June
20,
2007
Let’s do some non-Civil War stuff now, eh?
First up: Neil Gaiman’s Eternals
(which okay, technically happens during Civil War and makes glancing references, but never mind), which is a relaunch of Jack Kirby’s alien space god series. Like Gaiman’s 1602, it’s basically inoffensive, moderately enjoyable, but ultimately wholly forgettable; if you didn’t know, you’d never even come close to guessing it was by the author of The Sandman. There’s a lot better stuff out there written by people a lot less famous.
Next is Kaare Andrews’ Spider-Man: Reign
, which might more accurately be called The Spider-Knight Returns, as it’s so clearly an homage to — no, scratch that: derivative of Miller’s Batman story. The setting is a far future dystopia where Bad Men control everything, and Peter Parker is just a frail old geezer with a wife dead of (and I swear I’m not making this up) cancer caused by exposure to Parker’s radioactive, er, bodily fluids. He is a sad muppet. But then something happens — I forget what, and it’s not worth looking it up — and he puts on the costume again, to go forth and kick ass once more. The story is stupid, the background is stupid, the characters are stupid, the writing is horrid, and the art is hideous. I’d heard this was terrible before I bought it, and I wish I’d listened better.
Following up on the dark ‘n’ grim theme is Charlie Huston’s Moon Knight: The Bottom
. Moon Knight’s never been a particularly happy character, but man, this is just a bleakfest. It’s reasonably well done, for what it is, but you know what? It’s 2007 now, and I’m not interested in this level of sordidness. People who enjoy sordidness (perhaps fans of Huston’s crime fiction) will probably like this, though.
And then there’s Justin Gray and Jimmy Palmiotti’s Daughters of the Dragon: Samurai Bullets
, featuring the nipples of Colleen Wing and the heaving bosom of Misty Knight. This is an incredibly frustrating book, because it’s got some snappy dialogue and clever story going on — but the art is the most demeaning sexist tripe imaginable, with ridiculous outfits and exaggerated anatomy. And just when you think that maybe it’s the artist corrupting the perfectly fine work of the writers, they throw in a completely unnecessary shower scene. As it is, I find this impossible to recommend to anyone. And from the look of future tentacle-porn covers, things don’t get any better on this front. Ugh.
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June
20,
2007
So last time we saw Iron Man in his standalone comic, Warren Ellis was “infecting” him with a nanotech thing that ended up making him cooler and more powerful than ever. Daniel and Charles Knauf’s The Invincible Iron Man: Execute Program
has the task of taking this new enhanced Iron Man and putting him in position for his major role in Civil War. And, honestly, they do a bang-up job of it: This is yet another one of those comics where, after reading it, the character feels a lot more motivated to me than he did from the mainline Civil War story.
Of course, the story here also serves to undermine the whole triggering incident of the Civil War (an explosion that kills a few hundred people, set off by a villain), because in this book, events conspire to make Iron Man directly responsible for killing many hundreds of people, destroying huge swaths of property, and just generally doing a hell of a lot of damage. Yes, it’s “covered up” officially, but still: It’s hard to see Iron Man doing this kind of damage, and then something much more minor (and for which heroes were far less culpable) triggering such a major crisis. Still, the destruction here gives Iron Man reason to believe that heroes need more monitoring, plus a heaping helping of guilt to drive him, so ends up being a net plus to the plausibility.
The next volume is, of course Daniel and Charles Knauf, Christos N. Gage, and Brian Michael Bendis’ Iron Man: Civil War
. In the middle are the Knaufs’ volumes from the direct Civil War continuity, which are both competent and significant; but book-ending those issues are stories by Bendis and Gage that drive home the long history between Captain America and Iron Man.
Gage’s is particularly effective, as the two heroes meet in the abandoned Avengers Mansion, and reminisce about their first meeting and the assistances they’ve provided each other over the years. It’s been hard to take the conflict between these two characters as anything other than a plot contrivance, for precisely this reason: They’ve been working together so well for so long, that it’s hard to believe a political issue like this would cause them to battle so intensely. But Gage’s story ends up making it feel plausible, and humanizing a relationship that had only really been at the level of speechifying and punching in the mainline books. This is really an essential story — and a poignant one, for anyone with a grasp of Marvel history.
