Fixing Civil War

I was enjoying Marvel's Civil War. The basic premises, a conflict between security and individual rights played out as a literal battle between established superheroes, and how honorable people can end up violently disagreeing over important issues, are very strong and the art is very pretty. However, there have been MAJOR problems that have turned me off the whole thing.

And it didn't need to be that way. Here's how I would solve the problems of Civil War. (Nope, no hubris here).

1. The production delays. Yes, these are a problem. And whether by delaying the whole series until the late summer, to give Steve McNiven more time to draw, or calling in a fill-in artist, or simply not delaying other major titles so as not to spoil the shocking, shocking (ultimately, not that shocking) reveals, the delays should have been anticipated and dealt with. Personally, I would have disentangled it from the Marvel universe proper until it was resolved or almost resolved.

2. More to problems in the story itself, I'd make the Superhero Registration Act damned specific. Right now it's a vague mess. And if the debate is security vs. privacy, which it should be, the law should be a strongly enforced anti-vigilantism law, because, honestly, if you're using your mutant powers to bake cupcakes, who cares, but if you're just a regular joe using M-60s to mow down Mafia goombas, I think the police would like a word with you. Then the debate becomes whether superhumans have the right to take the law into their own hands without accountability to the public, and then, if you agree that they need to be watched, well, quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

3. As a corollary, the opening incident needs to be the direct result of the superhero committing a crime in the name of justice, and innocent people dying because of it. As it stands now, the New Warriors, funded by a television company and being documented by their own news crew, failed to stop a bad guy from killing lots of people. It is hard to see how the New Warriors could have been MORE public and MORE accountable, considering most of them died trying to save lives and there is still a major corporation that can be sued for damages, and being restrained by the law would NOT have prevented the explosion.

If I were writing Civil War, the Stamford Incident would have been caused by any of Marvel's monstrous or murderous anti-heroes beating Nitro to death, releasing his explosive energy in a civilian setting. In my dream scenario, it's Ghost Rider, who uses his penance stare to make Nitro go boom, so that only he remains in the burnt out field, charred bodies all around him. (Now he has to lam it on his bike every time the super authorities catch up with him, but can he out run his own guilt? But that's my pitch for a GR ongoing, and I digress...) So instead of heroes dying before they can prevent a mad man from killing, we have an immortal demon chasing vengeance regardless of the human cost... and THAT could get some people talking about new laws and new enforcement.

4. Captain America is the conscience of the Marvel Universe. Once he picked a side, it was all over. So I'd switch Captain America's and Spider-Man's positions, making Spider-Man the anti-reg leader and Cap the conflicted supporter/patsy of Iron Man. Yeah, it's America torn by Civil War, but even with the cliché, it works. It also makes more sense that Tony Stark would court his old friend and long-time ally, the universally beloved World War II hero Steve Rogers, to be the face of his campaign, rather than the publicly reviled Spider-Man, who Tony Stark may have worked with before but barely knows. And I could imagine Cap. America, Iron Man, and Reed Richards (the daddies of MU) making a good case that the kids can't just run around breaking things unsupervised.

It also puts Spider-Man in a more interesting position. More than anyone else (except maybe Matt "Daredevil" Murdock) Spider-Man knows the dangers of having his identity exposed. At the same time, Peter is hardly used to working on a team. What will he do when he has the power and responsibility of leading others into battle? Is openly flaunting a law putting his family in less danger or more? It also opens up class questions (Rich (Iron) Man/Poor (Spider) Man) and age gap issues.

5. I wouldn't put all the assholes on one side. The pro-registration side could have a very strong case, if they were not also so into throwing their friends into concentration camps, hiring mass murderers to hunt down people who have broken no laws but disagree with them, and play Odin by trying to clone gods. Not that superheroes can't make mistakes or be wrong, but shouldn't both sides be guilty of doing terrible things? Wouldn't it make more sense for the side without public and government support to be doing the more desperate, ethically questionable things? (so far, the worst thing they've done is let the Punisher save Spider-Man's life).

