Yeah, I made my own epilogue out of 4 comics. What an industrious block of posts for me. Now that the smoke has cleared, there’s a few more things to see. To open, it’s FF 543, which, hilariously, absolutely hilariously, finds the title celebrating its 45th anniversary with a fill-in writer and a team shattered by this stupid event. And not only that, but due to all the delays with the main title, the actual anniversary has come and gone by the time this gets out into the world. What incredible timing. What a disaster. This is the only issue of this run I bought on release. It tees up the next run, so I got it.
Same creative team as last issue. The premise is Ben, Johnny, Franklin and Valeria sitting down to watch TV, because what’s on TV is…
So, various talking heads start sharing their insights on the origin of the team for a couple pages.
Hey, you want to see something absolutely horrendous that John Byrne did during what is widely regarded as the 2nd best run of FF ever? Since we’re here?
Yes! He had Reed & Sue’s romance begin with she was a CHILD. There’s a lot of EXTREMELY creepy age dynamics in Byrne’s career, which I think I touched on during that whole Spider-Woman fiasco. It’s a pathology.
Spoilers: It will totally be the same, once they’ve had a chance to get some distance from this disaster of a storyline. On TV, T’Challa, Namor and even Doom discuss Doom’s rivalry with Reed, which makes Ben throw his popcorn at the TV. This causes some traditional Thing V. Torch cartoon violence, wherein they learn the kids bet on who’s going to win. On TV, Willie Lumpkin, of all people, takes us through the coming of Galactus. Oh, and this guy shows up:
McKone just flipping and enlarging that Spidey head seems pretty lazy. The show talks to Luke Cage, Sharon Ventura and She-Hulk, all former members of the FF. Then there’s footage of Ben, Johnny and Sue on various TV chat shows. Then Wolverine and Tony Stark weigh in (Wolverine? The guy who refused to let the world know he was an Avenger because of his own bad rep? He’s giving TV interviews?).
The show winds down, Johnny and Ben discuss the future of the team, we learn the FF was given the key to the city for the zillionth time today for their anniversary, and then Reed & sue show up.
And so, Dwayne McDuffie is setup for his brief but excellent run as FF writer. Joined by penciller Paul Pelleiter, he covered the adventures of this version of the FF while also covering Reed & Sue making up. He brought in classic villains, did a cool Dr. Doom thing, and everything old seemed fresh with this new team composition. But… Comics never treated McDuffie right. In truth, his run on this title was mostly just keeping it on the stands until the Ultimates team of Mark Millar and Bryan Hitch had enough material in the can to avoid Civil War-style delays. So McDuffie gets all of 10 issues before being shuffled off to the side to make way for the big names. And his run is SO much better than Millar’s. Obviously. It’d almost have to be. Also the Millar/Hitch team started missing ship dates pretty immediately, and their run ended with a co-writer and a new artist finishing. Embarrassing. As a big anniversary issue, this contains 3 stories, the main one and a couple spares. The spares are pretty noteworthy, as one is written by Stan Lee and one is by Paul Pope. And, frustratingly for me, as I’m trying get on with it, it features Spider-Man, so… let’s look at that. Pope is colored by Jose Villarubia in a tale set in the old days. After a couple pages establishing the Torch/Spider-Man rivalry…
So, Johnny is getting ready to start his race when he sees Spider-Man is there. And it makes him so mad…
They keep fighting for a bit until Spidey lands at the feet of Crystal, this being during the time she and Johnny were dating, and this upsets Johnny even more even tho it was a coincidence.
Well, that was cute. Pointless, but cute. Next up, we simply have to look at Captain America 25. We really do.
I don’t recall how I wound up with this variant cover instead of the normal one. Maybe the shop just decided to give it to me, I don’t know. This image would later be the cover of a Taco Bell giveaway, amusingly, but the contents were different. Steve Epting is back penciling and inking here. Amusingly to me, the first caption here is “Everyone knows the story of Steve Rogers.” Tell that to newly revealed superfan the Punisher! That’s over the beginning of 3 pages recapping Cap’s origin.
We learn his hearing is going to be broadcast on TV, and see a crowd of protesters for and against gathered. Hidden among them is Sharon Carter, working with Nick Fury, preparing to spring Cap before he can go to prison. Sharon flashes back to her extremely complicated history with Cap for a few pages…
…then Bucky flashes back to HIS history with Cap for a few pages. Cap is pushed through the mob of reporters and protestors yelling at him, and then…
(That’s the aforementioned Aleksander Lukin, who is sharing a body with Red Skull)
Yeah, man, this is happening. Bucky doesn’t find the sniper, but he’s perfectly placed for Falcon to arrive and think he did it. They tussle for a sec until Falcon sees he’s wrong, then they team up to chase the sniper with Fury giving Bucky directions. On the ground, Steve is being wheeled into an ambulance, Sharon at his side. Fury guides Sam & Bucky to a news chopper with Crossbones, Red Skull’s long-time muscle, inside. Bucky shoots it up, and Crossbones dives out, grabbing him out of Sam’s arms and sending them plummeting.
