Comic Book Resources

I wish you used the good cover instead of the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Cap cover.

So do I!

Marvel just had this one on their site.

By the way, I agree about the Foggy thing, a lot of people actually bought Foggy's death by Brubaker, but after Brubaker brought him back it's going to be hard to buy into him killing Cap just a year later.

Oh good.

I mean, I'm not reading Captain America, and 'fact I've never bought Captain America off the stands. (Though I've got a big 'ol Bronze Age run, and I've bought J.M. Demmaties back issues.)

So this wouldn't, like, affect me personally.

But I was a little offended by the idea. You don't kill the spirit of America.

I'm growing to dislike the Marvel Universe. Hype seems to be the main driver now, instead of actually telling stories. It's hard to get excited over the death of a character, when you know they'll bring them back soon with even more hype.

Cap died in Onslaught (and a few other times) - how many times am I supposed to be shocked and saddened by his passing? Same thing in Spidey - oh noes, Aunt May is in a coma, and might die? Yeah, yeah, she died back in ASM 400 - and I actually cared then.

Anyway, Civil War made both Iron Man and Captain America basically unlikeable (and not in a cool, Watchmen kind of way, either), so even if this wasn't his fourth or fifth "death", it doesn't really have the impact that it should. It's like none of the writers or editors in the main Marvel Universe respect the characters or fans anymore.

One of my co-workers came into my office today and told me Jean Baudrillard died today.

I said, "Gosh, that's sad, but Captain America died today, too."

He was noticibly perplexed at my choice of priorities, pointing out the importance of Baudrillard to philosophy and literature.

"Sure," I said. "But Captain America socked Hitler in the freakin' jaw."

May they both rest in peace.

I had been planning to eventually get Brubaker's Cap run in trades. I've heard lots of good things about it since it started.

But the idiocy of Civil War has made me apathetic about most Marvel books, including thos one. Brubaker's Cap run could've been really awesome... but Quesada just had to get his evil fingers on it.

Why can't we just have comics that are solely devoted to telling good stories and don't get bogged down in dumb events? Is that to much to ask?

"But I was a little offended by the idea. You don’t kill the spirit of America."

Well, not with a gun. You need Sinestro to really do it right.

"Hype seems to be the main driver now, instead of actually telling stories."

Cap being killed by the guy who's been plotting from behind the scenes since the first issue IS a story.

It really is sad to see a famous fictional character such as CAPTAIN AMERICA, be relegated to being a mere pawn for QUESADA and MARVEL'S endless contempt for it's longtime readers!

Having grown up with Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, it really is disturbing to see what has happened to the House of Ideas and their great stable of characters.

Civil War spealt the end of MARVEL COMICS as we know it, what we have now is a bunch of books that are very complex, and impossible to follow for the casual reader.

Never thought I'd stop reading a Marvel Comic, but enough is enough, and killing CAP off is the final nail in MARVEL'S coffin.

This looks to be more liberal/progressive agenda move than anything to me. Think about it; who was the new "uber-hero" after 9/11? Cap was, of course, due to the re-rise in Patriotism! Now in what promises to be the longest election season EVER! where the progressives are "hell bent for leather" so to speak (the fight to watch is "hillary vs. Obama" even though they are near dead last in the overall polls lead by Guilliani) this is one more move to desensitize us to patriotism becoming Wrong. We were given a peek at a future with superhero registration, It had wolverine being ionized by a sentinel and racheal summers coming to our time to stop it! How soon we forget!! Hell they put Bishop on the registration side????? Hello??? He came from that future and chose to stay here to see that it never came to be too.
This reminds me of as quote; please allow me to paraphrase "This year will go down in history. For the first time, a civilized nation has full gun" insert "superhero" here, "registration. Our streets will be safer, our police more efficient, and the world will follow our lead into the future!" -Adolf Hitler, 1935. 'nuff said!

“This year will go down in history. For the first time, a civilized nation has full gun” insert “superhero” here, “registration. Our streets will be safer, our police more efficient, and the world will follow our lead into the future!” -Adolf Hitler, 1935. ’nuff said!

You, uh, know Hitler never really said that, right? It's old NRA propaganda. In fact, the Nazis actually passed out military weapons to the civillian population and Eisenhower as amazed at how many the US Army ended up confiscating.
Godwin's Law in action...
Digressing back to the point, Cap was handled so haphazardly in Civil War and I was so repulsed by the "return" of Bucky, I can only hope that the inevitable relaunch will get back to the stories I enjoyed back in the Stern/Byrne days.