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June
17,
2007
So after reading Straczynski’s Spider-Man: Civil War, which de-soured me on the series, I figured I’d read J. Michael Straczynski’s Fantastic Four: Civil War
, to see if Straczynski could pull this one out, too. And, amazingly, he did.
It seemed like an insuperable task, because Reed Richards’ motivations in the main storyline were so implausible that no amount of skillful writing could make them consistent with his previously established character. (I’m going to spoil things a bit here, because I want to talk about this concretely, so skip down to the next book if you don’t want any spoiling.) In Millar’s hands, Richards’ motivation for rounding up his friends and building a concentration camp in the Negative Zone was “It’s the law, and we have to follow the law.” Which is insane, as no superhero ever has been lawful good, and there are tons of instances of Richards himself breaking laws to do the right thing.
So what Straczynski does is reveal that, while this is Richards’ public motive, secretly he’s got a different one: He’s invented psychohistory, and his equations show that this course of action, as much as he hates and detests it, is the least bad of all possible options. This is way, way better, because it’s consistent with his character, it gives him a more involved personal conflict, and it makes the whole Civil War battleground suddenly more nuanced — because Reed might be right, and he and Iron Man may really be saving the world in an unconventional, difficult way.
So my question is this: Did the minds in charge of Civil War have this in mind the whole time, and decided that the secret should only be parceled out in the pages of Fantastic Four? Or is this Straczynski getting Millar’s Civil War story handed to him, going, “Jesus, I can’t write this character — he doesn’t make any sense! What’s really going on here?” and freelancing up a retcon on the fly? I suspect the latter, but will probably never know. Either way, credit to Straczynski for saving an implausible plotline with skillful writing.
Meanwhile, Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa’s Peter Parker, Spider-Man: Civil War
shows the immediate consequences of the big Spider-Man plot development in Civil War. This isn’t as strong as Straczynski’s Spider-Man work, but it’s not supposed to be. Straczynski is carrying the main plotline, and Aguirre-Sacasa is working around the edges to tell little stories. The first story is very strong, told from the point of view of one of Parker’s students, and illustrated with attractive painted art. The rest of the stories are still well-written, but more conventional (featuring an always-hackneyed “Spider-Man’s villains team up to take him out!” story), and with regrettably manga-influenced art. A solid batch of Spider-Man stories, but not revelatory or critical.
Peter David’s Friendly Neighorhood Spider-Man: Mystery Date
is actually incredibly similar to Aguirre-Sacasa’s volume, featuring post-Civil War developments and villains attacking Parker’s school; but it’s brighter in tone than the Civil War grimness. (Perhaps that’s why they didn’t put the Civil War branding on it? Either that or they figured two Civil War Spider-Man volumes were enough.)
Paul Jenkins’ Front Line: Civil War, vols. 1 and 2
have four interwoven stories. “The Accused” is about the sentencing of the hero who inadvertantely triggered this whole Civil War mess, and basically involves a lot of political posturing in the service of a ho-hum story. “Embedded” features two reporters pursuing angles behind the Civil War stuff, and is more interesting (and fairly relevant to the larger plot). “Sleeper Cell” follows an investigation into Atlantean agents getting ready for action; it’s important in the context of the main plot, and reasonably interesting. Finally, there’s “War Correspondence” which juxtaposes images from history with those from the Civil War event, set to poetry or letters or whatever; it’s pretentious twaddle, and totally skippable. Overall, this is worth reading if you’re getting all into the Civil War stuff (as it should be clear by now that I did), but not if you’re just looking for a good story. It’s all “fill in the plot holes” stuff, not valuable in its own right.
