New Joe Fridays: Week 36

[Specter313]

http://www.newsarama.com/NewJoeFridays/NewJoeFridays36.html

 

[Red]

Meh.

 

[PhotoJones]

as early as these have been recently, they're gonna start coming out on thursday.

 

[PhotoJones]

oh, and that's the worst "joe fridays" i've ever read.

 

[TheCorpulent1]

as early as these have been recently, they're gonna start coming out on thursday.

Maybe Joe Q's trying to make up for CW.

 

[Foggy Nelson]

Crap

Thanks for your time anyways Joey Q.

 

[Dread]

Actually I found some of his statements on CW interesting, if not expected. I mean it's always good to see inside the mind.

Onto the pointless fan rebuttals!

: I think it’s pretty obvious now that we’re done that what we are left with is a level of uncertainty and uneasiness in the Marvel Universe which is similar in feel to the way it was at the time of the universes inception, and early years that followed. Heroes didn’t know one and other, they would meet, fight and then team up, it sounds corny now, but there was something to that. There was an edginess to the Marvel U that disappeared over 40 plus years of continuity and stories and fan familiarity. In those earlier years, heroes viewed each other with a certain amount of caution and uncertainty. ‘I just teamed up with that creepy kid named Spider-Man, but I don’t know who’s behind that mask, maybe I shouldn’t be so trusting and forthcoming with this guy.’

It is "obvious", I simply wonder about your obsession with reverting status quo's back to the 60's, first with DECIMATION and now this. It gives the impression is that the only thing that hasn't changed in 40+ years is the ideas. And a news-flash; Marvel Heroes "met, fought, and teamed up" plenty fine without needing CW. It's rather standard. And I must say, one of THE most overdone and poorly handled superhero genre gimmicks ever. All it usually shows is that people with superpowers lose all ability to rationally negociate a conflict, regardless of whether they are bank robbers or planet defenders. They always revolve around some contrived explaination. Some writers can pull it off well, but not many. Often it's just used for a cheap promotion cover.

What is wrong with superheroes developing a community? What is wrong with Spider-Man not being hunted down like a dog by every superhero after 10+ years in "Marvel Time" of being a pro superhero? It was PRECISELY these created developments that gave CW the emotional oomph it had. Of course, Millar pretended half the combatants didn't like each other, but...

Obviously we couldn’t set back the clock on a lot of what’s happened over the last four decades, many heroes know each others personal lives inside and out, but Civil War was a way of getting that uneasiness and edge back without having to reset everything in a Crisis like event.

Now, let me say that what you see here at the very end of Civil War is just the beginning as we’re still rolling out books and storylines. In other words, there’s more to come, True Believer!

But you HAVE tried to set back the clock. You set back the clock on mutants, reverting them back to 60's levels where pandas outnumbered them. You'd sell your soul to the Devil himself and eat your family raw to make Peter a free-wheeling bachelor again without either killing or divorcing MJ (until a feature film does it). And now you were irked that after 40 years of continuity, characters had established interconnected relationships via decades of alliances and etc. So you turned it back to the 60's where everyone hates everyone.

For the record, have we ever had an line-wide event during your tenure that HAD an actual ending? ANNIHILATION was not line-wide and as cool as it was, was treated as "Event B". I mean the company wide thing.

: Absolutely, and also, let’s face it, someone had to win. How dissatisfying would this story have been if it ended in a draw or no resolution at all? When you do a story like this, and I think line wide comic events in the past have proved this point very strongly, it has to have a resolution that delivers change and far reaching implications. You can’t take readers along for a ride like this and then end up right where you started. Not everyone is going to be happy with the resolution of any story we do, but what’s important is that there was a vestment of time and money from fans, at least make sure that what they were reading gave them a first hand look at a new status quo.

Now, more to the point of your question, what was very obvious about Civil War from the very beginning (and I did say it in so many interviews) is what we were showing was our government doing what it’s supposed to do. It was answering the will of the people, not the desires of a small powerful minority. It was the government acting responsibly. Tony Stark saw this as well, unfortunately, the person this was lost on was Cap.

As we started to structure Civil War, this was always the underlying subtext. In so many movies, TV shows, comics (yes, even ours), the government(s) - ours and others - are usually shown as the big global villains in a story, the shadow cabinet working behind the scenes for devious ends. It’s done quite often because it’s an easy plot device and easy for people to believe and wrap their minds around. Everyone loves a good government conspiracy! Civil War took advantage of that oft used story device and pushed against it because we readers have become accustomed to those kinds of stories and how they usually end, it’s become a natural impulse.

But guess what, in MCW, while there are readers and fans that may not like the laws that had been passed within the Marvel U, what was undeniable in the end is that the majority of the citizens of America within the Marvel Universe who have live day in and day out with superheroes and villains running rampant and destroying property and even lives, wanted these laws pass.

All too often those of us saturated by media bombardment find ourselves making global decisions about those in the media, celebrities, politicians, what have you. “Oh I hate him,” “I love her,” we all do it. Sure, sometimes there are actions made by people that are obvious and deserving of certain global opinions, but in the end, we only know what’s presented to us and the media picks and chooses what they want to present and how they present it. This to me is exactly what happened to Tony Stark and company in Civil War. Now as more and more layers get pulled away, a deeper more introspective picture starts to take shape. And if you want to see more of this, the definitely pick up Front Lines #11; it will blow your mind.