That’s Sin, the Red Skull’s daughter, who Brubaker brilliantly reinvented for this run. She switches into a nurse’s uniform to infiltrate the hospital Steve is going to as Bucky beats Crossbones within an inch of his life.
Cap is being raced to the hospital, and it looks bad. The news lady takes back over as we see Sharon and Falcon in the hospital waiting room. Sam finally gets his own flashback to his past with Cap, thinking he’s not ready for a world without Steve in it…
Now THAT is a shocking comic book. For all that Mark Millar delights in his shocking twists, he presents them with all the gravitas of a child who just told a joke. This comic makes you read it as fast as possible, even if you’ve read it before, because of its intensity. And Captain America is really dead. Or as dead as one can be in comics. He’s gonna be gone a long time. And what does that mean for the future? We’ll see, as it happens, at least to some degree. Oh, hey, since I have it right in front of me, PWJ 5…
Ends like this…
Crazy Frank Castle’s response to Cap’s death is to create his own Captain America costume and pick up the mantle, sort of, in his own crazy, murderous way. I used to call him Captain Punishamerica. It only lasts a few months, but it’s wild. Well, in the wake of that shocking revelation, we can very briefly look at Civil War: The Confession:
Bendis and Maleev bookend this event with the Illuminati and Confession one-shots, prelude and aftermath. Maleev colors the first half by himself, aided by Jose Villarubia on the backend. And Maleev is drawing the wrong Iron Man armor throughout, and even does a swipe from Granov on his first page, one of the same covers Deodato swiped in ASM. Modern Iron Man gives people so much trouble. It begins with Iron Man, Director of SHIELD, arriving at the helicarrier, asking if “he’s here,” turning off his armor’s global communications systems, and sitting down.
Tony flashes back to a famous bit of the Michelinie/Layton/Romita, Jr. Iron Man run where time travel hijinks put him and Doom in the time of King Arthur. It’s one of those famous stories Bendis references over and over in his, clearly a formative one for him. Tony teamed up with Arthur and his knights against Doom, Morgan Le Fey and her undead hordes. He goes on to say that it was during this time that he foresaw a superhero civil war. See, Bendis had this weird, weird idea of what a “futurist” was. To him, it was someone so smart and so good at assessing situations that he could literally see the future. Which is ridiculous, but it’s comics, I guess Tony can be a SUPER futurist. So, he knew they’d all come to blows over something eventually, and he began trying to prevent it. It’s why he formed the Illuminati. But when he saw the Registration Act, he knew this was it.
Sad! Sad times all around. Bendis really getting the Iron Man side of it all. But there’s more to this book, as we flashback to 2 days ago to find Steve Rogers getting locked up. He puts up no fight, of course. He asks his guard how old he is.
Tony comes to see his prisoner. He asks the guards to leave, then tells Steve he begged him to stop.
That’s not even what Cap himself said in Civil War 7, but there’s no point in asking for consistency from this event.
And, you know, that’s a pretty good summation of the Captain America side, too, a war fought over “you’re not the boss of me.” Well, now he’s dead, and registration is the law, and it’s time to see what the Marvel U will be like. Thusly, finally, it’s Civil War: The Initiative, sort of a comic, mostly a series of ads for what’s coming next. Because Civil War was a new kind of event for Marvel, and its success ensured it was not the last: One in which the point isn’t necessarily the event, but the status quo it creates. For years after Civil War, Marvel settles into a familiar, increasingly exhausting pattern. Every summer, an event blows up the status quo, and until next summer, we watch the entire publishing line live in a new status quo. Then they blow that up. Rinse, repeat. Initially, this was an exciting thing. It was the most cohesive Marvel U ever, in many ways, a truly shared universe. On the other hand, almost every comic was now telling the same story, and that got old fast, especially in the wake of the event after this one. By the time Marvel gave events a break, burnout was real. But also, sales went down, so events had to come right back. Some of them were smaller, some not. This sort of massive metaevent continued to happen at least every couple of years right through to today, where as I type this, Marvel is gearing up to launch Blood Hunt, a vampire-themed crossover with a preposterous 56 announced tie-ins and counting before the first issue has hit the stands.