Okay, so the major players in Civil War are Spider-Man, Iron Man, Captain America, and Reed Richards (for some reason, writing “Mr. Fantastic” sounds really stupid, so). Three of those guys are in the New Avengers, so it’s pretty clear that Brian Michael Bendis’ The New Avengers: Civil War
is not going to be a tale of unity and comity. Which it’s not. This is very nearly indistinguishable from the main-line Civil War volumes, and pretty much required reading for anyone trying to follow this whole big interwoven story. I confess, though, to being highly curious where the New Avengers comic goes from here. I mean, they went to a lot of trouble to get rid of the old B-grade-laden Avengers and replace them with A-grade guys; now that they’re all at each others’ throats, are they just going to toss the team? Reconstitute it with different members? Unclear, but intriguing.
You’d think that Ed Brubaker’s Captain America: Civil War
would be essential Civil War reading, since Cap is the leader of one faction and all. But it turns out not to be. The very strong sense I get is that Brubaker signed up to write the kind of stories he wanted to write (lots of spy stuff, heavy on the Cold War remnants) and he’s a bit resentful that the Powers That Be are fucking with his character, and will only mention these new developments in as grudging and reluctant a fashion as possible while still trying to tell his own story about the Red Skull and Bucky and all those other Captain America staples. The result may be a successful Captain America story (as I’ve mentioned before, I’m not the guy to judge, as I don’t really care for Captain America), but it’s a highly disposable Civil War story.
Frank Tieri’s War Crimes: Civil War
is a miniseries focusing on a just-out-of-prison criminal re-establishing himself in the underworld and figuring out the new lay of the land. That lay is shaped heavily by the Civil War events, but this isn’t really a Civil War story — Tieri could have written basically this same story if Civil War didn’t exist, and I suspect he would have, but got co-opted into the Big Crossover Event. Arguably to his benefit, as the only reason I read this was my omnivorous Civil War-related reading. As a straight story, it’s basically okay, but I don’t love stories where the protagonist is a criminal and all the stuff he’s doing is criminal stuff (which is why I don’t watch the Sopranos, didn’t enjoy Goodfellas, and have no interest in The Wire).
Marc Guggenheim’s Wolverine: Civil War
follows the popular badass as he sets off to kill the villain behind the tragedy that set off the Civil War events and finds that it goes deepr than he thought. This is a fine story, well-written and -plotted, with medium relevance to the main storyline. About the only drawback is that the art is hideously manga-esque. Worth reading for both Wolverine and Civil War devotees.
And finally, we come to Reginald Hudlin’s Black Panther: Civil War
, which features a really odd cover decision. Every single Civil War volume so far has had a picture on the top half of the cover, and a white bottom half, with a distinctive font and the Civil War logo in the middle. This has the exact same cover layout... except the bottom half is brown. Okay, we get it, The Black Panther and Storm (apparently now his wife) are both black; perhaps it doesn’t really need to be pointed out that obviously?
Inside the covers, though, this is a very well-done volume. It’s extremely relevant to the main Civil War storyline, while also being (one senses) essential to the Black Panther’s own story. Christopher Priest’s run on Black Panther took this third-rate token character, and pointed out that he really is the king of a technologically advanced and wealthy African nation, and that this makes him a bit more than just an acrobatic guy with no particular powers. Hudlin’s working off the Priest template here, and his Black Panther is enormously important, in general and to the Civil War events specifically.
Take that kind of significance, mix it up with some interesting moral and political dilemmas, surprisingly well-written interpersonal relationships, and some solidly good writing, and you’ve got a volume that’s one of the non-Straczynski highlights of the Civil War cornucopia. (Despite which, it’s still not up to the level of the extraordinary Priest volumes, which comprised one of those character-defining classic runs, but that’s not much of a complaint.) I suspect I’m going to have to order the rest of Hudlin’s Black Panther volumes.
