Civil War

[Mazakiel]

I've always been a big fan of Wolverine, but I can't stand what they've done the last few years.  One fucking stupid idea after another.  Though with everything I read of Civil War, it's not a problem limited solely to Wolverine stuff. 

[HaemishM]

And as a bonus, they've taken Wolverine into obscenely stupid territory (from just regular old stupid territory). In the latest issue, we see all his skin burned off his body just leaving the skeleton. And we are to assume his brain wasn't cooked in the process, what with being trapped in the equivalent of a metal pot. They've taken his regen ability to absurd proportions.

Thank you Haem.  Thank you for saving me the money.

It's even funnier to watch the skin and muscle and such grow back over the metal skeleton. In the current story, he's dropped from the HELICARRIER onto the streets of New York and gotten back up to walk into a building and act all badass, as well as any number of other death situations that his regen ability just magically fixes. It's gotten really retarded.

[Ironwood]

Yeah, but the mutant nullifier bit was just as stupid.  I would imagine that popping his claws without his mutant healing factor would make a right fucking mess of his entire forearms.

[Margalis]

(Thinks back to Hulk vs. Wolverine)

So when we started Hulk was invulnerable and Wolverine had minor healing powers. Then we learned that Hulk was not invulverable but just healed REALLY fast. Then Hulk started healing less fast. Meanwhile Woverine can regenerate his entire body fairly quickly.

Conclusion: Wolverine's powers are actually similar to Rogue's and he stole Hulk's regeneration ability!

[Velorath]

For those still reading Civil War, Marvel just pushed back issues 6 and 7 by two weeks (to the 3rd, and 31st of Jan).  According to Marvel, Steve McNiven came down with a case of strep throat.

[Ironwood]

Everyone in Marvel appears to be getting ill.  Which is fine because the storylines make me nauseous too.

[Velorath]

Just read through the Iron Man/Captain America Civil War book and it was probably the best book out of all the Civil War stuff I've read.  I'm not too familiar with Christos N. Gage.  A quick search shows that he's done some writing for TV, but I haven't read any of the comics that he's written.  He did a pretty good job here though of fleshing out both Iron Man and Cap's point of views.  He also shows some of the rougher points of their friendship and how well they know each other's flaws.

Of course in order to make this book work they pretty much had to avoid going into detail on why Tony would clone Thor, and they pretty much leave out anything about having super-villains working for him.  Actually this whole book in a way highlights how stupid that shit is by showing just how much they really didn't need to throw that crap in there to escalate the conflict between Cap's side and Iron Man's side.

In comparison Civil War Frontline #9 was garbage, portraying Cap as being out of touch and suggesting Iron Man's main motivation for backing the registration act was to make money.

[HaemishM]

In comparison Civil War Frontline #9 was garbage, portraying Cap as being out of touch and suggesting Iron Man's main motivation for backing the registration act was to make money.

Yeah, that book didn't really do a whole lot to make any sense whatsoever, and made the characters seem to go against what the entire rest of the book had been portraying them as. I find it said that they've done 9 of these books and yet can't even get 6 of the regular book out. There's more supplementary material than actual material on this story. I'll have to read the Iron Man/Cap book.

[HaemishM]

That Casualties of War book? Terrible. Two books within two weeks of each other with a "final" conversation between Iron Man and Cap, neither of them very good. How does editorial just let that shit slip by? How do they approve it? Is there no overriding voice looking at all these crossovers and separate books and slapping the shit out of writers? I can let a few continuity slips go by, but Civil War has just gotten to insane levels of miscoordination. Why does Joe Q. still have a job? Jim Shooter should be storming through the halls beating editors left and right with his cock.

[Velorath]

That Casualties of War book? Terrible. Two books within two weeks of each other with a "final" conversation between Iron Man and Cap, neither of them very good. How does editorial just let that shit slip by? How do they approve it? Is there no overriding voice looking at all these crossovers and separate books and slapping the shit out of writers? I can let a few continuity slips go by, but Civil War has just gotten to insane levels of miscoordination. Why does Joe Q. still have a job? Jim Shooter should be storming through the halls beating editors left and right with his cock.

It's approved by the same people who can't get it straight whether or not the negative zone prison is a temporary measure or not.  The same people who have been unable to make a clear, consistant statement on what the Registration act does and doesn't entail, partly because they never bothered to figure that out, and partly so they can do "shocking" plot-twists like "omg backdoor draft for people who registered!".  The same guys who can't even keep their stories straight when it comes to explaining why the books are late.

[Velorath]

So Civil War 6 came out.  Due to Diamond having some transportation issues a lot of comic shops on the West Coast didn't get their shipments in, but at least that's one delay that can't be blamed on Marvel.  Speaking of which, why did this book get delayed?  On the writing side things aren't particularly complex.  It's filler and setup for the big fight scene next issue.  Which kind of makes me wonder just what the hell Cap's overall plan is anyway?  Does he hope to overturn U.S. law by beating Iron Man's team and breaking people out of prison?  Wouldn't this kind of behavior more or less turn the public's opinion even more against unregistered superheroes?  There doesn't seem to be any realistic way for Cap to achieve his goals.

Which I guess might be why we need Civil War Frontline (#10 of which also just came out) and its hints that there's some secret reason behind the Registration Act.  Marvel know's there's no logical way to resolve the plotline by just having the heroes fight each other, and they know people are buying the main Civil War book just to see heroes fight each other.  So while Cap and Iron Man are pointlessly beating the shit out of each other in the final issue of Civil War, which can't possibly resolve anything, I imagine the real wrap up to the storyline will be in Frontline when this dark secret about the Registration Act comes to light and changes public opinion.  Things probably won't go completely back to normal but of course Marvel will have all sorts of one-shots and minis to deal with the fallout.  Those are my predictions anyway.

