Civil War (The Comic, not the G'n'f'n'R song)
Civil War (The Comic, not the G'n'f'n'R song)
Sep 20Didn’t Guns and Roses have a song called “Civil War”? Does anyone care? I don’t. Moving on.
Civil War #4 is finally out, and there is much rejoicing in the streets. Okay, maybe not the streets. Unless you define the streets as “my brain.” In which case, sure, rejoicing. Fine. Run with it.
And here’s what we have (SPOILERS lie ahead)…
1. “Thor” is a clone.
2. Tony Stark is fucking CREEPY for saving people’s hair.
2a. My cow-orker informs me that you can’t even clone someone from hair–something about the DNA being too dead–so fuck you, Millar.
3. Goliath is dead.
4. Peter Parker’s finally growing a spine.
5. Sue’s leaving Reed, leading Reed to start making bitter posts on his MySpace page about Sue.
I liked the execution of this issue more than I did the plot within it, if that makes any sense. The idea of the Thor clone is intriguing, but relying on cloning to move this lumbering event forward seems like a big-ass cop-out to me. It’s just too easy and cliche, especially for a comic book company where the words “clone” and “saga” put together instantly bring to mind humiliation and horseshit writing.
At the same time, that opening battle has a real intensity and scope, probably thanks mostly to Steve McNiven’s exceptional pencils. There’s real terror when the realization sets in that this war has become very, very real–that it’s not men in tights knocking each other around anymore, and that there are real life-or-death stakes involved.
You feel that, too, when the battle breaks up and the respective forces return to their home bases to lick their wounds; suddenly everything feels locked into place, and you get the sense of this as an ongoing conflict, which honestly, I haven’t really felt in the main Civil War book yet.
So, yeah. It’s still doing what I want it to do–marry Marvel madness (loved the 38 grave sites line re: Goliath) to a moral issue that is truly character-driven. Color me satisfied.