So! That’s pretty much all of Civil War (I think there are a few more volumes coming to me from Amazon, but I’ll get to those some other time), and after reading this whole great wodge of story, I think I need to revise my initial take on it. Once you have this whole tapestry, the Civil War plotline actually is interesting, and it actually does make a sort of sense (thanks to Straczynski), although there’s still a large amount of plot-driven, rather than character-driven, activity. I still think Millar’s skeletal volumes weren’t very good, but moving forward this huge multi-character story in seven issues is really a hell of a task, so perhaps he did as well as anyone could have. And I still absolutely think that the collection editors fell down on the job. I understand why you’d want to stay with the hero-centric collections, but in a crossover of this magnitude, it makes a lot more sense to collect at least the core books in a multi-volume Civil War collection, interleaving them as appropriate.
I can’t say I’d recommend the Civil War stuff to anyone who’s not interested in being immersed in the Marvel Universe, but to those who are, this ends up being a solid crossover event, and it’s worth picking up the essential stories as well as those related to characters you’re particularly interested in.
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June
10,
2007
Mark Millar’s Civil War
is a failure on multiple levels. An ambitious failure, but a failure.
The story in Civil War — which, if you care, you already know — is that some bad stuff happens (a villain blows up a school and some other blocks of a city with a big explosion, due to incompetent heroes bungling the situation), and there’s such an outcry against vigilante-ism that an act is passed, forcing heroes to register with the government and operate as government employees, or be treated as villains themselves. This proves to be divisive, and a pro-registration faction (led by Iron Man) ends up fighting aginst an anti-registration faction (led by Captain America).
On the premise level, this is a failure because it just doesn’t fit in the Marvel Universe. Bad shit happens all the time there; one explosion more or less couldn’t possibly make the kind of attitudinal difference that it makes here. Like the Avengers: Disassembled storyline, the writers have to take an event that’s exactly like stuff that’s happened in the past and imbue it with significance that it’s never had before, to drive massive world-changing plot events. It’s hard to swallow.
On the characterization level, it’s a failure because it forces people to do things that they don’t seem likely to do. Tony Stark may be a bit of a prick, but he’s not that big of an asshole; and as socially oblivious as Reed Richards can be, he’s more decent than that.
And on an editorial level, it’s a failure because the Civil War thing is a big tie-in event with major plot happenings in multiple comic books, and all we’re seeing is the mainline comics that have the skeleton of the plot. This ends up reading like a plot outline rather than an actual story, with little time devoted to character development and even significant events occurring off screen. This is a small fraction of the overall story, and if you want to read the whole thing you need to buy a bunch of other volumes.
Even then, though, it still won’t work well, because you’d have to interleave them and read a chapter of each book, then go through the cycle again for the next chapter, and who reads books like that? Collecting a crossover like this is a challenge, to be sure, but this approach is, I’m afraid, unsuccessful.
And speaking of the tie-in novels, J. Michael Straczynski’s The Amazing Spider-Man: Civil War
ends up being substantially better than the mainline stuff. It benefits from being able to focus on a single storyline, and therefore to be able to put flesh on the plot bones instead of racing maniacally through plot points; it benefits further from Spider-Man being perhaps the most well-drawn and plausible character in the Civil War storyline; and most of all, it benefits from Straczynski continuing to be a great writer of Spider-Man comics.
It’d be hard to read the Spider-Man volume without understanding the broader Civil War storyline, and some of the key events for Spider-Man only occur in the mainline Civil War book, so this can’t really be separated out, which is a bit of a pity. But for those who’ve been reading and enjoying Straczynski’s run, it’s probably worth it to suck it up and read the Civil War stuff so you can enjoy this — and, presumably, the upcoming volumes, because there’ve been some big changes made to Parker’s life in this series, and it’ll be interesting to see where Spider-Man goes from here.
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June
10,
2007
Having taken Horatio Hornblower’s career to levels of squadron command and international diplomacy, C.S. Forester’s Mr. Midshipman Hornblower and Lieutenant Hornblower
go back to when he was just getting started.
