Marvel: Civil War
Okay, figuring out the reading order was a bit of a pain in places, especially between ASM and the main Civil War series since I just couldn't get a real grip how the events sort out into a single timeline for Spider-Man. (A bit more on that below.) Also I haven't bought all the tie-ins, so I'm missing chunks, and I think I've rad the specials (War Crimes and The Return out of order).
Anyway, the Civil War issues I read were:
Road to Civil War: The New Avengers Illuminati
Amazing Spider-Man #529-538
Civil War #1-7
Civil War: Front Line #1-11
Civil War: The Return
Civil War: War Crimes
Civil War: The Confession
Civil War: The Initiative
New Avengers #21-25
Overall I quite enjoyed Civil War. It had lots of cool fight scenes, nice technology eye candy, the art was at least decent throughout and some of it looked even great, and while the central plot alone (in the Civil War series) would have been quite barren, the tie-in storylines and side stories making it more complex fleshed it out okay. It entertained me fine for a couple of hours anyway.
I did have some problems with the premise, I mean, the main "civil liberties" argument made by the anti-registration fraction is completely ludicrous IMO, which kind of undermined my empathy with the side we as a reader were clearly expected to favor. It's not that I didn't follow the resistance to registration on account of them distrusting the government or whatever. Obviously the implementation of their registration law was really dodgy, especially since somewhere in-between the option to just retire quietly from the costume scene without registering seemed to have vanished, at least it seemed that way in the whole Iron Man vs. Luke Cage mess in New Avengers #23, something that I actually didn't really understand in the plot. Later on I got the impression that it was implied that somehow Tony Stark may have engineered these flaws in the implementation to further his "secret agenda" that Urich and that other reporter confront him about, but I didn't quite follow the machinations and the reasoning in detail.
Still, seriously, it is not "pro civil liberties" to have costumed vigilantes run around as they please. That is just crazy. I don't think it is sinister per se to support superhero regulation: I wouldn't want my government to just tolerate costumed vigilantes running around forming secret societies to fight threats from other costumed goons and aliens without any legitimate control over them either, that's certainly not more "democratic" than to demand that people exerting such power submit to actual oversight within the legal framework.
And I'm not really sympathetic to the "a supervillain will find out and threaten my family" argument, because a) they do that anyway, b) it's not like anyone forced them to put on a costume and fight just because they gained some superpower, and c) I suspect individual vendettas from psychotics might even go down considerably if they were treated just like regular criminals and apprehended by a superpowered police force that doesn't act as flashy individual attracting attention into one of those "superhero/supervillain as eternal foes" spirals, but as a regular government agency. And leaving the training of people who want to go into the heroes business to something besides chance and the Darwin Awards method might not be bad idea either.
I find it pretty ludicrous that several characters seem to claim it was the more liberal and democratic thing to allow superpowered people to use force in way that infringe on the state's monopoly on the use of force, which is kind of central to have a civilized society in a state -- Thomas Hobbes already knew that. It's not that I can't imagine different organizational principles for humans to live together, especially on a local scale, I mean, I am quite sympathetic to socialist-anarchism after all *g*, but certainly in the framework of a modern nation state I much prefer to have the state the monopoly on force. And I know that the US have this bizarre setup allowing random people their own armed militia and such stuff, so I guess if someone thinks it's okay for everybody to be armed and have militias without official sanction, they might stretch the argument into deducing that some people in the Marvel universe might not be bothered by unsanctioned superpowered people either, and see it as a civil liberties problem if you tell them they can't just use these superpowers without being held accountable. I'm not really sympathetic to that, because unfortunately if you are among those not having superpowers you are kind of out of luck with having any liberty in practice, because in the Marvel universe you'll be just busy hiding from the armed and/or superpowered crazies. So I'm pretty much in favor of the model most other Western democracies have where only the state is entitled to force, arms and the maintenance of civil order, and certainly don't see that model as less democratic than armed vigilantes.
