Myweasel@yahoo.com

i don't think you're missing anything, as i actually agree with everything you've stated (clumsy heavy-handed beaten-over-head one-sided SimThor metaphor... MetaThor?), it's only our reactions to it that are different. it'll always be superhero comic book logic and it'll always be detached from reality (i mean, it's a genre that chooses to have norse god Thor wear spandex and fly about with scientists and mutants and super soldiers instead of tackling the theological whathaveyous such a being might have in the world, maybe validate nordic mythology over, say, Islam and Christianity for their lack of representation in the Marvel U), and i'm okay with that because once we get too critical about it (like how you're being (my opinion, of course) too critical about it), the entire story, metaphors and motivations and superhero comic books' most basic foundations will all be rendered meaningless and weak and hackneyed and childish.

and to butt in on your conversation with Ryan, it seems like we're all making the same argument here, pro or antiCW: that it's not much to think about, which makes our efforts to criticise it by holding it up against the finer points of literary devices a bit weird, because it doesn't hold up, not even at the beginning when it was trying to be subtle, because the story still has to make Marvel Comic Logic, because it doesn't exist in a vacuum, but (and here's the funny bit) i read (and will read, when the trades our out) them as such, heavyhanded metaphors and all, because, put simply, which mainstream superhero comic book metaphor isn't heavyhanded?

i will buy the trades because, again, it has one of the more interesting mainstream superhero comic book plots around, a bit mindless, yes, but beautifully so, and with just enough smarts and balls (however fake or biased) for me to marvel (ha!) and think about (so i guess it's not THAT mindless). i need that sort of thing every now and then, being someone who has the complete Eddie Campbell ALEC books, three OPTIC NERVE collections, a majority of the PANTHEON graphic novels (Satrapi, David B, Clowes, Ware, Beyer, Katchor), not to mention all the Brautigans and Murakamis and Eggerses and Sinclair's and Moorcocks and Moores, etc etc etc, in my sagging swollen to the brim bookshelves.

and re: WATCHMEN, that book is totally unreliable when taken against every other mainstream superhero comic book saga, as (like ASTRO CITY) it doesn't have the continuity gravitas that most comic book franchises do (only the illusion of continuity, but that's all it really is, which is, i suppose, a testament (or secret?) to the comic book's greatness). it only shows us the details that Moore and Gibbons want us to see and know to have that book's alien invasion THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL properly motivated, meaning Ozymandias doesn't have 60-odd years of straight history to have us fanboys yelling Foul! at him being dicky and out-of-character (which i believe he was being, and i believe everyone else in the book had that same thing in mind, as everyone thought Ozymandias was the least likely guy to do it, that's why they were all shocked and awed when they (and us) finally find out it was actually him orchestrating everything).

Because if it's the latter, then, frankly, they've just made this point last issue, and, really, in every issue so far, but in far more interesting and understated ways. My problem with the Thor-clone bit is that the plot twist itself is so OTT, so silly, and so gimmicky that whatever metaphor its making is buried under the sheer geekout lameness of "evil superhero clones made by superheroes who kill superheroes."

More frankly, this particular plot twist is an especially stupid, absurdly over-the-top way to keep making that point in story that began by questioning the basic assumption of the superhero genre -- violent vigilantism by decent folk. That it's now wallowing in genre elements even more absurd and unreal than that seems to be a massive tonal or thematic problem if we take the context of serious metaphor.

We can maybe compare it to the end of Watchmen, which was also quite exaggerated given what had gone on before, but in that case the metaphor was readily apparent -- Adrian kills a lot of people and then lies about it to achieve a greater good. He creates an "alien" because he needs a threat that's beyond Cold War politics to unite the world against, and he needs it to kill a lot of people so that it's taken seriously.

Taken in that spirit, I'm not sure what the Thor clone bit is meant to convey, aside from the notion that the pro-Reg heroes will do anything to win and have lost sight of their originally moral end. There's nothing specific in the plot event that works as a metaphor; it's just extreme, unsubtle shorthand. When you look at the details, it falls apart very, very quickly. Why a clone? Why a killer clone? Why a programmed killer clone?