So, to me, Civil War wasn’t just a statement on politics or the state of our civil liberties, but a statement on a wide variety of subjects effecting mainstream America and the world today.

The problem with all that is that not everyone was on the same page and the story was disjointed. The first half of the story from almost every chapter was the feeling that the Pro SHRA side was "overreacting" to Stamford, much as people said we "overreacted" to 9/11 by quickly launching wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, or becoming "super vigilant" and beefing up security to the point where Boston declares a state of emergency over AQUA TEEN HUNGER FORCE ads and seemingly is more prejudicial of Middle Eastern peoples. We saw that with Iron Man & Co.'s unapologetic stance on doing their thing, even if it meant cloning Thor, hunting down fellow heroes who didn't sign up with more vigor than any supervillian has ever gotten (I have never seen as many SHIELD agents decend on a villian as I have seen hunt Luke Cage), to throwing them into Negative Zone prisons that physically make you want to die WITHOUT A TRIAL OR HOPE FOR ONE UNTIL THEY SUBMIT, to signing up any supervillian so long as they have a gimmick and are ready to say "sir, yes sir", or at least can be leached with nanobots. Add to that the SHRA being treated as a draft where the hero who signs has NO CHOICE but to follow orders, essentially a "draft" (which is never socially popular) where the heroes have no will over who they battle. We had Jenkins employing every Liberal arguement in FRONTLINE, Bendis was hardly in favor in NA, and so on. Very few books even pretended to present the Pro-SHRA side as anything above civil-liberties violating thugs riding a wave of fleeting sentiment (after all, the world turned on Bush after barely a year). Halfway through the event, orders seemed to come down to soften things a bit, although some writers didn't get the memo. JMS especially made Iron Man very stormtrooper-ish in some areas. And then we got this ending where the story does a U-Turn and wants us to now see that the N-Zone Concentration Camp, the hiring of vicious thugs (how is Iron Man different than Dr. Doom in ULTIMATE ALLIANCE), the arresting of any superhero who doesn't sign his life away on a dotted line, the drafting of all heroes under indefinate prison or death, all this is presented as something that is now acceptable after 50% of a story that seemed shocked at all of it. It doesn't wash, Mr. Quesada.

The lesson it seems is that the "will of the people" is what matters, regardless if that will goes against the very principles of our nation. By this logic, segregation never would have ended and abortion never would have become legal. It seemed as if in the end, it was the "overreaction" to Stamford that won. And as that side wasn't presented as anything beyond diabolical at worst and stubborn at best for the first 4 acts of the story, the last 2-3 did not explain that shift well. So we should feel proud that Marvel's public accepts mandatory drafts and concentration camps, and intant parole for any super-killer who is useful?

That would have been the obvious thing to do, but I promised fans that there wouldn’t be a villain in the shadows curling his mustache when it was all said and done and there wasn’t. Well, with the exception of the yet to be revealed traitor in Tony Stark’s midst who is a major player yet to be revealed.

Ironically, Cap was supposed to learn to obey the people, yet Joe Q does not. So, you advocate a lesson that you yourself don't abide by. Hypocrisy. Maybe you got all those letters because many fans are DYING to see Marvel heroes fight villians again. So on the one hand you say "there is no villian or conspiracy" and in the same breath sell FRONTLINE #11 that professes to offer exactly that?

So we're selling the moral that Iron Man can manipulate friend and foe alike and this is okay? The ends always justify the means? By that logic, Dr. Doom is a hero. All he ever promised was a more orderly society where an armored genius knows better than all and can deliver what they want, even if they seem to have not asked for it. I defy anyone at Marvel to try to tell the different philosophically between Doom and Stark, and NO, mystical knowledge doesn't count.

The problem with "gray", Mr. Quesada is that if you cannot believe villians exist, then you can't believe heroes exist, and that is ungodly cynical, even for me, to believe that there is no difference between a cop and an axe murderer. That is moral ambiguance. If superheroes aren't about morality, then what are they about? Marvel seems to be high on moral ambiguance, that heroes can be evil and villians can be "good" under a moment's notice, and no one has any convictions, good or bad, that cannot change to fit a story.

Plenty in the future of Marvel does look good, the new titles, successfully relaunched B-List franchises, etc. So maybe all this scorched earth will yield some good plants, but it was scorched Earth. And a mixed bag ending. But that is what Marvel wanted. Joe Q gushed about being able to manipulate fans and Tom B. all but promised that "the ending may not please you", as if that was a mandate and not a consequence ("You better throw in a twist, Millar, because if anything bunches my tights in a wad, it is that anyone might be enjoying one of our stories. Get 'em mad! Mad mad! Incite a reaction, like a class clown with a bag of feces. That is all that matters").

I'd hoped that CW would end with the SHRA at least altered to a sane level. I never imagined Marvel would want a universe where heroes who don't immediately sign up to be the slave of the feds are hunted down like dogs, and where every villian is now a merc. I didn't think I'd be wrong because I couldn't imagine Marvel being this irrational. Oh, well. And won't it be great that MIGHTY AVENGERS and NEW AVENGERS will be repeating CW in under a year? Um, no.

Let's see how OMEGA FLIGHT and THE INITATIVE turn out.

 

[Kevin]

Subbing

 

[The Punisher]

Jeez, that was a bad Joe Fridays.