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…

Hey There!

Whew.

Well, finals finally ended for me last Friday and keeping my head down in the books (as well as wishing really, really hard) paid off.

Roman History (honors) – A
Medieval History – A
Biological Anthropology (honors) – B (pending completion of my honors paper)
Bio- Anthro Lab - A
Math For Humanities Dummies – A
Russian – B

It wasn’t pretty, but I survived.

Now I am on the road, writing to y’all from the homestate (Maine) spending time with the greatest Nephew in the world who is three. I tell you, I envy that kind of complete investment in one’s imagination.

Rutger also went for a swim today…in a lake. In Maine. In December.

Not one of his better plans.

In The News

A week or so before I left, I caught Senator Byrd on CSpan chewing out the 109th Congress on shuffling aside something along the lines of a dozen spending and appropriations bills until the new Congress starts up in January. Either A. The GOP representatives had their nose rings screwed in so tight they couldn’t move without word from the Oval Office or B. they were purposely trying to bog down the incoming Democrats in old business so it wouldn’t look like they were moving as fast as they promised on issues such as troop withdrawals (It’s not a “redeployment”, it’s withdrawal. Call it what it is people.).

However, give the sharp rise in attacks on Americans in Iraq, that childish little tactic will probably fail.

"All of us want to find a way to bring America's sons and daughters home again," said Robert Gates, who was sworn in Monday as the new U.S. defense secretary. "But as the president has made clear we simply cannot afford to fail in the Middle East. Failure in Iraq would be a calamity that would haunt our nation, impair our credibility (Too late!) and endanger Americans for decades to come."

I hope to Gawd he is just saying that to kiss Bush’s ass, though why anyone should bother to do so at this point is beyond me.

One of the biggest problems is of course, the president has never spelled out what “success” in Iraq is…at this stage in the game we can only assume he means a government subservient to America’s needs that will do whatever we want it to…”oh and get rid of all those dirty Muslims while you are at it. “

Let’s quit while we are behind to focus on real threats, like Iran and North Korea.

It’s a civil war, it’s bad and it’s not worth our soldiers lives.

'Tis a Silly Rant

Now then folks, after blowing all my neurons out in Finals, I am off to read the drivel that I have been reading since Friday at 1:30 pm. That’s right, I’m making one of my periodic swings through the Marvel Universe.

As I have mentioned before, I am an ex-X-Freak. I began reading it along with the original New Mutants series in High school (as Rogue joined the team) and stopped a few years later shortly after the “Mutant Massacre” when Chris Claremont seemed to be going through some kind of creative and/or emotional crisis (or maybe he was just sick of the series) and he made it all dark and depressing by making otherwise smart characters make a bunch of really stupid decisions (It’s a Mutant Genocide and Magneto is just sitting there. Storm, if there was ever a time to let Big Red out of the box, a genocidal masscre would be it.) and removing the more uplifting members of the team: Nightcrawler, Kitty Pryde and Colossus, leaving Storm, Wolverine, Rogue and Psylocke to wallow in their melodrama, non-stop.

No, the Jujubee doesn’t count. She was like a Marvel version of Elmo.

Everyone once in a while, every couple years, I stick my head back in to see what they have been doing with the characters. Sometimes it’s good, like Generation X, and sometimes it’s bad, like destroying Banshee by completely removing all vestiges of the character we have known for twenty plus years and making him a militant bad guy (Banshee? WTF?).

This time it’s about the same. While there are some things that I am *very* happy about, such as Magneto getting Genosha and being all Machiavellian and tragic (honestly, he has really hit a high point as an anti-hereo in those storylines), as well as Marvel ditching the cowardly attempt to avoid accusations of anti-Semitism with the “Erik Lehnsherr Sinte Gypsy” I.D. (by making it a forgery), there are some things I am not.

For instance…

“Secondary Mutations”. Being a telepath wasn’t enough, suddenly this person has to be able to turn her body into a “living diamond”. (Dudes, even Colossus wasn’t solid steel, get a grip.) Sorry folks, but it’s just a lame-ass cop out of writers run that have out of ideas. A duex ex machina to save characters written into a corner or in Hank’s case, to monkey with to make worse. Cut it out.

Beast is Angsty. Let me repeat that. The Beast. Is Angsty. As in the uninspired soulless automatons at Marvel had to go and make Hank McCoy depressing. The losers.

Women are either frigidly cold sex-tease bitches or completely hysterical psychotic bitches. When was the last time anyone at Marvel had a date? Do they wonder why?

Multiple titles. This is one of the reasons I left in the first place. It’s started with the X-Men and then they added the New Mutants. Their story lines didn’t even cross at that much despite the fact they lived in the same damn house. Now we have X-men, Uncanny X-Men, Astonishing X-Men, Amazing X-Men, New X-Men, Ultimate X-Men (whom for some reason are all gay, so much for Magneto’s dream of a Mutant Race, they aren’t breeding.), X-Factor, New Mutants, Wolverine, Weapon X, etc. etc. etc. And you have to buy all the titles of you want to keep up with any major storyline.

At 3.00$ a pop.

It’s fucking annoying. Knock it off.

Wolverine is named James Howlett. Now, I have never been overly fond of the little guy (I prefer either characters who do not take themselves *so* seriously: such as the way Nightcrawler, Banshee or the Beast used to be, or the *really* grand walking Greek tragedy: Magneto) but I understood his appeal. Wolvie was “the Man". He called all woman “darlin’” and Professor Xavier “Chuck”. He smoked constantly and drank copious amount of beer (an advantage of having a body that processes all toxins at a highly accelerated rate), he called out Cyclops for being the neurotic boyscout that he was, he loved Jean (and later Mariko) in the way a Knight of a chivalric medieval romance loved his unattainable Lady, he would take every fight to the limit and then go beyond, he was a reality check for all the other characters (Xavier included) and yet the ultimate Man of Mystery in the mansion, and the fans loved him for it.

Now, the wonderful thing about men of mystery is…

They’re mysterious.

You drop a little clue, a breadcrumb of character development every two years, and the fan base goes beserk with speculation and keeps buying the title.

You do not spell out every single fucking detail of their life story.

The problem is that everyone who grew up reading the X-Men that had their own ideas about Wolvie’s background got into comics and proceed to ruin it for the rest of us. A friend of mine refers to it as the “Rape of Wolverine”, the blatant exploitation and destruction of a great character in order to sell books.

Actually I was watching one DVD extra or something where they were discussing Wolverine character as the “failed Samurai” who has actually far exceeded the rest of the world’s moral and ethical standards, but continually fails his own unreasonably high self-judgment. I thought that was a great analysis of the character in a nutshell and all anyone ever needed to know about him.

And now that they have spelled out everything about Wolvie's background, what is there left to do with him?

Stupid, stupid people.

They killed Skin. Angelo Espinosa was one of the more unique character creations they had in some time. Skin was an ex-gang banger from L.A. who’s mutation of six extra feet of grey skin put him squarely in the Nightcrawler/ Beast category of getting by. But the fact that being at Xaviers was escaping his violence fraught past combined with the fact that he had more street smarts and experience, though not necessarily maturity, then most of the other kids made him someone who had his priorities in order and wasn’t taking life too seriously most of the time. I enjoyed Angelo, I was looking forward to seeing him back…and they killed him off as a plot device…

Because Gawd knows you can’t possibly have anyone running around the X-Universe that isn’t tragic and depressing.

Will someone get the Marvel staff some Paxil or something?

O.K. Rant fini.

I’ll check back with something a little more sane and on the ball within a week or so when I hit the next stop on the “Rutger Nationwide Tour”: Arizona, but I may check in before then.