Secret Wars Presents A Civil War That Never Ended

[Fanghawk]

Secret Wars Presents A Civil War That Never Ended

According to Charles Soule, Secret Wars will resurrect the Marvel Comics Civil War from a parallel universe where the battle never stopped.

Hey, remember when <a href=http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/138018-Marvels-Civil-War-Comic-Series-Coming-2015>Civil War was being re-released as a Secret Wars promotion? Did you ever wonder how that made any sense, since Civil War was part of Marvel's history? Well, Marvel Comics has been shedding some details of what's planned, and it seems the new series fits into <a href=http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/139551-Marvel-Comics-and-Ultimate-Universes-Will-Merge-In-Secret-Wars>Secret Wars parallel dimension smorgasbord after all - specifically, thanks to an alternate Earth where the war never ended.

"It takes the premise of the original [Civil War]-a super hero-focused internal battle-and expands it out to deliver on the promise of the title," writer Charles Soule explained. "In this new story, the Civil War has been going on for a long time, and it involves all of us-the entire country-not just the super heroes."

The original Civil War - written by Mark Millar with art from Steve McNiven - was a 2006 comics event where Marvel's superhero community made a choice: Reveal their secret identities or be treated as illegal vigilantes. The storyline turned former allies against each other, most notably Iron Man and Captain America, and had ramifications for the next half-decade of Marvel storylines.

In the regular Marvel continuity, Civil War had a clearly defined end - when Captain America surrendered. But in the Battleworld version, that finale never occurred. Instead the entire country was dragged into a prolonged conflict until the events of Secret Wars mashed its universe into all of the others. That being said, Soule intends for his version of Civil War to be a standalone story that be read independently of the larger storyline.

"The story is located in a nation on the Battleworld called the Warzone," Soule continued. "That spot is pretty isolated from the rest of Battleworld, and there are story reasons for that, which you'll see. It was important to me to write a story that could work either as an independent book-whether you're reading Secret Wars or not, or even if you've never read the original Civil War-or as part of the larger story. That was a tricky thing to pull off, but I think it works."

That distinction will likely be an important one, especially for movie fans who will only know about Civil War through <a href=http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/moviesandtv/columns/moviebob/12459-Captain-America-3-Will-Bring-Civil-War-to-the-Marvel-Cinematic-U>the upcoming Captain America film. Soule is also hoping to bring his own spin to Civil War's themes that stand apart from Millar and the MCU's versions.

"I wanted to comment on today's world in a way that hopefully resonates a bit with readers in the same way the original did almost 10 years ago," Soule said. "In some ways, the world is a very different place; and in others, the same. We're still arguing over security vs. freedom, and those themes are still present in my book. However, I wanted to comment more specifically on the idea of perpetual war; how years upon years of war can change the people fighting, both on the front lines and at home, and what it does to the leaders. For better or worse, this is my story-I didn't want to just repeat what we've seen before, as great as that was."

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But if you just want to read about superheroes pounding the tar out of each other? Well, that will be in Civil War too. "Without a doubt, it's the biggest thing I've ever done as far as story-scale. Lord of the Rings-style battles, almost every character you saw in the original Civil War plus more."

The Secret Wars Civil War series is expected to launch this June.

Source: <a href=http://marvel.com/news/comics/24307/secret_wars_correspondence_civil_war>Marvel

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[Godzillarich(aka tf2godz)]

Ok Marvel I'm going to say this just once.....stop pretending people liked civil war, no one likes civil war, stop talking about civil war people are trying to forget it, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD JUST STOP!

 

[CrazyGirl17]

Really, can we just get over Civil War already? Yes, the idea was interesting, but it wasn't handled very well, so why are we still talking about it?

 

[esserin]

Maybe this is an attempt to redo civil wars so that it doesn't suck?

 

[The Bucket]

We get it Marvel, Civil War sells a boatload of trades, doesnt make the event any less contrived and badly coordinated

 

[Scarim Coral]

Never ended? Really? As if making the characters even more out of characters is suppose to be a good thing (the concept is itneresting but I never liked just at how jaded the character were changed to make the story happened).