But this isn’t about that, it’s about the Initiative. Welcome back to the blog Marc Silvestri. Last seen briefly drawing Web of Spider-Man before getting whisked off to the X-Office and mega-stardom in the mid-80s, he’s since co-founded Image Comics, seen his comic Witchblade get a TV series and The Darkness get a successful video game, and now he’s messing around in the Marvel U sometimes. To this, he brings his whole studio, Top Cow productions, so Michael Broussard and Eric Basaldua can do backgrounds for him, Joe Weems, Marco Galli and Rick Basaldua can ink. That’s a lotta guys on 34 pages of line art. Frank D’Armata colors. This issue is served in 3 chunks, 2 of them written by Bendis, the middle bit written by Warren Ellis. Ellis was one of the most interesting writers in comics in the late 90s and early 2000s, co-creating excellent creator-owned material like Transmetropolitan, the Authority (More or less the blueprint for 21st century comics, its import cannot be overstated), Planetary, and many, many more, as well as stints in work-for-hire, like taking the 2nd and 3rd arc of Ultimate Fantastic Four when Bendis & Millar got too busy after originating it. And he’s about to bring his dark, cynical perspective to a new volume of Thunderbolts, the marvel Suicide Squad led by Norman Osborn. This will have a huge and unforeseen impact. But, later, in 2020, he would be swept up in the MeToo movement, revealed as a truly vile person, and one of my all-time favorite comic book writers would become someone I wanted nothing to do with overnight. I have literally an entire box of comics in my house that’s just Warren Ellis, and since 2020, I’ve not been sure what to do about that. Fun stuff. Fuuuuun stuff.
But this isn’t about that, either, it’s about the Initiative. In an opening 2-page spread of Iron Man flying, Bendis explains the status quo. He mentions that “the governments of the world” made him head of SHIELD. SHIELD has sometimes been a US organization and sometimes a global force. But if being in charge of SHIELD means being in charge of America’s federal superhero initiative… that doesn’t make a lot of sense at all. A real conflict of interests. But, as I said, the grasp of politics displayed during Civil War is frankly embarrassing, so whatever, I guess. While flying, Tony reviews the footage of Reed Richards interviewing Michael Pointer, from the Collective arc of New Avengers, getting background and personal info.
The guy grilling him is Walter Langkowski, aka Sasquatch, aka the only member of Alpha Flight who lived through that New Avengers arc (Don’t worry, I believe every single one of them gets better eventually). He’s here to tell Michael he’s getting a suit to help him control his powers, which looks like the Guardian suit that’s a staple of Alpha Flight, and he’s gonna work off his debt to society as a member of…
Two Canadians on this team. Maybe just one, I don’t know what the deal with the female Shaman is. Weird choices. Next, Tony watches footage of the Thunderbolts going after a hero called Hurricane who I’ve never heard of and who looks like Marc Silvestri design to me.
Radioactive Man suddenly getting a dramatically different look wouldn’t be such a big deal if he wasn’t front & center for so much of Civil War. How did he stop glowing green? Who cares, I guess. But look at this:
This hilariously emo character is Penance. Who Penance is was a mystery for awhile. Eventually, he’s revealed as SPEEDBALL. Happy-go-lucky, goofy ol’ Speedball is now the “I want you to hurt me” guy. His powers got messed up in Nitro’s explosion and are now triggered by pain. So EDGY. So stupid. Well, the T-Bolts keep beating on this poor guy, revealing Bullseye, Moonstone and the Swordsman as additional members. We learn Bullseye’s participation on the team is a secret, on account of him being a WANTON MASS MURDERER and all, but Moonstone and the others get public PR about them being the good guys. Songbird is also on the team, and Norman Osborn runs it from a desk rather than joining in. Meanwhile, Tony reaches Avengers Tower, where Ms. Marvel tells him she found Spider-Woman fighting the Grey Gargoyle.
Gotta have buttshots. This is the guy who made up Witchblade, after all, a woman who essentially fights crime nude. Carol proceeds to tell her friend a series of out and out lies, like Captain America’s secretly not dead and Tony Stark doesn’t have any problems with her, just wild stuff, trying to get her to come back, but it doesn’t work. In the present, Tony says if he sees Jessica, he’ll arrest her for treason, but Carol says Jess was right and flies away.
Jarvis says lucky for him, he doesn’t have to make that decision, but he’s prompted Tony to start thinking about it.
The rest of the book, 17 pages(!) is previews and teasers for other books. Incoming Iron Man artist Roberto De La Torre is ALSO using Timothy Dalton as Tony, that is insane. Dalton could’a sued Marvel into the ground for this. Well, anyway. There you go. We’re all set for the brave world. Almost. Just one more thing.