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

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

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.

And what does it say about Joe Quesada?

Best,
Hunter (Pedro Bouça)

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)

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.

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.

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, 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.)

Stupid HTML.

“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.”

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.