Beside how the hell can they even dragged it on with the amount of stuff that happened in their universe after Civil War and it DID ended regardless of the outcome with those two "what if" endings!

 

[P-89 Scorpion]

Really, can we just get over Civil War already? Yes, the idea was interesting, but it wasn't handled very well, so why are we still talking about it?

Because a $100+ million film is coming out based on it next year?

 

[Imperioratorex Caprae]

Ok Marvel I'm going to say this just once.....stop pretending people liked civil war, no one likes civil war, stop talking about civil war people are trying to forget it, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD JUST STOP!

And I'll parry and thrust saying I am of the many who did, in fact, like the Civil War series.

It addressed many issues that were relevant to both real world and the Marvel Earth politics. The prevalence of "reality media" and who ultimately is responsible for the damage caused by these super-beings battling in populated areas. You may not personally have enjoyed it, and it may not have had every moment written and drawn perfectly, but I thought it really made a difference in calling attention to the idea of accountability.
In US society, it seems accountability is something we don't want to address. We want to blame society, or mental illness, or video games, or "affluenza" shit like that. Politicians are NEVER truly held accountable for their mistakes, not since Nixon's impeachment (the Clinton impeachment trial was a farce, I'll leave it there). And the idea of the Marvel Civil War was holding super-heroes accountable for the damage they cause just as much as the villains they fight.

Spoiler: For those who haven't read it, spoiler warning

The most poignant piece of that series was at the end where Captain America is tackled by regular folks who force him to stop and take a look around at whats happening, who's really being hurt and he realizes that truly it is not Captain America who is in the wrong but Steve Rogers and that is a different thing entirely. He realized that everyone must be held accountable for the repercussions of their actions else who would be?

I can say that you're entitled to your opinion that you didn't like the Civil War comics. But dare not speak for all of us, because you cannot with certainty say no one liked it. Stop pretending you can speak for everyone or that you know for certain we all believe the same things you do because we don't.
Speak for yourself and let others either agree or disagree but do not deign to speak for us all sir, you are not privy to our thoughts universally.

END OF LINE

 

[Therumancer]

"Civil War" as an event was ruined when Bush-bashing liberals in the comics industry decided to undermine years worth of lead in to turn it into a political statement. Rather than two equally right sides clashing without any favoritism among the narrative, we started literally seeing Luke Cage ranting about slavery when Iron Man tried to recruit him, and a prison literally developed and marketed as "Superhuman Gitmo" (this comes from promotional materials directed at comic shop owners). They decided to push a "Captain America = The Right Side, Iron Man = The Wrong Side" totally overlooking the fact that at the end of the day the basic argument is supposed to be one that only makes sense in universe. Namely that threats like super villains cannot be successfully confronted by heroes who face public accountability. The basic argument being similar to the one from "The Incredibles" where they showed publically accountable heroes being shut down by the government due to concerns over law suits and such, which is ridiculous, but Marvel already went there to some extent since basically some bystander who gets his car trashed by heroes saving the city is still going to be pissed about losing his car (for example) and worrying about that or being tied down by laws, means fighting the bad guys becomes impractical. To some extent Marvel already went here long before "Civil War" by introducing concepts like "Damage Control Inc." and "Super Hero Insurance", including at one point a scam by Damage Control Inc. to fake super hero battles/damage in order to get government sponsored kickbacks if I remember. At the same time however saying "these guys are super powerful, and we're going to support the law having no control over them, and rely on them to keep each other in line" isn't exactly a wonderful idea either, especially in Marvel where while it's been a headache various heroes like "The Fantastic Four" have long histories of being able to balance public identities and accountability with the needs of public service. A third point that was foreshadowed but seemed to be overlooked due to politics, being mentioned only fairly briefly, is that the heroes were always somewhat accountable since groups like SHIELD both had surprisingly huge databases on them, and a decent track record of being able to deal with rogue heroes both with it's own technology and by using it's own deputized super humans. Effectively the registration act already happened, with the full support of Captain America no less, it's just that it wasn't public.