"Brubaker’s Cap run could’ve been really awesome… but Quesada just had to get his evil fingers on it."

I love how you manage to declare that an entire run is ruined based on the next 2 years' worth of issues that haven't even been published yet AND manage to blame Quesada for ruining it when Brubaker admits to being the one who made the final decision and plotted out how to kill Captain America in the first place.

"Adolf Hitler, 1935. ’nuff said!"

Well, you're right about that much, though not in the way you're probably thinking.

"I can only hope that the inevitable relaunch will get back to the stories I enjoyed back in the Stern/Byrne days."

Keep hoping. Maybe Marvel will decide that the way to sell more books is to write them the same way they did thirty years ago.

Cap being killed by the guy who’s been plotting from behind the scenes since the first issue IS a story.

Yes, but it's not necessarily a good or an interesting story, of course, particularly since the same character has been "plotting from behind the scenes" since 1941.

Is Keith being sarcastic? Because Marvel ain't exactly been pushing a progressive agenda lately. If anything, Marvel's message has been "hey kids, civil disobedience is wrong! lets all trust the shadowy cabal and their far-seeing leaders who FEEL things after they do evil (only to protect us from vague, undefinable threats of course)"

More elaborately, then...

The payoff to the last 24 issues o0f Captain America is apparently that a crossover not written by the book's own writer sets Cap up for someone to shoot him from a rooftop, after which a woman whose brainwashing was set up only, let's see, three issues ago, finishes the job.

The rest of the issue appears to be various cast members telegraphing the shooting by reminiscing about how wonderful Captain America is and how much they like him. After the shooting, we get a few pages of everyone panicking and doing panicky, dumb things because ZOMG! Captain America Has Been Shot!

So we have a master plan that boils down to "have people shoot my enemy with guns after he turns up in a public appearance I couldn't possibly have orchestrated." And we have lots of blathering about how damned important the fellow who was shot is, because clearly the fact that his name is on the cover doesn't clue us in to his narrative centrality.

This is an album issue capped by a decidedly controved and anticlimatic plot point, one dependent on things that happened in another book entirely.

This is a damnably mediocre -- not actively bad, mind you -- "event" comic.

G'bye Captain America on my pull list. Let me know when you get over this clumsy hype phase of your life and we'll talk.

All the comments about Marvel hype are well taken, but the bottom line is Brubaker has told great Cap stories and depicted Cap in the heroic light true to his origin. It's a welcome contrast to the crybaby who tossed aside the "Cap" cap at the end of Civil War. If I'm dropping titles, it's Civil War progeny, not Brubaker's excellent run.

Even as we speak Cap's new body (Arnim Zola, master cloner showed up a few issues back) with his mind (courtesy of the Cosmic Cube which moved Skull's mind) is hanging in the Skull's dungeon having unspeakable things done to him.

All nicely signposted if you know where to look

I find it hard to see a "progressive" agenda in a book where Cap's teenage sidekick--representing the youth of America--turns out to have been brainwashed by/secretly working under the orders of the Soviets, since the '50s.

Superhero comics may riff on the odd hook from the real (political) world, but they are almost always only about themselves.

Uh...Phillip...the Cube you're talking about was visibly destroyed by the Winter Soldier way back in Cap #14. Skull/Lukin even laments losing both in private.

"This looks to be more liberal/progressive agenda move than anything to me. Think about it; who was the new “uber-hero” after 9/11? Cap was, of course, due to the re-rise in Patriotism!"

Er, uh, Cap is a liberal, Keith, an ass-kicking liberal from the Kennedy era. The SRA is the Patriot Act, and Cap stood against it, because he cherishes the rights of the individual against unwanted government intrusion — even in the name of security. Btw, liberals can be patriotic, too.

"This looks to be more liberal/progressive agenda move than anything to me."

So far, so crazy. Go on.

"Think about it; who was the new “uber-hero” after 9/11?"

George W. Bush.

"Cap was, of course, due to the re-rise in Patriotism!"

Oh. I guess so, but could you maybe provide some speck of evidence? I mean, given that Captain America had no title being published during or in the wake of 9/11, it seems difficult to say he became the new uber-hero.

