhero community is hardly the problem here; it’s pure old-fashioned greed.

Speaking of Nitro, have you noticed that everyone is now so concerned with reigning in superheroes in general that literally no one is lifting a finger to go after the actual child killer?  It’s not like he died in the blast; Iron Man explicitly states that the guy got away, and yet here they are bickering among themselves instead of doing their jobs and bringing in the real bad guy.  If those people outside the White House really care about “Justice for Damien,” why aren’t they pressuring the government to go after the guy who actually did the killing, not the guys who had literally nothing to do with it?

Issue Two opens with SHIELD arresting over a dozen criminals that were apparently defeated by Captain America, who is still on the run.  The sheer number of crooks taken down has Hill worried that Cap has found himself some superpowered allies in the fight against the SHRA. 

While this is going on, Sue asks Reed if he’s sure he knows what he’s doing.

Look at what he’s saying.  He’s calling his own friends—the people he’s known and worked with for YEARS—“social dangers,” all because a supervillain did what supervillains do best and blew up a school.  Of course the deaths of those children was tragic, but for crying out loud, these are his friends, colleagues, and coworkers.  He has seen firsthand the good they’ve done for the world even in the face of public disapproval, and now all of a sudden he thinks throwing them under the bus is the right thing to do? 

If Marvel was trying to create a situation where I could clearly see both side of the argument and have trouble picking one over the other, they’re failing miserably.  The SHRA makes no sense and everyone on the pro-reg side is an unsympathetic peabrain!

But thanks to the efforts of Mr. Douchetastic and the (by Happy Hogan’s count) thirty-seven other heroes who support this gross overreaction, the SHRA officially becomes law.  I don’t know what’s more awkward: this comic, or the fact that the Marvel Universe managed to get comprehensive legislation passed in the wake of the tragedy while we didn’t.

Is he breathing really hard or is he actually repeating “huff” to himself as he runs?

That’s Patriot, by the way.  Member of the Young Avengers.  He’s an unregistered hero who tried to break up a robbery and is now on the run from SHIELD.  How the heck is America okay with the government gunning down teenagers in their own streets?  SHIELD literally sets off an explosion in an office building to arrest this guy!

How is anyone still supporting this stupid law?!  Now the government is authorized to do just as much damage as the superheroes did!  Nothing has changed or improved, it’s just that now the people running amok work for the government!

Patriot and the other Young Avengers are arrested, but Captain America and Falcon are disguised as SHIELD agents and manage to get the kids to a SHIELD safe house known only to Nick Fury and, now, the rebels.  The rebels include Daredevil, Cable, Hercules, Goliath, Cloak, and Dagger.  Dagger is so concerned about the whole mess that she put her breasts on backwards.

She’s pointing at the news, where Spiderman is taking his mask off in front of the whole world.  This, while proving that Peter is a fickle halfwit—last issue he was complaining that having a public identity would endanger his family, and now he’s cool with that?—also leads to the only moment in this comic I genuinely like, which is J. Jonah Jameson’s reaction to finding out Peter Parker is Spiderman.

And that’s pretty much where Issue Two ends.  Thank Rao.

So I was going to go all Linkara on you and start screaming “THESE COMICS SUCK,” but I don’t think suck quite covers it.  This goes waaaaay beyond the boundaries of suck.  I’m not sure there are enough negative verbs in the English language to properly describe how terrible this comic is.  Everyone is disgracefully out of character—did the writer care at all?—the art is weird, and any initial promise the plot once offered is swiftly incinerated by the character derailment pile-up.  I sure am looking forward to the next five issues!  Aren’t you?

Next Time: The ugliest superhero divorce of all time heats up as both sides shore up reinforcements.  Because nothing tells you you’re on the right team faster than releasing Venom from prison so he can take down your friends. 

Images from Avengers #32, Civil War #1, Superman #700, Young Avengers #6, Iron Man #175 and Civil War #2