The point is that "Civil War" had potential and seeing them do a reboot of it, doing it the RIGHT way is not a bad idea and one of the things on my wish list if they do pull an "Infinite Crisis" with Marvel, although I do prefer they keep the initial continuity intact as I always do (I dislike universal reboots as a matter of principle, don't even get me started on DC's "New 52" which had some cool stuff but gave up waaay too much). Simply re-printing the old comics or having a universe that continued from those comics directly just continues a waste of potential, and provides a perfect example of why personal, current, political grudges should be kept out of comic events, especially those that by definition rely on forms of in-universe logic for which there is no equivalent. It's as dumb as Marvel having done all of this tear jerking 9/11 stuff based on the real tradgedy and even had Doctor Doom shedding tears if I remember, when really a couple of buildings is nothing compared to the stuff that goes down in this universe. A couple of Muslims fly planes into a building and it's a big deal IRL, in a world where aliens tend to invade for real, we've had demons literally overrun New York City (Inferno), and enemy nations like Latveria exist, it's not even a blip on the radar, buildings get wrecked constantly, including when low flying aircraft and drones and such hit them in the process of chasing guys like Spider Man or various flying heroes and villains. While it came later, I mean cripes, in Fear Itself they literally had super entities (in this case a possessed "Thing") blowing up Avengers tower, and DC being overrun by armies of literal Nazi mecha... which flattened the place better than the War of 1812 could ever have dreamed. Yet while it was a big deal it somehow seemed to be less of one than when they decided to insert 9/11 for whatever bloody reason.

 

[faefrost]

Ok Marvel I'm going to say this just once.....stop pretending people liked civil war, no one likes civil war, stop talking about civil war people are trying to forget it, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD JUST STOP!

Let's be fair. We've been saying this about every single one of these "major event" crossovers for the past 20+ years. (OK Anihilation was good, but it was small and self contained.) I mean House of M? Or how about Secret Invasion? 6 issues of boring followed by one issue of WTF? At least for most of the big crossovers, the return to normalcy after them has occasionally yielded some interesting stories. But now it looks like they are writing that part out of the equation.

It astonished me that Marvel and DC, now effectively Disney and Warner Brothers, still have not figured out comics. Or rather they still expect to be selling comics the way they have been. Overpriced event dreck that fewer and fewer fans buy. Their payday comes from the IP, not from the physical comic book sales. The best they could do would be to walk away from the annual shitfests and instead simply start giving the comics away as loss leaders and IP bait. Follow the model used by a rather large number of succesful webcomics. Take a few of their A list properties. One X Men Book, a Spiderman book, an Avengers title, etc. Publish them as free web comics. 3 pages / week. M-W-F. Or better yet 1 page a day. Let the fans of the movies and TV shows find them and start reading them. Some will like them so much they will buy the other books. But if not you are generating fans of the IP and web traffic to sell ads. Just give them good solid stories.

Or am I being crazy again?

 

[Therumancer]

Ok Marvel I'm going to say this just once.....stop pretending people liked civil war, no one likes civil war, stop talking about civil war people are trying to forget it, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD JUST STOP!

Let's be fair. We've been saying this about every single one of these "major event" crossovers for the past 20+ years. (OK Anihilation was good, but it was small and self contained.) I mean House of M? Or how about Secret Invasion? 6 issues of boring followed by one issue of WTF? At least for most of the big crossovers, the return to normalcy after them has occasionally yielded some interesting stories. But now it looks like they are writing that part out of the equation.

It astonished me that Marvel and DC, now effectively Disney and Warner Brothers, still have not figured out comics. Or rather they still expect to be selling comics the way they have been. Overpriced event dreck that fewer and fewer fans buy. Their payday comes from the IP, not from the physical comic book sales. The best they could do would be to walk away from the annual shitfests and instead simply start giving the comics away as loss leaders and IP bait. Follow the model used by a rather large number of succesful webcomics. Take a few of their A list properties. One X Men Book, a Spiderman book, an Avengers title, etc. Publish them as free web comics. 3 pages / week. M-W-F. Or better yet 1 page a day. Let the fans of the movies and TV shows find them and start reading them. Some will like them so much they will buy the other books. But if not you are generating fans of the IP and web traffic to sell ads. Just give them good solid stories.