"Now in what promises to be the longest election season EVER!"

This I agree with, and, though I blame the media (with 24 hour news channels that refuse to cover more than 20 minutes worth of news ad nauseum, it's gonna happen), you could easily point to the Republicans and say "Hey, why didn't you have a vice president that could run for president?"

"where the progressives are “hell bent for leather” so to speak"

You should try to use phrases that make sense and convey what you're thinking.

"the fight to watch is “hillary vs. Obama” even though they are near dead last in the overall polls lead by Guilliani)"

I won't even touch the warped view that requires you to believe that Guiliani would beat Hilary (he was scared to run against her for Senate) or Obama based *solely* on meaningless polls, and just point out that Guiliani is pro-choice and pro-gay rights, so he won't be the Republican candidate anyway. However, I will point out that, if you truly put any stock in polls like that, then you're the sort of person responsible for making this the longest election cycle ever.

"this is one more move to desensitize us to patriotism becoming Wrong."

Really? So the immediate wake of people embracing patriotism and America because of this within the comics, that's going to desensitize us? I guarantee you the metaphor will be "Boy, we thought Captain America was acting a little scary and weird, but we certainly didn't want him to *die*" ... just like the vast majority of liberals feel about America under George Bush.

Also worth pointing out, Captain America died because he rebelled against government actions he considered to be wrong; that's not anti-patriotism, that's just anti-blind patriotism.

"We were given a peek at a future with superhero registration, It had wolverine being ionized by a sentinel and racheal summers coming to our time to stop it! How soon we forget!! Hell they put Bishop on the registration side????? Hello??? He came from that future and chose to stay here to see that it never came to be too."

False. Check: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiverse_%28Marvel_Comics%29

Bishop is not from the Days of Future Past world, you must've gotten that from the X-Men Animated Series.

"This reminds me of as quote; please allow me to paraphrase “ "

Um, there's something contradictory about saying "a(s) quote", "paraphrase", and using quotation marks all to refer to the same sentence.

Especially when the quote is a fabrication.

Your fundamental point makes no sense. If Marvel were progressing a liberal agenda, then why would they state absolutely and with no room for interpretation that Captain America was in the wrong for fighting to protect civil rights over security? That's a pretty basic "liberal vs. conservative" argument for the past five years, and they came down firmly conservative. (See any interview with Quesada or Tom Breevort.)

I can't believe there are readers out there who honestly believe Civil War was anti-liberal propaganda. Yeah, because comics are filled with conservative writers, especially that Mark Millar. Yes Tony Stark's side "won," but they were shown as scumbags all the way through. The liberals, the ones who were anti-registration the whole way through, were portrayed more sympathetically. The conservatives only "won" so that we can get a year or two of comics showing how they bring about a fascist brave new world followed by a big event where the anti-reg side roars back and finally wins.

Anyway, the conceit that liberals would be antia-reg in the real world is silly. Based on their gun control stances and their desire to micromanage how the military and pilice do their jobs, why exactly do people think real-world liberals would embrace superheroes rights? Keep in mind that the man in the street in the Marvel Universe doesn't have the years and hundreds of comic issues worth of insights that we as fans do, so they don't have the personal in depth knowledge of these people and their secret identities that we fans do. They are just more powerful versions of the police or military, except with near complete anonymity and no checks and balances. Yeah, a handgun bothers liberals but a human being able to destroy the country singlehandedly doesn't need legislating? Also, most superheroes are white, male, Western, and unrepentingly powerful...not a demographic liberals are typically sympathetic to.

I'm not claiming conservatives would embrace superheroes either, its a complicated issue. But I do think its really narcissistic and self-aggrandizing to automatically associate any popular stance in fiction as the liberal one.

Dude, comics ARE filled with conservative writers. Sure, there are tons of liberals as well, but c'mon. Even Millar is pretty conservative on a lot of issues if you actually read his interviews and stuff (other than hating Bush, but thats more because he's British). Sure, he likes to claim liberalism, and I think its fair to say he believes it, but most likely its a calculated decision in order to make him seem 5% edgier. He's basicly just too DUMB to have an actual political affiliation. No one at Marvel believes that Tony Stark came out of this as anything other than smelling like roses. He's the NEW breed of hero! He does bad things, but its ok because in the end its proven to be necessary and also he feels emotions about it in private! And when you come out in the beginning and say "this is a metaphor for civil and privacy rights" and then end with every character (especially the ex-liberal reporter who wised up) saying "let that be a lesson Captain America, the majority is always right!" it sends kind of a message.

