Marvel Universe (Thar be spoilers ahead.)

[Merusk]

Isn't the plot of this "civil war" thing exactly the same as the overall xmen premise?

It makes more sense when you realize mutants are analogs for people who are gay. Born that way, can't help it but are hated for it. They're "Flawed!"

 Meanwhile the FF4 and others are normal people who were just in terrible accidents.  They're OK because they were only maimed. They were "normal" once.

[Speedy Cerviche]

That's a modern interpretation. I am pretty sure I have heard Stan Lee say it was to tap into teenage angst.

[K9]

However, The Avengers do well separately and together, both in the comics and in the films, and Marvel has built a very nice film universe around it.

I'm trying to envision some films based around solo members of the X-Men that aren't wolverine and it's not going well. A cyclops movie? A storm movie? Those sound awful.

[Lakov_Sanite]

However, The Avengers do well separately and together, both in the comics and in the films, and Marvel has built a very nice film universe around it.

I'm trying to envision some films based around solo members of the X-Men that aren't wolverine and it's not going well. A cyclops movie? A storm movie? Those sound awful.

Magneto and Xavier could have been a whole movie without the first class, kind of a wasted opportunity there.

[Raguel]

I remember a few good Storm-centric stories by Claremont back in the day, but I don't really care for Halle Berry so I'm in no hurry to see her in a stand-alone movie.

[Merusk]

That's a modern interpretation. I am pretty sure I have heard Stan Lee say it was to tap into teenage angst.

Conveniently Civil War and the X-men movies are modern stories.

[jgsugden]

I hesitate to mention anything about Civil War as there seems to be some mistake that people think I adore the storyline - I just think it is something that they could translate to film and sell as it was one of their most marketable mass events. 

It covers a lot of ground, but the core issues was meant to reflect the battle between security and privacy that was being waged after 911.  If a trustworthy government has access to all our data, it can do a better job to protect us from threats.  On the other hand, that is major Big Brother territory - and many would argue government is one of the worst threats out there.

Do the heroes have to give up their anonymioty and be regulated?  Or do they have the right to secret identities and privacy.

There are a lot of ways that was reflected, and they used the conflict between heroes as the main point, but according to the articles I read about the storyline, that was the sell at the conclave where they planned it out.

[Velorath]

Except one of the main issues with Civil War is that it's not unreasonable to ask people who are more or less acting as law enforcement to register with the government. That's not really an invasion of privacy for the sake of security in the same respect that it's not unreasonable to require that people become cops rather than just let anybody who wants to put on a mask and go out and enforce Justice. Civil War's failing is that it shined a spotlight on tropes we've just agreed to ignore because, hey superhero comics. It makes sense to make superheroes register, and the writers put themselves in the position where they ultimately had to champion the wrong side because it's the status quo.

Edit: In fact the anti-reg side came across almost like an unintentional parody of the NRA. The only way to stop a bad guy with superpowers is a good guy with superpowers, and fuck no we shouldn't be subjected to registration or any sort of regulations or laws.

[jgsugden]

The interesting thing about Civil War, to me, was how it was viewed very differently in different areas and by different groups of people.  Go back and read some of the articles about it.  There are a lot of people that think like Velorath, but there are a lot of people that disagree, too.

[Velorath]

They tried to portray it as more or less two equal sides at first, but they knew from the start they weren't going to keep registration around (because again, status quo). They ultimately had to stack the deck and make the pro-reg side look worse by having the Thunderbolts crippling people, having fake Thor kill the expendable black superhero, Cap getting assassinated after he turned himself in, etc., and they never made a reasonable case for why registration itself was bad.

[sickrubik]

I side very much with jgusden on the interpretation side of things when it comes to Civil War.

However, I think a lot of it is a Rorschach test.

[Lakov_Sanite]

He has a point in that all of it is based on super hero tropes and the entire arc had to be written to fit a fake world.  No amount of heroism would allow supers in the real world to get away with what they do, in one way DC's "gods amongst men" works because what the fuck can any government do to superman except try to make nice?  The marvel world however has so many low powered supers such that the world governments must be completely incompetent or all turning an unrealistic blind eye to vigilantes. 

Hey I'd love a world where we could let super powered people do what they want but if you think that would ever be the world we live in then I have a bridge to sell you.  So yes, any real world statements in civil war are diminished by having the result predestined before the argument even began due to fake world constraints.

[HaemishM]

Civil War was not helped by the idiotic portrayals of established characters like Tony Stark and Reed Richards. What they did in those stories went so totally against 40 years worth of canon that it felt horribly forced... because it WAS horribly forced, horribly conceived. It also wasn't helped that the whole goddamn thing was a stretched out version of 3 pages worth of Marvel Team-Up style plotting - the part where the heroes fight before teaming up.