Unless the point is that the pro-Reg heroes are anti-free-will psychotic eugenecists -- Nazis, then -- I don't get it. And if the point is that they're Nazis, well, sorry, Millar has left the building called "reality" far, far behind. There's simply nothing going on in the real world today that seems to fit reasonably with the details Millar has chosen for his twist. It's comic-book logic at that point where it becomes too detached from reality, from metaphor or allegory, for anyone besides the hardcore fanbase -- 300,00 strong, based on sales figures -- to much care.

Show me what I'm missing, then.

ryan -- We're making the same argument, then. You're saying that it's fun if you just don't think too much about it; I'm saying that Civil War #4 doesn't bear thinking much about.

what i'm getting at is, if you have been a comic fan for years and years, have read and dissected and nitpicked thousands of books over time... then no "mainstream" book is going to fully satisfy you. same goes for anything else. if you put enough time into anything (art, music, sports, whatever), then you won't like what is considered mainstream. i have playing music for most of my life, and as most musicians would tell you, we hate the radio. as a fan of not just comics, but great storytelling overall, the civil war series has me so tickled pink that i get to actually experience the feeling of not being able to wait for the next issue to come out. this feeling is something that i haven't though i'd ever feel again, and this brings me right back to 12 yrs. old again. thank you, marvel.

maybe it's a metaphor on the lengths one goes through to prove/validate what others might see as a dodgy point, only filtered through comic book tropes?

in the same way that, say, the original VOLTRON lion cartoon was a metaphor about the ever-escalating American-Soviet-China arms race?

or NOW AND THEN, HERE AND THERE being based on the African (and West European) guerrila practice of pillaging a village and kidnapping their young to Stockholm them into their guerrila causes?

The problem here, for me, is that a story that began as vaguely political, then became a passably constructed and well-executed hero vs. hero brawl, has now degenerated into a pile-up of genre cliches: Clones! Brainwashing! A second banana will die in this issue!

I don't care what happens to Iron Man and Reed Richards in this. They've been around 40 years, and dozens of writers have had differing takes on the characters and concepts, and will continue to do so. Nor do I care much that Black Goliath and his dated codename are dead and buried.

Civil War #4's plot twist is stupid because it amounts to "Superheroes make faulty killer clones of other superheroes that kill still other superheroes." It is thematically dull -- what, pray tell, do killer clones have to do with either the War on Terror, the gun control debate, or the vigilantism debate that Civil War started out trying to touch on? -- and it fails a basic of risibility when summarized in ordinary language.

It's not raising serious concerns about genetic engineering or about law enforcement methods. It's a clone of a Shakespeare-spouting god that kills people with a hammer shaped lightning cannon. The scene doesn't anger provok thought, it merely shocks and provokes disbelieving laughter at having bought and read the stupid thing now in front of the reader.

We see stupid things like this all the time in comics. That doesn't make them anything other than stupid things we've all come to accept as features of the genre, things we breeze past to get to the worthwhile stuff. If they weren't there in the first place, though, I suspect we'd get more of that worthwhile stuff in undiluted form.

That Civil War will still sell huge after this, in turn, may in fact suggest things about the Direct Market, just as the figures on Infinite Crisis did. It is smart marketing...but only because of the audience that it's marketed to. As anything beyond a short-run cash grab that will hold Marvel's stockholders for another quarter, Civil War #4 is simply not defensible.

how exactly is it stupid?

and, like i said before, i'm not buying the monthlies but i'm actually planning on buying the trades for CIVIL WAR main and FRONTLINES, not because of my lefty leanings or because i agree that Stark and Reed are dicks (i don't really care much about them to actually think about them on that level, and, at any rate, most strong Marvel leaderish characters are dicks (Prof X, Cyclops, Doc Strange, Namor, Bruce Banner, etc) with only Spider-man being the only truly accessible character in Marvel U), not because i have this nostalgic whathaveyou for the characters involved, or maybe i do but it doesn't run too deep.