Look, I know Joey Q has been doing damage control with all his recent "there is no political message!" interviews on the nerd rags, but Marvel has trained people from birth to look at super powers as a metaphor for human differences, be it sexuality, race, religion or just the little things that make each of us special. Saying "you'd be against superheroes because, y'know, handguns!" doesn't fly because this is an allegorical world. Super powers are not hand guns. They are make believe. I don't think their anti-progressive subtext is necessarily intended, I think they are just trying to latch on to the basic necessary-evil-but-hero crap we see on TV and movies all the time these days. They did it badly, but thats just because they aren't very talented.

Mark my words, we are not going to get a year or two of facism. We're going to get Hulk showing up and Tony Stark bravely leading his new army of super heroes against him to save the day (thereby proving he was right all along!)

I think gun control is a lazy analogy: The SRA requires people having superpowers to register. Most superhumans got their powers by accident, unlike guns which are a choice.

Also, T., yo keep saying liberals want to micromanage military and police, but politicians ALWAYS try to control those forces: It is a conservative who is currently the commander in chief of our arms forces, and his administration has had a heavy hand in how it conducts its business, like Johnson's (and later Nixon's) adminstration did in Vietnam. That's probably why we aren't doing so well in Iraq and Afghanistan.

On a more relevant note, I don't think the new Orwellian status quo is gonna stick in the MU: It will become more and more odious and villianous until it is debunked. Hopefully, by Steve Rogers.

Am I the only one who thinks this is all an elaborate bluff? I mean, taken broadly, comic creators and Marvel's editorial policy are generally liberal -- which is fine by me; I like my fantasy worlds to be liberal. Since even Millar identifies himself as liberal, I can't accept the Pro-Reg side's victory as anything except a setup for future stories, where they will presumably be taken down. (And Tony will be revealed to be Kang in disguise, or the Iron Tyrant, or the adult version of "teen Tony" from the Crossing.) At the moment, Spider-Man is on the "bad guys" side, and Venom is with the "good guys." There's no way Marvel policy considers that to be right and proper and the correct direction going forward. So that means it's a bluff, right? I have to believe it is, because the only way my brain will accept the whole Speedball thing is as a joke in bad taste. (No amount of mental gymnastics can explain away Clor, though.)

Anyone who considers not picking up Brubaker's run in trade after this issue is doing themselves a disservice. I've never been a big Captain America fan (not so symbolic to a Canadian), but I can tell you that this run by Brubaker is excellent, and well worth your time.

In fact, if it wasn't for Brubaker writing this, I'd easily write it off and ignore it, but between Cap, Criminal, Daredevil, Iron Fist, and Uncanny X-Men, Brubaker tells good stories, so I'll give him a lot of rope to make something out of the hype that comes with this. And I'd bet good money that he will.

How can gun control be a lazy analogy, yet the patriot act and iraq war are supposedly good ones? Guns are weapons, so are superhero powers. One can argue that gun ownership is a choice and superhero powers aren't. But we have precedent for people's liberties being curtailed due to their public threat status. Look at people with highly dangerous, highly communicable diseases. They didn't choose to have a disease, yet they can get quarantined and regulated. I'd say the supeehero reg issue mixes elements of gun control and public safety quarantine laws.

What I think is lazy is the reasoning the fans and writers involved have used for this story:

1.Based on my intimate knowledge of these characters and their personalities, I know that anti-registration is morally right.

2.Liberals are always morally right, therefore

3. Liberals would definitely support anti-reg

To those saying that Brevoort, millar and company are conservative and sympathetic to registration, think about this: cloning Thor, celebrating Venom, bullseye and norman osborn as public heroes and killing Goliath. Would you make the side representing your view do those things? Its blatantly a setup for a future takedown in a big crossover.

My complaint is that its just simplistic and stupid to believe that liberals would automatically be anti-reg and conservatives pro-reg. Nothing in my real-life observations supports that belief.

Another poor analogy: "Look at people with highly dangerous, highly communicable diseases. They didn’t choose to have a disease, yet they can get quarantined and regulated."