[rk47]

Not sure how they're gonna cover the identity issues. Some people like Spidey doesn't have a mask to hide behind any more. To the average person, that's not a big deal but to supervillains, pete's gonna really get paranoid without Stark security acting as body guard for his family. He can't even get his job back at Daily Bugle lol.

[Velorath]

Surprising nobody, Civil War #7 has been delayed until February 21st.  Marvel hasn't yet said if this will cause any other books to be delayed.

[HaemishM]

Frontline was worse than the regular Civil War book. Everything is setting up for Tony Stark to be the big bad guy, which really cheapens the whole idea. PENANCE? So Speedball becomes a walking BDSM cliche?

Bleh.

[Llava]

SPOILER

Soooo... Hulkling, who is part Skrull, can shapeshift to replicate retina and voice patterns?  Wouldn't that mean that all Skrulls could do that?  Wouldn't that mean that relying on those forms of identification would be kind of silly, given all the past encounters with Skrulls?

I would've bought it had it actually been Mystique, saying that her mastery of shapeshifting is just that much more refined and just about no other shapeshifter could pull off such a complete transformation, but if a half-skrull could do it, that's a whole enemy alien race practically being handed the keys to TOP SECRET GOVERNMENT FACILITY OMG.

I actually would've bought it more had Pym actually just switched sides.  He certainly seemed to be leaning that way with the whole thorbot incident, in his conversation with parker.

[HaemishM]

Didn't we see Pym/Hulkling working on Thorbot's brain earlier in the issue?

Yeah, it's a clusterfuck of a continuity snafu.

[Lantyssa]

Is Hulkling the son of the Super-Skrull?  If so, maybe his powers are more refined.  I don't know much about the Young Avengers though, so take my memory with a grain of salt.

Not that it still isn't silly.

[HaemishM]

He's the son of Super-Skrull and a human woman, I think. But he's a teenager, so expecting his powers to be that refined is probably a bit much.

[Luxor]

Is it bad that I find the parodies more entertaining than the real thing?

http://mightygodking.livejournal.com/291556.html

[Zetleft]

Is it bad that I find the parodies more entertaining than the real thing?

http://mightygodking.livejournal.com/291556.html

Nothing wrong with that.  I haven't even read any civil war stuff, other then this thread, and I gotta say that parody was fucking hilarious.

"you're staring at my groin" 

[Ironwood]

Is it bad that I find the parodies more entertaining than the real thing?

http://mightygodking.livejournal.com/291556.html

No.  That's fucking hilarious.

SomethingAwful did summat similar at one point.  The only thing Civil War is good for is parody.

[HaemishM]

Le art.

[Tebonas]

Finally a justification for the Civil war stuff. They should fire the writers and print this instead.

[Velorath]

That shit was pretty damn funny.

By the way, Marvel recently announced that they've added an epilogue issue for Civil War (called "the Confession" I think).  Haemish in particular might be excited to know that apparently it features... another talk between Iron Man and Captain America.

[HaemishM]

I weep for Marvel Comics. Is this the conversation where they take all the pent up aggression and asspound each other while Harry Potter watches? Fuck. Nothing good can come of this series.

[Llava]

Well, I have to give the Fantastic Four writer credit. This week, he explored why Reed is acting how he is, and gave a halfway plausible and in-character reason for his actions.

[Teleku]

Yeah, Reed Richards is Hari Seldon.  Who knew.

But yeah, I actually can accept that as an explination for his wierd actions, since I can imagine the uber genius side of him deciding thats the way to go given what he knows.

[Velorath]

Well, I have to give the Fantastic Four writer credit. This week, he explored why Reed is acting how he is, and gave a halfway plausible and in-character reason for his actions.

I haven't read it yet, but I heard that Dwayne McDuffie (creator of Static Shock) took over writing Fantastic Four starting with this issue (which was planned, although the issue was solicited as being written by JMS).

[Ironwood]

Yeah, Reed Richards is Hari Seldon.  Who knew.

Reed fucks robots ?

[HaemishM]

He might as well, after this last issue, Sue's not going to touch him with someone else's vagina. As for his entire reason for following along this path, it only works if you take the interpretation of his character that says he's the guy who stole a spaceship to test a theory. It completely ignores all the rest of his life after that mistake, his entire use of power responsibly since then.

[Llava]

I'd say he's frantically trying to do the most responsible thing he can see.  That's why he kidnapped the Thinker to check his math, hoping he was wrong.  But if he's figured it out to the point that he knows he's not wrong about this, which it seems he has, responsibility suddenly turns from blind optimism to damage control.

[Velorath]

Yeah, Reed Richards is Hari Seldon.  Who knew.

Reed fucks robots ?

Well, the Scarlet Witch did make that sort of thing acceptable in the MU.

[Llava]

And Red Tornado made it alright in DCU.

Personally, I think we need to amend the constitution to ban that.  It was Adam and Eve, not Adam and TV.

[Lantyssa]

I bet you don't approve of cylon-human relations either. 

[HaemishM]

Civil War: The Return came out. The Sentry story was useless, and the return of MAR-VELL was silly. They pulled an Hourman. They made Mar-vell warden of the Negative Zone prison. I just don't see how it could be any more stupid.