Mr. Midshipman is a series of short stories dealing with incidents from the beginning of Hornblower’s career. It’s interesting (and occasionally amusing) to see a young, uncertain Hornblower who feels awkward at speaking in naval jargon and isn’t the commanding presence we’ve come to know. Despite which, this is probably the weakest entry in the series so far, as the dramas are small-scale and quickly dispensed with. Which is as it had to be, really — you can’t write a Hornblower story where he’s not driving the events to a large degree, and it’s unrealistic for a midshipman to be driving significant events — but still somewhat less satisfying than you’d hope.
Lieutenant, however, is entirely satisfying. Hornblower is still young, but far more experienced nevertheless, and he’s starting to display here the traits that make him the formidable leader he becomes — even if he’s not, technically speaking, in command. This is yet another excellent Hornblower book.
I will say, though, that having read these two books now, which are listed as the first and second in the editions I have (which lists them by chronological, rather than published, order), I think you could read the series in either order. These do work well as introductions to the Hornblower series, and going from Lieutenant Hornblower to Beat to Quarters wouldn’t be jarringly weird. But overall, the publication order that I’ve been following still seems like the best bet.
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June
4,
2007
As you’d guess from the titles, C. S. Forester’s Commodore Hornblower and Lord Hornblower
tell the further adventures of Horatio Hornblower as he ascends in rank and importance.
The books are still full of all the naval derring-do that you’d expect from the earlier ones, but there’s also a satisfying amount of progress. The concerns of Commodore Hornblower are not those of Captain Hornblower. There are larger matters to deal with here than the command of a single ship, and he’s no longer as young as he was. It’s a difficult task to change the nature of a series of books while still maintaining its appeal, but Forester does it handily.
For some reason, I’d always had this idea that the Hornblower books were pulpy “men’s fiction,” full of high adventure and derring-do, but little else. This isn’t at all the case, as the books are superb with characterization (Hornblower alone has more depth and complexity than the entire cast of an Honor Harrington novel) and posessed of what might pretentiously be called insight into the human condition. These are real books of quality, and shouldn’t be just dismissed just because they’re compellingly readable.
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June
1,
2007
So, getting back into the Harringtonian swing of things, I polished off David Weber’s More Than Honor, Worlds of Honor, Changer of Worlds, and Service of the Sword
collections. Or rather, I polished off the parts of the contents that were actually written by David Weber. In the first volume, I made the mistake of reading a David Drake story, and regretted it deeply. It wasn’t necessarily a terrible story, but it sure as heck wasn’t one set in the by-now-familiar Honorverse, no matter how many proper nouns attested otherwise.
So sticking just to the Weber stories, here’s how the line-up goes. More Than Honor is wholly skippable. There’s one story, and it’s about treecats. Read it online if you want to read it, but unless you really really like telepathic cats, it’s definitely not worth the $8 that a modern paperback costs. Worlds of Honor has another treecat story, as well as a story featuring one of the mainline characters as a kid. Both stories are readable, but even together it’s hard to say the book’s worth a purchase.
Changer of Worlds is a bit of a different animal. You get “Ms. Midshipwoman Harrington”, which I’d read in the Big Book of Spopera. It’s a very good story, important to mainline continuity, and fairly long. It’s worth picking up the book just for this, even if you don’t care about the apparently-obligatory treecat story. (The book also purports to have a third Weber story, but as far as I could tell, it was just an excerpt from one of the novels. This sounds weird, so I have to assume there was some additional content in here that wasn’t in the novel, but it was deja-vuing me too bad, so I quit reading.)
And finally, there’s The Service of the Sword. Only one story here, featuring a Grayson naval officer who appears in mainline continuity; while it’s moderately good and moderately long, I don’t think it’s quite so much either as “Ms. Midshipwoman”. Probably not worth an actual buy, but it’s sort of borderline. Hey, it’s your $8, you make the call. There’s no treecats, so that should be worth something right there.
(And if you don’t know where to go to read these online, just ask Wikipedia Pete, for he knows all knowledge. Note that there are links there for the novels and other Weber books, too. So if you’re really super-cheap, but want to check out this Harrington stuff, you now know where to go, entirely legally.)
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