Marcdachamp said:
Luke Cage as a traitor? Well, the only traitor I've heard of is on the Pro side, and that looks to be Sue Richards and/or Spider-Man.
As for the IC/CW debate... I'm admittedly not a big fan of Crisis. It was far too convoluted, the art was rushed (so much so that DC is supposedly "fixing" it for the HC), the story was weak and the ramifications weren't nearly as major as DC would have had us believe. I remember picking up Issue One and thinking "Wow, this could change the fabric of the DCU for years to come!". Instead, we saw minor characters get their heads blown off and incredibly minor continuity changes (did anyone really want Wonder Woman to be a founding JLAer again? Surely this was to appease the old-school DC loving Meltzer).
With Civil War, we have an intriguing philosophical debate. I feel like this is the kind of story that publishers are often afraid to tell. Marvel can't simply make things exactly as they were after Civil War. It's not possible. And, as scary as that seems, it's also wonderful. I've sung a lot of praise for Daredevil lately because the writers have sacrificed status quo for storytelling and the result has been one of the finest reads on the market. Imagine replicating that feeling in all of Marvel's books.
I actually liked IC, although I'll agree that it was just as willing to gleefully knock off C-Listers as Marvel is often accused of doing. But I liked that it had some old school superheroing. Plus there WAS a philosophical debate to it, and that was "old vs. new". The villians of the piece, Alex Luthor and Superboy-Prime (and Psycho-Pirate I guess), and for a while a manipulated Earth-2 Superman, felt they should undo the first "CRISIS" because they felt the world that was created afterward was tainted or "evil"; i.e. that the "old" ways were better, and the "new" ways of DC were darker, not as nice, that sort of thing. Of course, they were zealous in achieving those ends, and Superboy-Prime quickly became a butcher. Consider that when IC started, Marvel was doing HOM, which chose to ignore any sort of philosophical debate in the name of pointless exposition and chatter (and punching).
CIVIL WAR is shaping up to provide a good debate and have some taut storytelling, true, but I'm not one who likes a "burn all our bridges behind us" approach to comics, since its dubious. NOTHING lasts. It can't. If you have characters that never age, and stories that never end, you can only stretch them beyond their given format so far before they become something unrecognizable. Take Spider-Man; before he was a hero most people could relate to; now he's agrueably no different than a slew of DC heroes. He's been made more generic in the name of advancing a story.
Comics, Marvel in particular, always return to some sort of status quo after enough time; just ask anyone who liked Morrison's X-Men comics. That length of time averages about 1-2 years, or whenever the next movie comes out. I get that CW will likely provide Marvel with a few stories to do in the aftermath, but what then? Congrats, Spidey's ID is known. Some fun stories can come of it. But then you do them all. And then what?
The problem with "risks" is that they backfire, and the medium is one that usually returns towards a status quo eventually. Best to do stories that don't make that road so difficult that you need a retcon to do so.
Still, I'll admit CW's shaping up to be interesting.
BlackSymbiote said:
I usually love everything Kirkman does, but the Magician is just getting on my nerves. I hate characters who are all power. He's a Deus Ex Machina to the extreme (which would be a no pun intended if Vaughn were still on). I just hope Kirkman has SOMETHING big planned for him.
Maybe he'll turn against the team somehow? Become a traitor? That's usually the formula for teams after a while.
