Comic Books: They're All Grown Up and Morally Ambiguous Now

*sniff* I'm so proud!

So....Insulting, Cutting Commentary or Both?

Props to Kevin Church for the pic.

It’s rare that two of my interests combine in such a manner, but Marvel Comics Latest Huge Crossover Event ™ was “The Civil War”.

In a nutshell, a group of inexperienced superheros completely fucked up taking down four third-rate supervillains resulting in a explosion that not only killed off most of their team, it blew up an elementary school. While it was in session.

The resulting public backlash brought around a piece of Marvel Universe Legislation that had been considered for mutants for years, but now was to be applied broadly across the superhero community: The Superpowers Registration Act.

(Any analogies to the Patriot Act and similar RL legislation are your own to make.)

Needless to say, this makes some characters upset, most importantly Captain America who happens to actually believe in that silly little thing called “Personal Liberty”. On the pro-registration side falls Iron Man, capitalist hero (I’m not kidding, he was first conceived of as an anti-Communist hero) and former Secretary of Defense (Read: A “Yay, It’s the Government!” person). The Marvel Superhero community proceedes to split down the middle with the X-Men playing the Rwandans for this episode ("And where were Avengers and the FF when millions of mutants died in a Sentinel massacre? Right. Screw all Y’all and the horses you rode in on.") and Doctor Strange, well, being Doc Strange, is simply above this sort of thing. Like the Government is really going to force the Sorcerer Supreme of the planet into anything before he turns them all into muskrats? (See below.)

Now, the details don’t matter, Iron Man and Spiderman unmask, jails are made in alternate dimensions, clone Thors are introduced (*sigh* I love comics), no one is really acting quite right in the head because they are being written by someone who doesn’t usually write them. In the end, after being on the cusp of victory in the Climatic Battle ™ Captain America is attacked by a mob of police and firemen because the battle has trashed half of Manhattan. (Like this is something new to Marvel Manhattan. That place has been trashed so many times it should be reconstructed in Leggos…o.k. I can’t take credit for that one, it’s a Joss Whedon) Captian America takes of his mask and surrenders to the police as Steve Rogers.

Tony Stark/Iron Man becomes head of S.H.I.E.L.D. As a reward of their willing participation on the Pro-Registration side of the Civil War She-hulk and Wonderman have been drafted, quite against their will, into S.H.I.E.L.D., which is the Marvel Universe super-duper intelligence black ops, they-show-up-and-everything-grinds-to-halt-in-exposition agency.

In the aftermath, Captain America attempts to give an interview in which he explains his actions. The result is this little scene (Scan down to the bottom, I also encourage you to read the ensuing conversation below it) about which the comic book community has been going berserk ever since. Most were quite insulted or took it as an astute, if painful, commentary, but there are just enough morons in the crowd out there saying “Gee, she's right!” to make one slam one’s head against a wall.

It's truly sad when people have mistaken popular culture for cultural ethical values. What “Sally” points out has nothing to do with what being American means. They're entertainment, not values. They’re trends, fads, things to distract us that will be gone in a relatively short period of time. What Captain America fights for is ideals, the ethics and values that America was founded on, what we as Americans should be aspiring to be, rather than pridefully embracing of the lowest common denominator that so many Americans nowadays seem to feel they are entitled to.

So what if we do “treat our celebrites like royalty and our teachers like dirt”, does that make it right? Should we be O.K. with that? Should we say “That is what being American is!”? Because that sure as hell doesn’t represent me and it doesn’t represent a lot of people.

Marvel’s commentary was dead on. If they meant of reader to think “Hey! Wait a minute!” is up for question, but it certainly does give one pause. Not only that such a thing could be said about our country now, but that things in our society have become so extreme that it was a comic book that was making the observation that America has become too stupid and shallow to make intelligent choices about freedom. A superhero comic book.

On the lighter side, all of this did spawn one of the funniest parodies I have seen in quite a while. (NSFW for some verbal sexual content. ) And yes, that guy has gone through and done all 7 issues. Click the "Photoshopped Crap" at the top of the entry to find links to all of them in his archives. It’s freakin’ hilarious.

Re: The Captain American fight scene at the end, haven’t you always suspected…