Or am I being crazy again?

Well, part of the problem is that the business side of these companies have yet to really get a handle on both the speculator market and political bias within the media, and how they affect things. The speculator market isn't quite what it was in the 1990s but is still a huge part of comics, and at the end of the day there are people that rush out to purchase anything that is part of an "event" or does something unusual with the status quo. What's more like the gaming media you see a ton of left wing bias within comics media as well, it's one of the reasons why I and a few others broaden the whole gamersgate type problems to include geekdom in general, and point out it can be expanded to all forms of journalism and reporting in a general sense, but it's perhaps most directly entrenched within the geek culture. Civil War is a good example of this problem, it managed to get critical acclaim from the comics press, because of the way it was being written to include commentary on current politics even if this meant a lot of characters acting incredibly out of character and the writing itself to suck because it just never meshed well with the world it was supposed to be taking place in, like a lot of other political events they try to bring into fantasy worlds with their own greatly divergent realities. The comics industry looks at the spectator market for sales, and the media commentary, and assumes people "really liked this" but never actually look at the average comic reader and what their reaction actually is, and seem to go out of their way to ignore what the reaction is once things have had a chance to digest somewhat and we're not in the promotion/hype phase anymore. The classic example of this in some comic communities is Miles Morales, the Black/Hispanic Spider Man from "The Ultimate Universe" who probably stands as one of the most reviled characters in Marvel's stable. He is however a character that moves a lot of books to speculators, and gets praise on political grounds for being a "statement" by ethnicity changing a well known character. It makes money, the media seems to be loving it, so the key question is of course always why they can't really find ways to leverage the property beyond that to the point where even greedy FTP video games like "Marvel 2015" don't want anything to do with the character because they know the core fans won't give a crap.

That said, given that it makes money, you see the formula repeted, where we have major event after major event, all kinds of political statement stunts whether it's social or general politics, and it works, but few of these events go "blockbuster" by appealing to the average fan, and that's the lightning they want to strike. Civil War was almost a lighning strike to be fair because to begin with it DID involve a lot of positive fan interest, Marvel had lead into that for a while and done a huge "what side are you on" promotion for a long time beforehand. It's just that when the event arrived they went in an entirely different direction and made it so it was an event with a clear cut "black and white" battle where it shouldn't have been that undermined everything. While it was actually part of the "Road To Civil War" that happened right beforehand a lot of fans will point to the event dying a crib death when they had Iron Man trying to recruit Luke Cage and Iron Man getting a speech about slavery and for some reason being unable to articulate a response under Luke's "righteous fury". Something which not only made no sense at all in context, but also made it clear that if they were not having Luke dismissed as an idiot, and your supposed to be putting Iron Man's position in the same category as slave masters, it's pretty clear Iron Man is being presented as the bad guy here. From that point on it can be argued the whole tone being built here changed, we had Captain America leading a "heroic resistance" where we were supposed to see Iron Man as some kind of insane fascist who rarely had any opportunities to make what were supposed to be some very legitimate points. You also had people on all sides doing crap that they just would not do as a result trying to hammer this narrative and message through. It became less "whose side are you on" more than "support the heroic Captain America against the fallen hero Iron Man and his crusade for tyranny".