Though it's not that I found all their "civil liberties" objections idiotic, clearly the surveillance, data gathering, the prisons, the due process for detained and arrested people, the weird science experiments on prisoners, and so on that apparently followed that law or were already going on before, were all such issues, just not the "right" of random people to put on masks to conceal their identity and perform functions that normally belong to public authorities.
Still, once I ignored that, I could get into the story. I think it may have worked even better if I was more familiar with Tony Stark. I because throughout I just couldn't gauge how sinister and/or duplicitous he's supposed to come across. In the end I guess I found him mostly creepy, because while he pretended to want to give the people back actual democratic control and oversight over the costumed heroes, all along he only wants to manipulate everybody in an every complicated scheme, assuming he knows more and is better equipped to decide what's right for people than they are themselves, and presents different agendas and arguments for different audiences to achieve some opaque goal. Also he clearly took the whole "the end justifies the means" maxim quite a bit too far.
Other things that didn't quite click for me was during the events that set off the violence between the heroes, it didn't make sense to me how Captain America reacted (I think this was in Civil War #1). I mean, why did he escalate that confrontation right then into a fight? Even if he does oppose the registration, the strategic thing would have been to stall, and then do some publicity thing, so he can't be vanished as easily if he does resign over the registration act when he refuses to take down other costumes. Obviously at least on paper the government needs to offer the alternative to resign even for A-list heroes in previous government employment. It's kind of idiotic behavior to escalate right away, before even any action compromising the own position was inevitable.
Otherwise, while the fights in the main Civil War series were neat, I think my favorite parts were Civil War: Front Line. The multiple perspectives and the POV from reporters and such and the "documentary" feel worked for me, and Ben Urich is always cool. And it managed to make me care about this Speedball (I guess now "Penance") character, which I seriously didn't expect. I actually wouldn't mind finding out how his story ends, but I have no idea where he appears next.
The parts with the cosmic entities completely lost me, I have no idea who the Sentry or Captain Marvel were and whether (or how) they were back from the dead or what, and I had no clue who these Inhumans were either, and the whole Atlantis thing wasn't much better. At least I knew about Iron Fist(?) impersonating Daredevil from the Daredevil series, so at least I wasn't too confused about that. Though I wouldn't want to match up all the timelines for Matt and Fisk and the others.
I wasn't even sure how ASM and Civil War fit together in the timeline. Though I attempted to make it fit by having all comics open simultaneously and trying to figure out what goes where. ASM #535 ends with Peter switching sides and fighting Iron Man, that is they talk, Iron Man seemingly takes off, Peter evacuates MJ and Aunt May or rather buys them time to escape, and it ends with Iron Man pushing Peter through a wall. ASM #536 starts with continuing that fight, Peter is still in the red/gold costume, they fight on the street, Peter escapes into the sewer, and some unspecified time "later" meets up with MJ.
According to the editors note Civil War #5 and #6 happen between this. When we see Peter in CW #5 that fight with Iron Man is still in progress, there is conversation we don't see in ASM #535/6 but thought the locations don't match exactly I presume it's the same fight, however, while in ASM Iron Man and Spider-Man fall towards the street together and continue the fight, in CW #5 Peter falls while Iron Man stands and looks down, and I tried to make that action sequence match or mesh somehow, but it won't work. Anyway, at one point in CW #5 Peter ends up in the sewer too, which I assume is supposed to be the same moment as in ASM#536, he's wounded, brought to the secret resistance headquarters by Punisher, changes costumes into his old one and helps the resistance with that prison break from the negative zone, action which seems to be continuing into CW#7 where the Prison break segues via teleportation into the final fight in New York. So Peter must have visited MJ before the end of CW #6, so most of ASM #536 takes place during CW #6, and all of ASM #537. The phone conversation with MJ in #538 must take place before the prison break as well, but I think the huge fight scene that follows is the New York part of the final battle, which initially confused me, because the internal monologue doesn't indicate a break.
