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The only possible conclusion to Civil War is one that will leave us with Dead Tony, Peter Parker running Stark International as the new Iron Man and Ben reilly as Spidey.

And Teen Tony back in the armor! Yeah! Teen Tony. What America needs.

Hm. Maybe Ironman should kill a few more people and just get it over with.

I think this will herald the return of who we've all been waiting for ... RoboCap! Tony Stark will die, sacrificing himself no doubt, and in memory of his friend Steve Rogers will don the Iron Man armour.

What?

I googled up bits and pieces, but could someone who has actually read "The Crossing" summarize it for other people who haven't?

Damn. 3 really knows how to burn somebody.

Well really, when you get down to it, it's not like Tony was ever the most alturistic of people. Heck, his orgin is that he's an arms manufacturer who starts to feel bad not because of the people who've died because of his work but due to stupidly injuring himself on his own product. Yet, even after building his armor and swearing that he'll turn a new leaf he uses his invention to drum up publicity for his company, fight those blasted commies for the government, and sell high-tech weaponry to SHEILD. Weaponry most likely currently being used to hunt down Cap in Civil War.

markus: I've not read The Crossing but the basics of it are that Kang (or Immortus I think that was later retconned as) had turned out to be responsible for all of Tony Stark's missteps throughout the years ending up taking over his mind and having Iron Man kill some characters whose names escape me. To combat this The Avengers go back in time to when Stark was a teenager, give him a heart condition in order to push him to build an Iron Man suit and then bring him back to their own time to fight evil Iron Man. It was the 90's.

On the flipslide, at least he's got a built in alibi:

"Hey guys remember when I manipulated Spider-Man into ruining his life and fan appeal before I tried to hunt you down and have you killed? Turns out I was just really, really drunk."

Err . . . that's supposed to be the image from INFINITY WAR #2 where Daredevil attacks the Mr. Fantastic and Iron Man doppelgangers.

Stupid HTML.

I've gotta say, I'm a lot more irritated with the treatment of Reed Richards than I am with Iron Man. Iron Man, as I've said, is kind of a dick anyway: a zillionaire playboy weapons dealer whose standard-issue Marvel Moment Of Irony (war profiteer gets blown up by weapons of war!) doesn't lead him to fight for peace or cure cancer or even to just stop making weapons, but to fly around the world getting into fights with the Titanium Man. He's The Man, and if anyone was going to take the government's position here,* it'd probably be him.

Reed, on the other hand, may be weird, but his heart's always been in the right place, and to see him designing a superhero concentration camp while ignoring a hospitalized Johnny is just one of those sad abandon-character-for-the-sake-of-plot moments. Not that I can get too upset about it, since there's nothing they can do to the Fantastic Four that'd be worse than Tom Defalco's run, and they still managed to recover from that.

(*Not that anyone would, because within the Marvel Universe it's just insane to have all superheroes work for the government. How many times has the government of Marvel America been corrupted, infiltrated or had critical departments compromised by Nazis, killer robots, and Skrulls? Hell, I've got five bucks that says SHIELD Director Maria Hill is the Space Phantom.)

When comic writers still knew how to write interesting
characters (hell, when they were still COMIC writers,
instead of movie and TV writers between assignments),
Tony Stark decided he wouldn't build weapons anymore.
Even got into a big fight (ideological, not physical)
with SHIELD because of that.

Then suddenly, Marvel, at time under the wise guidance of
Bill Jemas, decided to ignore that. And that Tony had
beaten alcoolism, while we are at that.

Now one of my favorite Marvel characters is shunned by
everyone, his reputation (among READERS, not in the
Marvel U itself) is being tarnished almost beyond
reprieve and his own book does't even TRY to answer that,
because the movie and TV writers working on it right now
are doing their own thing and don't care that the
character they are writing is being dragged through the mud.

Sad thing is, Iron Man is a MAGNIFICENT character with A
LOT of untapped potential (I don't believe that Marvel
has ever done the character justice, the definitive IM
run is still ahead of us!). I just hope that someday
someone at Marvel will realize that, instead of using him
as the default "traitor avenger".

Best,
Hunter (Pedro Bouça)

Reed's always been aan arse. I'm not at all surprised by his behaviour. Sue's jumping sides any time now...

Reed’s always been aan arse

Reed's always been weird, moreso in recent years after every writer and his mother jumped on the notion that he's some kind of borderline autistic freak, but he's hardly always been an ass (I refuse to use the Britishism "arse"). He's never been portrayed as so out of touch he'd never bother to visit a comatose Human Torch because he's too busy building gulags for governmnet legislation he's previously opposed.