Unlike the vast majority of superheroes, who can control their powers, they can't control the disease. Spider-Man can take off the uni and that's that. Someone with ebola is a threat. Doesn't really apply in most cases to the SRA.

Iraq was only an example of conservatives bending the military to their ends, in poor fashion, I might add. As well conservatives, the party of "states' rights" and freedom weigh in on assisted suicide, medical marijuana, abortion, free speech (especially when it criticizes their policies) and other individual freedoms against the side of freedom. So bashing libs for gun control (which I ain't a huge fan of, btw, only because it's in the Bill of Rights (though I don't see why someone needs an anti-tank weapon in the den)), is a bit myopic. Frankly, most of the people who argue incessantly for gun owner's rights are the ones who probably shouldn't have them to begin with.

A quick aside: I wonder how superheoes in general feel about unfettered access to guns for everyone?

I agree with you that libs would be pro-registration in real life, but so would your average law-and-order conservative. In fact, I think most people would be. But public displays of heroism go a long way. For eample, Rudy Guiliani was hated for being somewhat of a dictator, somewhat of a racist and somewhat of thin-skinned asshole, despite his generally good cleaning up of NYC. After 9/11, the man simply did a great job of, um, just doing his job, and people rallied to him. Now many consider the cross-dressing, gay-friendly adulterer the (very, very) early GOP front runner for president. Amazing what basic (or at least very public) displays of bravery can do. And amazing how principled the GOP is. Party of "family values," my ass.

Anyway, I digress, who knows how people would feel after Galactus, Magneto, Dr. Doom, etc.? Maybe a good-sized group would let Captain America and crew keep their secrets. Probably not.

I also agree with you on another point, liberals are always right: America wasn't founded on conservative principles, was it? No.

Most of the Marvel comic books from the silver age are decidely liberal and anti-establishment: Afterall, liberals didn't write "Seduction of the Innocent." Though they did form the PMRC. Sigh …

Most importantly, I think the SRA would make a great story generator, but, let's face it: Marvel has botched it thusfar.

I;m sort of bored with people trying to find "liberal" or "conservative" comics. To begin with, even in American politics those words cover a broad range of not-always-compatible positions. George W. Bush is a conservative, but so is Pat Buchanan...and they'd disagree on a great many things. Ditto, in the Democratic Party, for everyone from the anti-gun-control Howard Dean -- look it up, dudes -- to the "stereotypically liberal on everything but the Iraq War" Joseph Liberman.

Most efforts to define either term so that it has a rigid meaning, one in which, say, Bush isn't conservative but Buchanan is, are merely example sof the insupportably fallacious logic of the "One True Scotsman" sort. In short, they are bosh.

Look, superheroes fight evil by, essentially, beating the hell out of the bad guys. That's hardly up to the lofty Mirandizing standards of the ACLU, which practically every self-described conservative I've ever met calls a "liberal" organization. But on the balance, superheroes tend towards the sort of multiculturalist views associated with "liberalism," especially its campus variant.

Civil War is pretty much the same. Is Registration gun control, as Tom Brevoort has suggested, or is it a serious privacy violation by a too-Big Government of the sort that Grover Norquist wishes to drown in his bathtub, or is it a racialization like the old-school civil rights analogy of the Mutant Registration Act in the X-books?

Is the Thunderbolts book by Warren Ellis liberal because it compares a government that would hire on theT-Bolts to the Nazis (with that "Mittlewerk" reference in #110) or is it deeply conservative because it evinces a distrust of intrusive and murderous government forces -- almost literally G. Gordon Liddy's "jackbooted thugs" -- who butcher a self-determining individualist and patriot like Jack Flagg for the "crime" of stopping a rape in his neighborhood?

The answer seems to me to be that it's folly when comic book writers, editors, critics, or readers attempt to write conventional politics into or read them out of the average superhero comic book in so literal or even directly allegorical a fashion as some have been doing in this thread.

Making those sorts of one-to-one correspondences work always involves so much selectivity of evidence and of applied reading practice that the method used to arrive at the set correspondences will, with a few pushes, dissolve into logical incoherence. This is why serious students of literature rarely if ever read novels and poetry, even those that seem to explicitly declare their own politics, as straight political fables. Fiction does things that cannot be channeled into the sorts of propagandistic readings both "liberal" and "conservative" comics writers, readers, and editors occasionally decide to fantastically project onto collaborative, fantasy fiction.