no, i'll be buying the trades because i'm actually interested in the story, which you'll have to admit, when stripped to its barebones and regarded out of continuity (like i do), is actually pretty interesting. i mean, come on, imagine this happening in, i don't know, Astro City (or whatever superhero verse outside DCU and MU). i bet it'd be getting more positive comments if it was in a self-contained fictional universe, free from continuity gravitas, seeing as to how most of the negative comments about the book are about the characters not being true to themselves or their concept (Spider-man unmasking), about characters acting out of character (Stark and Reed).

and you know, it's one of those done-in-one things, something more like what graphic novels ought to be, superheroey, yes, but it has that Steven Ambrose feel to it, only with spandex (or pleather, or whatever it is that these guys use now as costume material).

so, yeah, i'll be buying this because so far, CIVIL WAR has the more intriguing high concept comic book thing compared to all the other high concept comic book things out there.

The thing that bugs me about Civil War, and Infinite Crises too for that matter, is the marginalization that happens to the core monthlies. Creative teams who were brought in to be the guiding force for characters like Captain America or Superman or Iron Man are suddenly belittled because they're suddenly no longer the core influence (or at least the biggest influence after the company suits) on the character whose main book they're writing! So basically, if somebody wants to know what the big thing happening with (for instance) Iron Man is they're pointed out to Civil War and not Iron Man's own book, and that seems kinda ass-backwards to me. But then, I'm not very big on the "shared universe"/"interconnected continuity" concept to begin with.

Well, yes and no, I think.

Yeah, 'Civil War' sure does look stupid to me, too.

But if they've figured out what the fans want and have come out with a successful tentpole title to hold up the rest of the company, then what's stupid about that?

Wow, Marvel are releasing a title that the fans want to buy. How freaking stupid must they be?

Or because we like good comics. But no, that would be silly...

The only panel I connected with.

I've figured out how it all ends. I was lost for a while there, but after seeing the brilliant originality of clone Thor, and the touching bring back a guy noone ever cared about and try to make the readers care when he dies events of CW4, I've got it.

Tony Stark's been possessed by the disembodied brain of.....Adolf Hitler.

Gold I tells ya, gold!

Civil War #4 is not a good comic. Its main plot point cannot be summarized in even the most carefully neutral language without sounding quite explicitly stupid.

But as decades of television and, increasingly, decades of comics have shown us, stupid sells. It sells big. Because stupid's only requirement to be entertaining is that we shut off our brains and gape at the pretty colors and the incoherent events.

It is fascinating but many of us MUST see how the story ends, even if we don't particularly like the plot.

And I know even when you DON'T buy issue #5, you'll be right back here offering commentary. Or someone else will. You'll read what happens regardless, but many people resort to purchasing the book to find these things out.

"But what happens a year from now when everything goes back to the way it used to be? Will he be disappointed and turned off comics? We’re used to it. He may not be."

He'll be a comic fan. As you said, WE'RE used to it. If he likes them still, he'll get used to it. If he doesn't then Marvel's gamble didn't payoff.

But Civil War didn't invent the incredibly audacious comic event, and it didn't invent the cosmic do-over .

I was there when they killed Superman and broke Batman's back.

The return of Jason Todd. Jean Grey. Bucky, for chrissakes.

We kept buying when they wiped those "tragedies" off the slate. What compels you to look out for the next generation?

Never mind they held up half the production schedule waiting for the art for issue 4 to get finished and it looks rushed and half assed. If half the line only prints 11 (or 10) issues in 2006 instead of 12 do you know how much that will cost Marvel? Is anyone getting fired? Will Marvel NEVER learn to get all issues of a mini series in the vault before releasing it? Is there any sense of proffessionalism left in the comics industry?

And does anyone honestly believe that this will leave a permanent rift between Cap and Iron Man or Sue and Reed?
It's already been said at by Joe Q. that they will be cranking Spiderman back to what Stan intended him to be. They can't do that if the world knows he's Spiderman. So look for the Beyonder or Onslaught or Mephisto to rewrite the history of the world and wipe this all clean...

And your nephew is one of the people who will be let down the most by this. If it's getting him interested in comics, great. But what happens a year from now when everything goes back to the way it used to be? Will he be disappointed and turned off comics? We're used to it. He may not be.