Saturday, September 23, 2006

Why I'm Dropping Civil War

Before this starts, I just want to point out that I was really enjoying Civil War.

Until last Wednesday.

Putting aside all the fanboy complaints of lateness and "character assassination," Civil War #4 made the series objectively bad. In a, "I have lost all interest, why should I continue to read it?" manner.

If you read my review, you can see that my complaint before was that it seemed like the deck was stacked against the pro-registration side, and that a more even handed approach would better serve the theme of how an ideological argument between two honorable men can lead to war.

Well, with issue four, "stacked against" became "marked cards." Instead of just acting like jerks, the pro-registration side has moved on to morally abhorrent behavior, recklessly creating an abomination of both science and religion and hiring psychotic murderers to do their bidding. Worse, there is no good reason given for why Reed Richards and Tony Stark feel they have to take such extreme and obviously stupid actions, they just go ahead and take them.

And it's that last page reveal, that Iron Man has turned to Bullseye, who once killed a church full of nuns, that revealed to me how hollow Civil War is. Because at that point Tony went from very probably the bad guy to absolutely the bad guy, but why he's the bad guy has NOTHING to do with the registration act they're supposedly fighting over.

Mark Millar still hasn't told us why the registration act itself is bad, just why the people defending it are, and the longer the story goes on without a cohesive argument against or even for the act, the more obvious it becomes Millar doesn't care what they're fighting about, just as long as there's a law that some heroes end up on one side of and some heroes end up on the other. They might as well be arguing "Great Taste" over "Less Filling", the Great Butter Battle, or, god help me, the color red vs. the color blue. Tony would still be wrong.

And if Mark Millar doesn't care why they're fighting, then I don't care that they're fighting. The whole thing becomes just superheroes punching and killing each other because Millar wants to see who'd win, a tale full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

So I'm done. Now that I know there's no "there" there, I know I will get no more enjoyment out Civil War (unless Jake performs another hilarious evisceration of the next three issues). Instead, I will use my four bucks to buy Casanova and Fell, where I know the writer at least is, y'know, thinking.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Y'know... you're right. I was just thinking, "oh, come ON" when they had Reed and Tony deploying Bullseye & Co., but you're exactly right, the problem is worse than simple character rape.

The pro-reg side has made its moral case, again and again - and it's a pretty good case. The anti-reg side just hasn't. This is especially sad when you consider that the anti-reg leader is Captain America, who back in the day of Gruenberg was the best comic-book orator of all time. Now he just calls people "punk" and talks vaguely of "rights." What rights? To put on a mask and beat people up? Uhhhh? I mean, there may be a good argument for vigilantism in the MU, but nobody's saying what it is. Well, sod it, I'm joining you. I'll skim the issues just to see who's still married to whom, but it's not worth buying any more.