Alright, we’ve seen just how bad this event can get, let’s get Strackzynski’s take on the situation. Ron Garney, beloved Captain America artist, getting in on the “deranged with anger” version there on the cover. This one begins with Iron Man recapping the events of Civil War 4 to his assembled team, saying they performed admirably and they should be proud of what they accomplished. Any mention of Bill Foster’s death or Tony making an abomination out of his dead friend’s DNA is curiously absent. I guess to avoid spoiling things?
Weird glamor shot of Ms. Marvel. Garney has really just designed his own Iron Man armor, at this point. So, we go to this prisoner transfer, with Iron Man and Spider-Man prominently visible and everyone else more hidden, like a trap for the anti-reggers. As they travel down the street, Spider-Man looks at the crowds protesting for or against registration, lined up like it’s a parade, and thinks he’s finally out, on the side of the law, and doing the right thing, so why does it feel so wrong? Gosh, who could’ve seen this doubt coming!? It’s almost like they made Spider-Man the soul of this thing. Well, anyway, get ready for something incredibly stupid:
Man, Peter has been yelling about his Spider Sense to anyone who’d listen since 1963! Roger Stern tried to put the genie back in the bottle, treat it like a secret, when he was talking to VILLAINS, but with fellow heroes, he’s always been an open book, and that was before he lived with them and they knew him on a first name basis! Everyone knows about his Spider Sense! Tony has spent months doing a million tests on him! That is prePOSterous. Spidey was just yammering about his danger sense to the assembled Mysterios the other day! It is not a secret! Absolute nonsense. Staggering. Well, anyway, Spider-Man uses his TOP SECRET DANGER SENSE to feel Cap’s team is down in the sewer beneath them, so they switch to a backup route, which is blocked, and then another backup route, which takes them down Yancy Street, home of the famous Yancy Street Gang of the Thing’s past.
Our man wrangles those missiles into smashing into each other, then returns to find his guys fighting the other guys, with an editor’s note telling you to go see this same sequence from Ben Grimm’s perspective in FF 539. Also Garney draws a remarkably Romita, Jr.-looking Daredevil, because there’s that strange similarity I keep mentioning.
I think that guy running in the alley is the ski mask guy from CW 4, and I think that makes it a little more obvious who he is.
Civil War sucks, but I get to see Ron Garney draw Cap again, so that’s cool. He just really had a handle on that guy, look at him. When Mark Waid & Garney took over Cap’s book in the mid-90s, some people went so far as to say it was the character Garney was born to draw. Which, you know, is a bit much, but he sure was good at it. Look at this:
That’s just how you want Cap to look. Confident, powerful and effortless. The Waid/Garney run of Cap was cut short by the dreadful Heroes Reborn event, Rob Liefeld taking over Cap, the book going from being one of the best looking comics Marvel put out to one of the worst overnight. Heroes Reborn happened in a desperate attempt to juice sales on some important Marvel books that weren’t doing well. And in that respect, it worked, sales went way up. Meanwhile, Liefeld’s stuff (Cap and Avengers) was so bad he and his studio were fired in 6 months and Jim Lee, who’d taken FF and Iron Man with his studio, took over. When Heroes Reborn ended after a year and the various characters returned to the prime Marvel universe, Waid and Garney got Captain America back. Ironically, their run on Cap had already reinvigorated the book. It wasn’t selling on the level Heroes Reborn did, but it became a critical and commercial darling pretty much instantly. And then Marvel had to end it. Awkward. And when they got the keys back, they did good work, but a year had past, they lost their momentum. And then Marvel replaced Garney with Andy Kubert, again trying to get someone more famous on board, shunting Ron over to a new anthology title called Captain America: Sentinel of Liberty, which would tell untold tales from his past or something, where Garney only lasted a handful of issues before bailing, because the book was obviously superfluous and unnecessary. Damn shame, all that. At any rate, now, a decade after that first Cap run, we get to see his Cap in action again, and it’s very cool. If anything, it’s better here than back then, as Garney has grown a lot. Well! That digression was more fun than reading this comic! Spide-rMan webs Cap’s flying shield to a wall, but that was a distraction so Cap could get close and… jab him in the ribs? He’s wearing armor now. That seems silly. But, Cap’s been wanting to punch Iron Manin the helmet for months now, I guess he doesn’t care. Throughout this fight, Spider-Man starts using all the extra web nozzles on his wrists, at one point shooting 4 lines from each hand. So are those all artificial? 3 out of 4? Are they proposing he’s somehow funneling the organic stuff through all that? No one cares. Messy. Our guy can’t get over on Cap, who’s studied him too well, so he resorts to his silly 3 mechanical arms.
Gee whiz, I think our guy’s gonna switch sides! “It’s the law!” Slavery was the law once. Gay people not being allowed to marry was the law as this came out. “The law” is often wrong. That’s how this was so often framed, “it’s the law.” Rather than “Deciding to pull on a mask and go out into the night looking for people to beat up was never legal in the first place, and for good reason.” You could make a much stronger argument for registration that way. But no one bothered. They touted this book as dealing with complex political topics ripped from the headlines (Of years prior), but the political and social philosophy in the event is rarely even talked about, let alone adequately supported. “It’s the law!” To me, the thing is simply… since the 60s, Marvel Comics has known that fans like to see their heroes fight. DC heroes never fought each other back then, it made Marvel stand out. And all your little kid “Who would win in a fight?” questions could be answered… temporarily. “Two heroes fight over a misunderstanding” is such a standard cliche because it sold books. In this allegedly more enlightened time, “two heroes fight over a misunderstanding” is harder to sell. But that doesn’t mean fans don’t want to see the heroes fighting. So they instead decided to saddle the need for the good guys to fight with this really naive “political argument” where both sides seem like idiots. I think I would’ve preferred mass mind control as a reason for them all to fight… Bring the Beyonder back or something. Leave the political philosophy to people smarter than Mark Millar. Ah, well. As always with my grousing about how asinine this event was, I can’t argue with the numbers. I am clearly in the minority, so what do I know? Fans got to see the heroes fight, sales were massive, mission accomplished. Next post, I’ve decided to do something I’ve never done before on the ol’ blog.