Again, it doesn't bother me that much because as a core Marvel character, they'll get him and the rest of the FF back to normal eventually. But you might as well call the guy who's running around in Civil War designing concentration camps for superpeople Shmeed Shmitchards, 'cause it's not the same guy.

Thought for the day: Does Tony Stark have the highest "innocent victim" death total of any super-hero at the Big Two? He killed three people during the Crossing, another one during Mask in the Iron Man (although that was a super-villain), Justin Hammer took control of his armor and made him kill someone with it back in the late 70s/early 80s, and then recently he killed a bunch more. I can't really think of any major superhero who's killed something like a half-dozen civilians apart from him.

Pedro, the problem with condemning the Knaufs for "doing their own thing" on Iron Man right now and saying they don't care about Civil War is that Execute Program was supposed to be out a long time ago, and I believe writing on it was completed before Civil War was even conceived.

However, the delays with Granov's art on Extremis wrecked the schedule originally planned, and Execute Program couldn't be released until Extremis was finished. It's unfortunate that the scheduling had to happen like this, but they couldn't interrupt it to do a Civil War tie-in or delay the storyline any further, otherwise they'd be left with a six issue storyline, either whole or in part, that would make absolutely no sense in the post-Civil War climate without massive rewrites. I'm not trying to be an apologist for them, but I have enjoyed their work so far and think that they've been put in an incredibly difficult situation by factors out of their control that most people don't realize.

They're going to be doing a Civil War tie-in as soon as Execute Program wraps, which I am looking forward to.

Well, I do hope the Knaufs have some REAL good stuff for
their Civil War tie-in, because by the time it is
published, Iron Man's reputation (again among readers,
not Marvel U) will be worse than Charles Manson's!

Anyway, seeing that when they DID come aboard Civil War
was almost coming out, they should've abridged their
story or even delayed it outright to make way for the
tie-ins. If they want to do comics so much, they have to
take the bad portions of the job (like intrusive
crossovers) as well as the good ones.

Even if they didn't have the time, another writer might
have done the issues between Ellis and the post-Civil
War Knauf issues. Like, say, Joe Casey, who had just
done a limited series and seems to love Iron Man. Or
Quesada's Pal Frank Tieri. Or any starving former Iron
Man writer out there (Roger Stern, David Michelinie, Bob
Layton, Len Kaminsky, you name it). There wasn't a need
to start a 6 issue arc a couple of months before a MAJOR
event on Iron Man's career.

Or they could've delayed Civil War itself. Would've
prevented a lot of headaches...

Best,
Hunter (Pedro Bouça)

If you really love Iron Man, you wouldn't let Frank Tieri write him.

>
> If you really love Iron Man, you wouldn’t let
> Frank Tieri write him.
>

And what does it say about Joe Quesada?

Best,
Hunter (Pedro Bouça)

He’s never been portrayed as so out of touch he’d never bother to visit a comatose Human Torch because he’s too busy building gulags for governmnet legislation he’s previously opposed.
Fair point. I should also point out that "Asshat Reed" knows about the oncoming Annihilation Wave, and hasn't told anyone.

[b]Does Tony Stark have the highest “innocent victim” death total of any super-hero at the Big Two? [/b]

I think Jean "Oops, were you using that planet?" Grey still has him beat.

"I refuse to use the Britishism “arse”. "

Britishism?

You refuse to spell a word the way the English do (they who invented the English Language), but making up a word to justify not doing so is alright?

Your more twisted than Tony Stark!

I think Jean “Oops, were you using that planet?” Grey still has him beat.

Yeah, that whole Dark-Phoenix-blowing-up-the-planet-of-the-asparagus-people thing is a real awkward conversation killer around Xavier's Mansion

Eesh, yeah. Iron Man as mind-controlled traitor was far more sympathetic than Iron Man, protofascist degenerate hatemongering anti-everything-America-stands for whore.

The Civil War thing has got me SO fed up... It's going to end up either damaging the Marvel universe consistency so much that it cannot continue, and readers live in droves... or they'll pull some PATHETIC deus ex machina that'll be such an unsatisfying ending that readers will ... leave in droves.

(blog pimping) I got so fed up with this whole Marvel-runs-its-616-universe-into-the-ground deal that I created a blog to vent about it. Please feel free to read it.

http://deaduniverse.blogspot.com