[Ironwood]

They tried to portray it as more or less two equal sides at first, but they knew from the start they weren't going to keep registration around (because again, status quo). They ultimately had to stack the deck and make the pro-reg side look worse by having the Thunderbolts crippling people, having fake Thor kill the expendable black superhero, Cap getting assassinated after he turned himself in, etc., and they never made a reasonable case for why registration itself was bad.

It didn't really help Spidermans life.

[Velorath]

I don't think it was his choices in Civil War that got him stuck with JMS as a writer.

[Lakov_Sanite]

If there was a completely separate comic universe called civil war where canon was built from scratch a la watchmen, I think it could have been something really great.

[Khaldun]

This has become a huge theme in both comics worlds since the early 2000s (gee, I wonder if something happened then...)--basically, I see it as roughly equivalent to the awkwardness of superhero comics in relationship to WWII in the Golden Age. You had characters then who could have ended the war, but the war was going on. The characters were escapism, but you couldn't push the escapism to "Awesome! Superman just killed so many Nazis that you don't have to worry about D-Day anymore," because that would be too  .

Since 2001, both companies have been increasingly preoccupied with on one hand having superheroes do stuff that feels "real", up to and including dealing with terrorism, covert or secret government, the militarization of democratic societies, etc.--but they obviously can't have superheroes 'win' any of those struggles.

Marvel lately seems to be slipping a bit more into really just saying, "Our fantasy universe is not your fantasy universe" mode: the Avengers are overtly involved in galactic politics, the Roxxon Oil Company is importing ice from their mining operations on Europa, AIM has just gone from being terrorist-analogues to something way weirder, etc. But neither company is never going to get this completely settled--in comics or in film/TV-- because they can't.

One thing to remember about Civil War, though, is that Millar was openly pro-registration and kind of openly anti-superhero in the way he developed the main story--and making the analogies very specific to the Patriot Act-era building up of a more intrusive US government, with apparent sympathy for that idea. Thunderbolts was kind of Ellis' reply to Millar: you fucking moral idiot. If you took even a small smidgen of that into a future Avengers film, you'd have to decide how to play it. So far I would say that the films seem to be going with "SHIELD/its bosses/governments are untrustworthy dickbags, you'd be better off going with Thor, Iron Man, et al".

[HaemishM]

This is one of the main problems I have with a lot of the guys in control of Marvel's super hero output these days. They fucking HATE the very idea of super heroes. They think it's stupid... because it IS stupid. Bendis is particularly guilty of this. They hate the concept and all the silliness and handwaving that is required for this to function in a modern world. And it bleeds all over their work and affects it for the worse, IMO. Super heroes of the power levels talked about would fundamentally change the nature of the world - and if the universe refuses to acknowledge that (which it does because that's the way it's been done for decades), stories have to be manipulated so that things sort of work. And that means characters have to act out of character.

So either stop trying to root the Marvel universe in the real world. Don't make the president Barack Obama, make it someone like him. It's worked before, there's no reason it can't work now. That's one of the reasons I dig DC Comics at times - they don't even bother trying to place it in the real world where places like Gotham and Metropolis don't exist. They inhabit their own fantasy universe. So a lot of the bullshit pretzel logic that Civil War had to go through just doesn't exist. Now that doesn't necessarily mean the characters in DC are better, but they are usually more consistent in their characterizations.

Of course, I'm of the opinion Marvel needs another serious Crisis on Infinite Earths type of reboot and start again approach, but that's not happening.

[Tannhauser]

Brandon Flowers from The Killers said something to the effect that "Nirvana took all the fun out of rock and roll."  I see this is the case with comics too.  That's why the MCU is doing so well.  Super heroes are stupid, everyone knows they are stupid, but a lot of folks still like them.  And Marvel is having fun with them.  None of the MCU movies have been total grimdark, everyone has a quip here and there while saving the world.  Look at the Guardians; a freaking raccoon with a machine gun.  While 'DCU' flounders in grimdark, the MCU struts by in it's platform shoes with goldfish in them.

Sure GL tried, but something just didn't come together over there.

[Velorath]

This is one of the main problems I have with a lot of the guys in control of Marvel's super hero output these days. They fucking HATE the very idea of super heroes. They think it's stupid... because it IS stupid. Bendis is particularly guilty of this. They hate the concept and all the silliness and handwaving that is required for this to function in a modern world.

