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Missing an 'e' in the last panel there.

But this is my face-kick of the week, for sure.

... this gag was funnier when it was the closer of Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back.

Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back was a terrible movie.

all the faces look like this: :^U

This was great until that menstruating a-hole ended up in the last panel.

Who's a menstruating a-hole? Downey? Why?

Why does Downey menstruate?

Cause he's from Hollywood, that's why.

What's this in reference to?

Torpor's been posting about the female lead character "menstruating" for a while now, which I'm assuming is the world's least clever PMS joke...or a disturbing insight into the mind of a serial killer-to-be.

I'm sure $1200 Italian loafers taste better than $50 loafers from JCPenny.

Was the last panel needed?

Ha! I had to say it.

I want the last panel as a t-shirt. Like, right now. Get on that, guys, well, once the menstruating (didn't know it was spelled that way) is over with.

The best part is, if we spell his name that way on the T-shirt, I don't think we can even be sued.

So is Downey, Jr., gonna kick the crap out of...well, everyone involved in writing Dark Reign the storyline that's designed to Blame Tony Stark?

Actually, since Iron Man keep blaming himself in his own comics these days, are we gonna see reality explode after Robert Downey Jr. defends Iron Man by kicking Iron Man in the face?

Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back was a terrible movie.

Bit all over the place and with some pacing issues - but surely a 'MagnoliaFan' can appreciate that.

"MagnoliaFan" was one of the guys beat up at the end of Jay & Silent Bob. It's a joke.

I want to be friends with the face-kicking comic strip version of Robert Downey Jr, even if I disagree with him. He seems like a fun guy.

"Method all the way"!!! That was brilliant!!!

Somewhere a Marvel editor is trying to figure out a way to squeeze a summer event series out of this strip. And damn his eyes, he'll probably succeed.

Do the people calling Stark a Nazi realize he was just enforcing the superhero equivalent of gun control?

@Carl: I think a lot of the stress over Stark is over editorial inconsistencies in his portrayal. For instance, if you read Civil War, Captain America, Iron Man, Avengers or a couple other books, you see a determined Stark who fully believes in what he's doing but still hates how out of control this whole mess got and wonders if there was something different he could've done.

But if you were to read, say, Amazing Spider-Man or Frontline, you'd see a borderline Fascist maniac Stark who was beating the shit out of Spider-Man, engaging in war profiteering, taking a hardline "If you're not with me you're against me" stance, and building secret prisons to house fairly harmless c-level heroes like Prodigy. (You'd also get to see a rookie reporter berating Cap for not knowing about MySpace or following NASCAR! That book had everything.)

It was one thing to show different reactions to Iron Man's actions, but there were some alarming screwups in how events were interpreted between books (in "Civil War," Peter's planning on leaving Avengers Tower and Stark tries to talk him out of it; in "Amazing Spider-Man" the same scene has Stark hurling him through a wall).

So...that's why a lot of people still nurse a grudge against Tony Stark.

Do the people calling Stark a Nazi realize he was just enforcing the superhero equivalent of gun control?

I think the salient point is that his methods of enforcement involved indefinite detention and forced conscription. As with so many legal matters, the method of enforcement can be a problem even when the law itself is valid in its aims.

As tot he other bit of it..the problem with Civil War at the level of publishing is that the heroes who resisted it still had to be good guys in their own books, especially when Spider-Man was made into a resister. That's essentially going to force the writer of the anti-SHRA books to make the SHRA seem illegitimate, because the readers and writer are going to like Spider-Man -- whose book they're buying --0 more than Iron Man -- whose book they're not.

The deeper problem, of course, is that taking the SHRA seriously as a premise means that much of the previous 40 years of Marvel comics were actually horrible stories of vigilantes risking the public good, rather than heroic tales of Spider-Man defeating the Sinister Six and other such things that Stan Lee, Steve Ditko, Jack Kirby, and the actual creators and readers wanted, enjoyed, and produced.

Civil War was, at bottom, an extended example of Mark Millar not fucking getting it. And that makes the in-universe inconsistencies an inevitable result of a flawed premise, or at least a premise that's flawed if it's imposed on a whole publishing line about 45 years into perfectly workable genre conceits.