6. And less "shocks". The conflict is strong enough to carry seven issues without reveals like Thor, Clone of Thunder, the all new Suicide Squad Thunderbolts, and Dark Speedball. All that does is distract from the main idea, the underlying moral conflict. I know it's the major crossover, tying into tons of books and launching more than a few series, but the story would be better served by paring down the "moments" and leaving more space for character work and emotional beats.

So, to re-cap,

1. Cut it off from the rest of superhero books, for now.

2. Clarify that the debate is over vigilantism, and who watches whom.

3. Have the catalyst explosion be caused by over-zealous, not incompetent, super "heroes."

4. Put the moral center of the universe in the center of the conflict.

5. Morally compromise both sides, especially the less powerful side.

6. Get rid of the stupid stuff.

Oh, wait, that's Kingdom Come.

I Swear I'll Stop Meming Soon

(and this one's for Brandon)

Validus Reviews Civil War

(image courtesy of Kevin)

Neutral

Hey Everyone! How ya been?

First up, thanks for the links, anonymous posters on The IMDB and Television Without Pity message boards. With your help, I cracked the 10,000 mark. (and while I appreciate being considered an "expert" on Lois Lane, the idea of "Chlois" just creeps me out to no end, possibly because it sounds too much like "Clor".)

And thanks to Ragnell for conscripting me into Beefcake/Cheesecake Week. It saves me the trouble of having to come up with a separate post. (and HOLY! Is this the kind of traffic you get everyday?)

This response from Robert Kirkman to the strong criticism of the death of Freedom Ring got me thinking. Kirkman cops to being too clever by half, basically, taking two really good ideas for a superhero ("being superpowered isn't enough to make you a superhero" and "being gay is not the beginning and end of defining a character") and muddling them both by combining the two. While clearly not his intention, a very clear interpretation of the result is that Freedom Ring was killed because he was gay.

What I started thinking about was how Kirkman could have told the first idea without getting into trouble. (The idea of a superhero actually suffering and sacrificing to do his job, obviously, interests me.) And I realized the only way he could have done it is if Freedom Ring was a straight white male.

If Freedom Ring was black, or Hispanic, or Asian, or if he were a she, then Kirkman might have been accused (rightly accused) of implying that Freedom Ring was incompetent because he was black, because she was a woman.

But no one would reasonably say he would have died because he was male, or white, or straight. For storytelling purposes, a straight white male is neutral, contains no value that informs or overwhelms other, subtler personality traits.

It reminds me of something I read in... a book whose title escapes me now, but I'll remember later a book by Douglas Hofstadter. It said that you can't start a joke "a woman walks into a bar..." unless the joke was about her being a woman. If the punch line is "I was talking to the duck" then the listener is left wondering why you specified the lead as a woman. This does not happen if you say "a man walks into a bar..." "Man" is a blank template, and if his sex is not essential to the story, no one tries to figure out why you brought it up. For some reason, "man" is less specific that "woman."

Which is crap, of course. In reality, being straight, being white, or being male, DOES inform character just as much as being gay, black or female. So those traits SHOULD inform the writing and reading of characters just as much traits that aren't "neutral". Which is to say a little, but not entirely.

The solution, I feel, is just having more and more varied characters who are gay (or who are black or Hispanic or who are women), so that the "value" of "gay" is weakened until the unique person shines through.

But it does put Kirkman in a bind for writing a character "who happens to be gay," right now. Without counter-examples of competent gay superheroes to compare Freedom Ring to, it's hard to argue that the failure and the gay have NOTHING to do with each other.

He certainly shouldn't have told the story at Marvel, which has so few gay characters. It would have been better, but not much, in the DC universe, where at least Obsidian, Piper, Montoya, and Maggie Sawyer kick ass.

But in the Wildstorm Universe, where the two baddest bastards on the planet also happen to bone each other, Freedom Ring's story would have taken on an entirely different meaning. There, the lesson would be "being superpowered AND gay isn't enough to make you a superhero." And that's a story I can support.

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.