At any rate for those that read this far, if you really want to see the problem in a nutshell, the people you really want to look at right now are DC. DC has been getting a lot of crap about "New 52" and what it did to the continuity (which should probably not be encouraging to Marvel wanting to do the same thing) but one of it's high points has actually been what they did with the "Bat Family" books, having run two really epic events back to back in the form of "Court Of Owls" and "Death Of The Family", the darker tone and open world fitting Batman and doing things with his portion of the world that couldn't have been done previously. Things like the "Court Of Owls Mask" being pretty big sellers at cons, and even seeing mass produced versions for collectors boxes at comic stores. "Death Of The Family" was being worshipped by fans as one of the absolute best Batman stories, especially following that, as it used The Joker more effectively than almost anyone had before, putting it right up there with things like "The Long Halloween" and "The Killing Joke" for bat fans. Especially seeing as it did a successful fake out where it made the joker threatening in part because he was so nasty and the writers/event convincing people they were going to kill off numerous bat-family characters, invoking imagery from famous previous events, and even the title hearkening back to the first time Jason Todd was killed. It stood on it's own, but was also a masterpiece of meta-storytelling and implied menace directed specifically at fans. Of course flying high on this success the very first thing DC does is send everything they built up the river because political critics and SJWs thought a cover of the Joker menacing Batgirl was too dark and sexist. It doesn't matter that they created a version of Batman that was really successful to both collectors and fans, and were even doing well with merchandising off of this stuff even while most of New 52 was being heavily criticized, some SJWs say they don't like it in the media and obviously the comic company must change it's tune when artists start to feel intimidated. The point here being that it demonstrates that the industry itself does not understand what a good, or successful, comic book is, and that's why it's so hard for them to produce them, and rather we wind up with these endless series of "major events" that make money and don't annoy (or impress) the SJWs, but don't actually achieve any kind of real success with the actual fan base.... who might have supported it because they read comics, and talk about it because hey, it happened (but usually negatively), but certainly don't want more of that crap.

Of course with Marvel it should be noted that it intentionally wants to sink into the intellectual gutter, because that is where a lot of money is going to come from. It realized that there is more money in making movies than there ever will be in making comics, and the comics art form and any integrity they fought for can be used for toilet paper, and simply be treated as merchandising tie ins for movies which mandates creating the simplest, most dumbed down, and inoffensive product possible. On a lot of levels it might have created the audience for "The Civil War" that didn't exist when it was created, because simply put they probably aren't thinking about comic fans, and probably won't be until they tap out the movies (to be honest people will eventually be bored with them) and then come trying to win back the core fans and re build the integrity of the medium just to keep the IPs alive.

A sort of example of this would be say what happened with Alan Moore's work, namely things like "V For Vendetta" ask your average person what the story was about and they would talk about a heroic, but faceless, freedom fighter standing against a fascist future empire that tormented him. Some might very well even point out all the analogies to liberals criticizing Bush-era politics despite the story being set in the US. The observant might even point to various Anonymous ops and hactivists using Guy Fawkes masks when they stick it to the man. What everyone of course will miss is that this is NOT what the story was about, that's what a movie with only the most superficial resemblance to the source was about. Indeed that movie arguably undermined the entire point of a much deeper, and profound, story which was critically acclaimed because it never degenerated into the crap you saw in that movie. For example "V" is not a hero in any way, shape, or form, he's insane and totally self interested, and really has no concern for society or the damage he's doing at all. He's pure anarchy in the name of a vendetta, and goes so far that part of the point is that it doesn't matter who he is or why he's doing this anymore. Granted everyone in this story is a bad guy when you get down to it, but that's also kind of the point. Ironically the guy who is the bad guy in the movie is perhaps one of the most well intentioned characters in the entire story, which doesn't make him entirely right of course, but unlike V he at least means well and is trying to do good, and it can be argued that part of the reason his plans go to crap is because V is hacking the machines he uses to run the society and sabotaging everything, not because he even really messed up. So basically we have one of the most critically acclaimed graphic novels of all time, and perhaps one of the best social commentaries of all time which really takes nobody's side, turns it into a brainless action movie that teaches nobody anything of real value other than how real politics can ruin anything, and of course makes a ton of money which helped pave the way for the death of comics and the associated IPs because heck, who cares if we can make money creating something good, when we can have ALL the money, or at least make a good play for it, but creating the most basic and inoffensive trash we can.

 

[Travis Fischer]

Civil War was a failure at pretty much every level of its execution. Hopefully Soule can scrape something redeemable out of the concept.

 

[Hyperstorm]

I liked Civil War because if for no other reason than every issue felt like something was happening (unlike Secret Invasion which could have been told in 4 issues once all the padding was removed).

That said, I lost all interest in Secret War when the number of tie-ins went above 8 issues because Shadowland showed Marvel are incapable of telling a complete story in the core book with everything else being optional add-ons.

I've jumped off almost all of my Marvel titles anyway so no love lost I guess.