> Uh…Phillip…the Cube you’re talking about was
> visibly destroyed by the Winter Soldier way back in
> Cap #14. Skull/Lukin even laments losing both in
> private.

Blow. Shows what attention I've been paying. Oh well, Zola transfers his mind using some other device then

"Brubaker admits to being the one who made the final decision and plotted out how to kill Captain America in the first place."

What? where is THIS shown? I read killing Cap was that jagoff Whedon's idea.

Omar, Great post, and mea culpa; I definitely paint with too broad a brush. I think you're spot on throughout most of that.

A few things: Grover Norquist only seems to want to drain Big Government of welfare, public works (New Deal stuff, essentially) and regulations on business. He doesn't seem to bleat when civil liberties are curtailed.

And you're right, the SRA is all those things. Gun control is partially appropriate analogy. So, nods to T., as well. I still think it's more Patriot Act and current affairs, than the other.

Another, and this is something that always irks me: Why are Nazis liberal? Yes, it has solicialist in the title, but those highly nationalistic (also in the anacronym), semi-religiously fueled, xenophobic and militant Bavarians of yore don't seem that far removed from many of the folks we have in office now. And, like the Nazis, business and government are incestuous (the "socialist" part), but in our gov's case, business infiltrated government (where's Teddy Roosevelt?) and neither one seems to operate very effectively. So, I tend to think of Nazism as more of a right-wing thing. And, I am not saying our government is doing anything to the scale of the Holocaust, though they seem to obsess over Jews.

Also, I'm not sure about how G. Gordon Liddy would be opposed "instrusive" government. He was a Nixon-hired thug hired for a B&E and wiretap. That's a close shade to jackboot. I've never understood why that guy isn't a pariah, a political OJ SImpson.

Anyway, a smart-as-hell and well-nuanced post. Thanks.

But I still Civil War was botched: great concept, shite execution. So there.

remember the days when marvel comics was the greatest comic comp in the world??when u could pick up a book and really enjoy the story of your favorite character barely escaping with their life and taking you on a thrill ride in the process?yeah the artwork wasn't as intricate but there was an escape from reality that made the book as magical as the story inside it.what happened to those days?now marvel characters are based on hype and commercialism.when quesada first took over the helm i thought "great a real fellow comic collector is going to bring real comics back ",but instead i helplessly watched my favorite comic book characters fall from a glory i once thought eternal.and through all these thoughts my biggest question to marvel would be "why did you ever make civil war?".destroying a universe of heroes that took decades to make in one quick swoop.and now by killing cap?is that really the only way marvel can now bring in readers?how about picking up a older book 60s-80s(some early-mid90s) and re-reading what truly made marvel great?thats why after 30 yrs i stopped collecting...i missed the real marvel universe for too long.

As a libertarian, I have a lot of trouble telling the difference between conservatives and liberals most of the time these days. A strong case can be made that SRA would be supported by both cons and libs - the Patriot Act certainly was. It's a very rare politician who will support freedom - it's much easier to be seen as "getting something done" even though that almost always means a reduction in freedom.

By the way, the SRA isn't a very new idea in comics - both Watchmen and Powers have had the same idea in the past.

As far as the "hype" versus "story" idea - Omar hits it on the head in post 17 above. Well said.

In my opinion, Ed Brubaker has been doing a great job writing Captain America. I have never been into Cap much but everyone kept telling me that it was great. So I picked up the trades. Wow. Great stuff. He writes Captain America like he is Jack Bauer or someone in a Tom Clancy Novel.

And yes, The Punisher will be Captain America. He picked up Cap's cowl.

I think Marvel is trying to make a statement about America today. If Steve Rogers was a mirror of America in World War II. Are they saying that Frank Castle is a mirror of America today?

Richard
http://1rightopinion-comics.blogspot.com/

"Yes, but it’s not necessarily a good or an interesting story"

No story is necessarily a good story. Some like it, some don't.

My point being that it wasn't a case of story being trumped by hype, it WAS the story.

"No story is necessarily a good story. Some like it, some don’t."

Nonsense. There are good stories and bad stories. There are rules to creating good stories, and while a great writer might get away with bending these rules, there are rules nonetheless.