Anyway, it took some work to make sense of the overlap. I guess it would have been worse if I read all the tie-ins and had to make it fit with the three or four more series.
Anyway, the Civil War issues I read were:
Road to Civil War: The New Avengers Illuminati
Amazing Spider-Man #529-538
Civil War #1-7
Civil War: Front Line #1-11
Civil War: The Return
Civil War: War Crimes
Civil War: The Confession
Civil War: The Initiative
New Avengers #21-25
Overall I quite enjoyed Civil War. It had lots of cool fight scenes, nice technology eye candy, the art was at least decent throughout and some of it looked even great, and while the central plot alone (in the Civil War series) would have been quite barren, the tie-in storylines and side stories making it more complex fleshed it out okay. It entertained me fine for a couple of hours anyway.
I did have some problems with the premise, I mean, the main "civil liberties" argument made by the anti-registration fraction is completely ludicrous IMO, which kind of undermined my empathy with the side we as a reader were clearly expected to favor. It's not that I didn't follow the resistance to registration on account of them distrusting the government or whatever. Obviously the implementation of their registration law was really dodgy, especially since somewhere in-between the option to just retire quietly from the costume scene without registering seemed to have vanished, at least it seemed that way in the whole Iron Man vs. Luke Cage mess in New Avengers #23, something that I actually didn't really understand in the plot. Later on I got the impression that it was implied that somehow Tony Stark may have engineered these flaws in the implementation to further his "secret agenda" that Urich and that other reporter confront him about, but I didn't quite follow the machinations and the reasoning in detail.
Still, seriously, it is not "pro civil liberties" to have costumed vigilantes run around as they please. That is just crazy. I don't think it is sinister per se to support superhero regulation: I wouldn't want my government to just tolerate costumed vigilantes running around forming secret societies to fight threats from other costumed goons and aliens without any legitimate control over them either, that's certainly not more "democratic" than to demand that people exerting such power submit to actual oversight within the legal framework.
And I'm not really sympathetic to the "a supervillain will find out and threaten my family" argument, because a) they do that anyway, b) it's not like anyone forced them to put on a costume and fight just because they gained some superpower, and c) I suspect individual vendettas from psychotics might even go down considerably if they were treated just like regular criminals and apprehended by a superpowered police force that doesn't act as flashy individual attracting attention into one of those "superhero/supervillain as eternal foes" spirals, but as a regular government agency. And leaving the training of people who want to go into the heroes business to something besides chance and the Darwin Awards method might not be bad idea either.
I find it pretty ludicrous that several characters seem to claim it was the more liberal and democratic thing to allow superpowered people to use force in way that infringe on the state's monopoly on the use of force, which is kind of central to have a civilized society in a state -- Thomas Hobbes already knew that. It's not that I can't imagine different organizational principles for humans to live together, especially on a local scale, I mean, I am quite sympathetic to socialist-anarchism after all *g*, but certainly in the framework of a modern nation state I much prefer to have the state the monopoly on force. And I know that the US have this bizarre setup allowing random people their own armed militia and such stuff, so I guess if someone thinks it's okay for everybody to be armed and have militias without official sanction, they might stretch the argument into deducing that some people in the Marvel universe might not be bothered by unsanctioned superpowered people either, and see it as a civil liberties problem if you tell them they can't just use these superpowers without being held accountable. I'm not really sympathetic to that, because unfortunately if you are among those not having superpowers you are kind of out of luck with having any liberty in practice, because in the Marvel universe you'll be just busy hiding from the armed and/or superpowered crazies. So I'm pretty much in favor of the model most other Western democracies have where only the state is entitled to force, arms and the maintenance of civil order, and certainly don't see that model as less democratic than armed vigilantes.
