Finished the novel Civil War a few days ago. It is based in the Marvel universe, with Iron Man, Spider-Man, The Fantastic Four and Captain America as its central characters, amid a cast of many, many more minor hero (and villain) characters.

This novel is a very mixed bag for me. On one hand, it’s interesting to see these characters applied into a semi-real world situation (the ever-expanding American Police State we live in – the novel is set just after Obama’s election, even though he’s not mentioned in the story). On the other hand, I really find it hard to believe that Captain America would be the only ‘main’ hero with serious problems about the main plot of the novel (which I won’t spoil for you) – and Reed Richards in particular seems a complete sell-out from the first page, almost like he was drugged or something (cult follower). Just not believable based on past stories from these various characters. And fine, Tony Stark is leading the compliance charge, but that itself flies in the face of immediately recent past stories too – heroes just don’t lie down and give up like seen in this novel.

Finally, this novel completely demonstrates a fundamental problem with superhero stories as a genre: They really only work well when you have ‘one’ team of them that are the good guys, amid a possible sea of villains or indifferent others. When you have too many, it just doesn’t work well because the story has to pay homage to all of them and in the end, shortchanges nearly all the characterizations and plot in the doing. I thought the X-Men movies in the past (not all of them being very good, of course) effectively walked this line, because most of the X-Men aren’t heroes and aren’t interested in being mutants much for that matter – they just want normal lives. So having a bazillion of them all over the world isn’t near as much an issue as most aren’t going to be putting on spandex anytime soon. Here, it seems like there are so many superheroes that its hard to see how there COULD be any crime (save possibly white collar – but for that, we have The Punisher anyway) because there are so many of them.

Moreover, SHIELD ends up in a villainous role here too for the most part, and given their historical role, that’s fairly unbelievable too. Yes, Nick Fury isn’t running the show here either, but they just seem like high-powered vigilantes that effectively force the human govts to kowtow to them too.

Basically, this story is a big disappointment, even if the ending does ring a bit true for Captain America’s fate – he is effectively painted as the one true soul throughout the book, and remains that way.

Sigh…..

candybowl

Given yesterday’s post, I can’t help believing this is true – although SOME people weren’t laughing (me! 🙂 )

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