The first, most important, primary rule is to never, never break the implied contract between the storyteller and the audience. If I write a story, I'm asking the reader to trust me. Give me your imagination and let me control your emotions for a while, and I'll take you on a trip. I'll give you a hero to identify with, and you can live a hero's life and feel good about it.

And trust me, I won't jerk the rug out from under you at the last moment. If it's a tragedy, the hero might lose, but he'll go down fighting against overwhelming odds because that's what makes a good story. Or the hero might win eventually. But the hero won't suddenly surrender and admit the dark force was right all along. Frodo won't get all the way to Mt Doom and suddenly decide to surrender and give the ring away.

That would be a bad story. The Marvel Civil War story is simply bad writing. Characters do not suddenly lose their basic values and heros do not change sides. Marvel showed their contempt for their readers by doing so. It's not about liberal versus conservative. It's about bad storytelling.

I'd say the heroes changed when their enemies changed. I red the Civil War issues one after the other and free of all the hype and frustrating delays surrounding it. And I thought they were very well done, really only dipping close to the end. And as a guy who's been collecting Cap since 1991, I actually loved the ending. As I understood, it would have been bad writing to have a different type of enemy (a good guy backed by law) and NOT alter the protagonists and methods for each side.

Still ignoring all hype and whatever allegory people may force on it, I thought Cap #25 was well done. That's what it was to me, issue 25, not "The Death of Captain America." A Brubaker story fragment that ended up above the radar.

Tyson, I believe you are right. I think a libertarian would probably be the most behind an SRA, not necessarily a progressive Democrat or a Republican. Both democrats and republicans are unpredictable about when they support big government. That's my problem about this storyline and the narcissistic way progressive liberals were presented as the only ones who'd ever be willing to stand against the SRA, when nothing in our reality suggests that such a conclusion is the no-brainer the writers seem to think it is.

I'd argue the opposite, as a progressive liberal has certain ways of deciding conflict:
Darker skin vs. lighter skin? Darker always wins.
Richer vs. Poorer? Poorer always wins.
Powerful vs. less powerful. Less powerful always wins.
White collar vs. blue collar? Blue collar always wins.
Eurocentric vs. Eastern? Eastern always wins.
pro-America vs. globalist? Globalist view always wins.

So given that the people in question are for the most part white, American, powerful, famous, beautiful and presumably well off (no one knows the secret identities of superheroes, so would probably assume they are rich even when they aren't), I don't see any particular reason why progressive liberals in the Marvel Universe would be sympathetic to the superheroes. Progressive liberal comic fans grew up with these characters, know them inside out, see them almost as longtime friends, and of course would side with these characters because they're longtime fans. In the Marvel Universe, the average citizen doesn't know these characters as intimately, and would just view them as powerful white Americans with little accountability that claim to fight for our good. In such a situation, I think progressives would view them with the same suspicion they view all powerful predominately white institutions.

I'm not arguing the comic; I've said my piece for that. But really, T., you actually believe in that strawman list you've constructed or received?

I’d argue the opposite, as a progressive liberal has certain ways of deciding conflict:

-- Darker skin vs. lighter skin? Darker always wins.

Except in parts of the world like Darfur, where the liberal call has long since been for American and European intervention.

-- Richer vs. Poorer? Poorer always wins.

Except that elements of the liberal side of the policy debate in this country have long supported, for example, the urbanization and technologization of rural areas. And of course the safety and environmental standards pushed by many elements of the liberal side in this country cause price changes that impact the poor more than the rich.

-- Powerful vs. less powerful. Less powerful always wins.

Both conservatives and liberals tend to portray the causes they support as underdogs or victims, so you're actually going to have to define "powerful" here. This one is a fairly empty category, really.

-- White collar vs. blue collar? Blue collar always wins.

Except in cases where the enforcement of environmental laws has greater impact on blue-collar folks than white-collar folks;

-- Eurocentric vs. Eastern? Eastern always wins.

Unless we're talking about Islamic mistreatment of women, child soldiery, the persistence of slavery in other parts of the world, female genital mutilation,

-- pro-America vs. globalist? Globalist view always wins.

Except for all those radical lefty anti-globalization protestors who keep turning up at G8 and WTO meetings, smashing up Starbucks and so on.

