The Four Color Media Monitor

I discovered a poster on Spider-Man Crawl Space asking a question that's actually quite worthy: just how Marxist is Marvel's horrible crossover, Civil War? I always realized it was ultra-leftist in its approach, but until now, I don't think I'd ever considered wondering whether it was Marxist, surely the strongest accusation you could make against Mark Millar and Joe Quesada's useless junk. The poster says:

Civil War was a New Marxist, scramble-brained allegorical slam against the Bush Administration. None of the characters made any sense, jammed as they were into that iron mold. The MU public blamed the superheroes for Stanford instead of the supervillians (cementing their collective reputation as a population dumber than rocks), Osborn despite being a mentally deranged supervillain was hired by the U.S. government & became a stereotyped jingoistic flag-waver, Tony Stark suddenly turned into an amoral fascist, Steve Rogers immediately launched armed resistance instead of the 203 other peaceful options open to him, and came close to beheading Tony, Franklin Richards turned a toy gun into a real gun and fired it into Osborn's arm, Ben Grimm ran off to hide in France, Reed Richards built a gulag and unintentionally killed Black Goliath by proxy, MJ and Aunt May advocated Peter's unmasking for irrational reasons, Peter unmasked for the sanme irrational reasons....and then the entire thing culminated in One More Day!

I don't see the people writing these stories as all that good at it, with a few exceptions. Sure, they know how to run the basics beats on a 22-page visual format, but I don't see these last ten years as providing timeless classics -- partly because I don't see the stories as having heart. Civil War had no heart.

Almost nothing produced this past decade had any heart. There's little to no character drama featuring supporting cast members - certainly none who were introduced plausibly - and crossovers have shoved personality for superheroes out the window. If that's all today's editors can focus on, of course there's no heart. There's only hate for their own properties. No wonder Civil War could be as Marxist as it is leftist.

Labels: crossoverloading, dreadful writers, marvel comics, politics