I think a prime example of that was the whole thing with whether or not Hulk ever killed anybody in his rampages. Obviously if you look at it with real world logic, of course it's reasonable to assume that at least some people have died due to the Hulk, but that would make the Hulk a lot less likable as a character and makes him hard to redeem or portray as a hero when he sometimes goes crazy and kills innocent people (which makes for a potentially interesting character, but probably not how Marvel want portray him given how recognizable he is to kids). So you just handwave that stuff away. It's comics. Hulk hasn't killed anybody. Of course that's not good enough for Bendis, so he does a story where it's mentioned that Hulk went on a rampage in Vegas that killed innocents including children, because fuck all that handwavy shit, we need to take these superhero comics seriously.

Then Greg Pak, eventually retconned it saying that the Hulk doesn't kill because Banner subconsciously runs calculations that enable Hulk to rampage while not killing anybody (not sure how they dealt with the Vegas stuff specifically). This of course was an enormously retarded explanation, but only became necessary because Bendis had to fuck with the character since he is just incapable of accepting these tropes. When I was doing some searches online just now trying to remember the specifics of all this, I saw someone refer to the Hulk not killing as "Superman's Glasses". That made me think that if Bendis worked for DC, I could actually see him doing a Superman arc eliminating the Clark Kent disguise because there's just no way that shit would actually fool anybody.

[eldaec]

Tony Soprano, Walter white, Dr Jekyll, MacBeth, are all relatable characters who do bad shit including killing innocents.

If you write well you can write past the hulk's issues. The avengers did a pretty good job, although they had the advantage of the hulk being nowhere near top of the bill.

Otoh if you limit the hulk to a poor misunderstood victim you get the last few attempts at a hulk film and everyone goes home bored.

[Lakov_Sanite]

Comic books are not and should never try to be Shakespeare.  That's the point.

It's a different genre, a different form of fantasy and escapism.  People get cynical and they want things to be as grimdark and cynical as there are but those people should not be allowed to write every damn comic.  Preacher was far and away better than most dramas you'll see in movies and tv but it never started out as a super hero comic.  There are venues in comics for telling grimdark stories without fucking over children's heroes.

[Ironwood]

Comic books are not and should never try to be Shakespeare. 

Not for nothing, but I hate when people do this.

Comic books are pretty much Shakespeare.   

[Merusk]

Oh you.  Next you'll be saying Justin Bieber is Mozart.

Just because it's art for the masses or some such.  Geez.

[Ironwood]

Oh God, No, I won't be saying that at all.

Though Mozart wouldn't get punched out in a fast food restaurant.

[Lakov_Sanite]

I recognize shakespeare is probably the closest one to comics but replace shakespeare with breaking bad or sopranos then, they just are not a medium for gritty realism.

[Merusk]

Oh God, No, I won't be saying that at all.

Though Mozart wouldn't get punched out in a fast food restaurant.

I dunno, man.  The guy WAS kind of a douche in only the way a person exposed to fame from age 4 onward can be.

[eldaec]

Some people here need to see more Shakespeare.

If you think he wasn't writing fantasy and escapism then you weren't paying attention.

Almost any good performance art is fantasy and escapism. That doesn't excuse you from including relatable characters

[eldaec]

To be fair to people here, I should add that there are few people on earth who wouldn't benefit from more Shakespeare when writing film critism.

[Margalis]

The Hulk stuff seems like a perfect example of editors not doing their jobs.

[Khaldun]

I think it was a case of creative confusion--that "realism" was what would make comics, and comics movies, work.

Which, again, means nobody at DC or Marvel was paying attention when "The Incredibles" worked so well. Audiences will love the fuck out of a superhero movie that isn't ashamed of having superheroes--you just have to get the whole feel right, beginning to end, and have tons of heart and almost no fanservice continuity-wank.

[Velorath]

Tony Soprano, Walter white, Dr Jekyll, MacBeth, are all relatable characters who do bad shit including killing innocents.

If you write well you can write past the hulk's issues. The avengers did a pretty good job, although they had the advantage of the hulk being nowhere near top of the bill.

Otoh if you limit the hulk to a poor misunderstood victim you get the last few attempts at a hulk film and everyone goes home bored.

Tony Soprano and Walter White don't get to occasionally join the Defenders or the Avengers. Parents aren't going to pick up Breaking Bad comics for their kids expecting child-friendly entertainment and then have to explain to their kids that sometimes Walter White does stuff that results in the death of children and other innocent people.

Like I said, those kinds of characters are interesting, but they aren't the Hulk.

[HaemishM]

To be fair, children aren't really the target demographic for comic books these days (man-children but not children). Comic book movies are going for an all audiences type of thing, however.

[Margalis]

Most comics these days sell like 30k copies or fewer. The target audience seems to be the smallish group of people who read comics in the 90s and stuck with them.

[Lakov_Sanite]

comics are deader than uncle ben.