Look, I said it above: neither "liberal" nor "conservative" is all that internally consistent a label. Green libs and technocratic libs get into fights all the time; neoliberalism is fiercely pro-capitalist and free trade, albeit globalist; anti-capitalist/soft-socialist liberals oppose globalized capital.

And ditto for conservatives. There are libertarian conservatives who hate legislated morality but believe an open market would reflect a basically centrist/social-conservative set of preferences; religious fundamentalist conservatives who only care about the government enforcing a particular brand of morality; pro-business conservatives whose ideal world looks rather different from the rural-Western conservatives' idea of things; and so on.

Putting up these silly lists of positions more at home in the simplistic world of the editorial cartoonist does neither the conservative nor the liberal sides any favors.

Let's see, how many times has cap: revealed his identity and/or been apparently killed? He did it back in the early days (Cap 113?) and again when his supersoldier serum wore out and again in the last reboot I believe.

This is only interesting and getting press because of the timing, the civil war hype and the graphic nature of it. Frankly, Im disappointed because the entire run of late has been excellent and Ive even loved the return of Bucky - something I would have sworn was anathema. I'll stay tuned but I hated the civil war - again, something that could have been interesting but just turned stupid.

Time for some new ideas (which is what I thought we were getting with a non-clone, substitute or robot Bucky). Ah well

Omar, I'm not saying that conservatives would stick up for superheroes any better than liberals in the situation presented in Civil War. I'm just saying that the situation presented in Civil War by writers and fans showing some ideal world where liberals would be the sole champions of superheroes is a fantasy that doesn't jibe with reality at all. I'd say the same things if they showed conservatives being the sole champions of superhero rights and liberals being the superhero oppressors. I think breaking down pro- and anti- superhero stances according to liberal or conservative just doesn't work. Outside of that, I think my analysis stands. FOr example, the progressives may stand for Islamic women's rights in a vacuum for example, but if you frame the argument in "East vs. West," for example, "Did life for Muslims improve after the US invaded Iraq" THEN they'll be suspiciously quiet about how bad conditions are in the Muslim world for women or how so many women were liberated from rape.

"Suspiciously quiet", T.?

I trying to keep my nice new shoes out of the bullshit, please.

You gotta love what a little politics does to a BB, oh, BTW the "s" in "as" was a typo (your vindictive little dig at me for it was hilarious and said far more about you than about me, thanks) and thank you for educating me about the quote, I'll not use it in the future. It did, quite nicely, serve it's purpose though didn't it? And, now for something completely different.

On the impossibility of reading superhero comics politically in a direct fashion, you know we're in agreement. On the stuff about real-world liberals and conservatives, I tend to think, as you seem to at some points and seem not to at others, to think that Manichean notions of the two positions are inherently flawed representations of American governmental policies and political processes, and certainly of the real views of most Americans.

To clarify, I'm responding to T. And I'd note, T., that you're introducing a hierarchy of values into your list of positions that organizes them as preferences in regard to one another. My point is that, even granting that those particular valences hold true for all liberals -- and they don't -- different self-identified liberals will hierarchize those values differently. The same could be said of conservatives.

As to the SHRA...well, as written up in the comics and especially as portrayed (or, per Millar's wacky understanding, unfairly "demonized") in the tie-ins, it wouldn't survive any of the three dozen court challenges thrown against it by everyone from the ACLU to the NRA.

"Nonsense. There are good stories and bad stories."

You misunderstood me. I said no story is NECESSARILY a good story.

"Kid watches his parents get murdered and then grows up to become a vigilante" is not NECESSARILY a good story. It just happened to be written well. If Rob Liefeld had worked with the exact same concept during 90s-era Image, it would've sucked.

Likewise, a hundred writers could have very easily screwed up the "Captain America dies" story. It just so happenes that Brubaker is not one of them, and the story is good. Some people didn't like it, which is fine, but doesn't change anything.

(Which, for the second time, is so far away from my original point it makes me wonder how closely anyone reads these...so, gooba-gabba-goo)

Look Marvel is Librael. We need securiy in this country. What is one of those heroes becomes a villian and join al-quada. If we don't know his identity there is a problem.

Comics like the press are librael. And they wonder why they keep losing readers:(

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Well, that explains why it's back again. Nice to know that. And horribly depressing. Almost as much as having T. around! I kid, T.

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