Though it's not that I found all their "civil liberties" objections idiotic, clearly the surveillance, data gathering, the prisons, the due process for detained and arrested people, the weird science experiments on prisoners, and so on that apparently followed that law or were already going on before, were all such issues, just not the "right" of random people to put on masks to conceal their identity and perform functions that normally belong to public authorities.
Still, once I ignored that, I could get into the story. I think it may have worked even better if I was more familiar with Tony Stark. I because throughout I just couldn't gauge how sinister and/or duplicitous he's supposed to come across. In the end I guess I found him mostly creepy, because while he pretended to want to give the people back actual democratic control and oversight over the costumed heroes, all along he only wants to manipulate everybody in an every complicated scheme, assuming he knows more and is better equipped to decide what's right for people than they are themselves, and presents different agendas and arguments for different audiences to achieve some opaque goal. Also he clearly took the whole "the end justifies the means" maxim quite a bit too far.
Other things that didn't quite click for me was during the events that set off the violence between the heroes, it didn't make sense to me how Captain America reacted (I think this was in Civil War #1). I mean, why did he escalate that confrontation right then into a fight? Even if he does oppose the registration, the strategic thing would have been to stall, and then do some publicity thing, so he can't be vanished as easily if he does resign over the registration act when he refuses to take down other costumes. Obviously at least on paper the government needs to offer the alternative to resign even for A-list heroes in previous government employment. It's kind of idiotic behavior to escalate right away, before even any action compromising the own position was inevitable.
Otherwise, while the fights in the main Civil War series were neat, I think my favorite parts were Civil War: Front Line. The multiple perspectives and the POV from reporters and such and the "documentary" feel worked for me, and Ben Urich is always cool. And it managed to make me care about this Speedball (I guess now "Penance") character, which I seriously didn't expect. I actually wouldn't mind finding out how his story ends, but I have no idea where he appears next.
The parts with the cosmic entities completely lost me, I have no idea who the Sentry or Captain Marvel were and whether (or how) they were back from the dead or what, and I had no clue who these Inhumans were either, and the whole Atlantis thing wasn't much better. At least I knew about Iron Fist(?) impersonating Daredevil from the Daredevil series, so at least I wasn't too confused about that. Though I wouldn't want to match up all the timelines for Matt and Fisk and the others.
I wasn't even sure how ASM and Civil War fit together in the timeline. Though I attempted to make it fit by having all comics open simultaneously and trying to figure out what goes where. ASM #535 ends with Peter switching sides and fighting Iron Man, that is they talk, Iron Man seemingly takes off, Peter evacuates MJ and Aunt May or rather buys them time to escape, and it ends with Iron Man pushing Peter through a wall. ASM #536 starts with continuing that fight, Peter is still in the red/gold costume, they fight on the street, Peter escapes into the sewer, and some unspecified time "later" meets up with MJ.
According to the editors note Civil War #5 and #6 happen between this. When we see Peter in CW #5 that fight with Iron Man is still in progress, there is conversation we don't see in ASM #535/6 but thought the locations don't match exactly I presume it's the same fight, however, while in ASM Iron Man and Spider-Man fall towards the street together and continue the fight, in CW #5 Peter falls while Iron Man stands and looks down, and I tried to make that action sequence match or mesh somehow, but it won't work. Anyway, at one point in CW #5 Peter ends up in the sewer too, which I assume is supposed to be the same moment as in ASM#536, he's wounded, brought to the secret resistance headquarters by Punisher, changes costumes into his old one and helps the resistance with that prison break from the negative zone, action which seems to be continuing into CW#7 where the Prison break segues via teleportation into the final fight in New York. So Peter must have visited MJ before the end of CW #6, so most of ASM #536 takes place during CW #6, and all of ASM #537. The phone conversation with MJ in #538 must take place before the prison break as well, but I think the huge fight scene that follows is the New York part of the final battle, which initially confused me, because the internal monologue doesn't indicate a break.
Anyway, it took some work to make sense of the overlap. I guess it would have been worse if I read all the tie-ins and had to make it fit with the three or four more series.