I wanted to read the whole thing and write a short post about it but as you can see there is too much to say, so this is part one spanning about a quarter of the series. Also beware of spoilers I am going to read the whole series. So join me as I read Marvel Civil War! A huge Marvel cross-over involving every super hero and villain they have to offer.

Basically the government gets scared and requires all the superheros to “register,” which entails them revealing their secret identities so that they can be held accountable for their mistakes and collateral damage. Some heroes are against it some are for it, the pro registration superheros hunt down and imprison the anti registration superheros. Now this must sound familiar, if it doesn’t it should because it is, it’s fucking X-men!

Anyway this whole things starts when the New Warriors decide to go fight some villains way out of their league including Nitro. Nitro is a completely fucking ridiculous villain, which really isn’t saying much since we are in the Marvel universe, his only power is to explode, then reconstitute himself from a gaseous state. Thats right he explodes! How do you fight that. Punch him till he dies? Normally he is a Captain Marvel villain, which makes sense seeing as how Captain Marvel basically tells you that you lost and you listen because he is fucking Captain Marvel. So anyway the New Warriors fight Nitro and you guessed it he explodes! Which kills a bunch of school children and it is very sad.

I guess the big shocker of the chunk that I read was Spider-man revealing his secret identity (Peter Parker) to the world. Now if your first thought was “that’s pretty stupid seeing as how every villain in the Spider-man comic series is more than willing to kill his whole family to hurt him” Then you are a fairly rational person. Civil War explains this away, with “ya well… Iron Man will help… I guess” Your next thought should be “Iron Man is Iron Man and he won’t do shit”, and thus you can probably predict the whole Spider-man sub-plot for Civil War. After that a total of nothing happens. Everyone spends the rest of the time worrying about the registration act and talking about their feelings. Except for Captain America who immediately punches the shit out of pretty much everyone he sees, and starts to put together a rebel group to fight against the registration guys. So the Marvel heroes become two sides, one led by Iron Man, and most of the superheroes who are already publicly known and Captain America and a few others he manages to scrounge up, which is still happening at the point where I am in the series. It seems kind of silly that neither side really talks about the issues with each other. Don’t get me wrong there is talking, the whole fucking series is people talking about how they feel about registration, but they never talk with the other side. They just immediately start destroying each other

The Civil War comics themselves are OK, but one of the draws to Civil War is the tie ins, which admittedly was slightly exciting for me, because I had an excuse to read some comics that I never really tried before. I was especially excited to read She-Hulk, I had read that she was one of the few powerful, intelligent, non-objectified female super heroines in comics. I was slightly disappointed by her comics, certainly she was portrayed way more respectably than most women in comics, but I had hoped for a little more. However, the big difference was in other comics, that included her as a character, Civil War Frontline really emphasized her as a powerful attorney, and was more what I had expected, but then I read Civil War issue two…

Now this is really only one interpretation of She-hulk, the other comics are much more respectful, but here lies one of the major flaws with Civil War and many cross-overs in general, is that different writers are taking charge of the same characters at the same time, portraying them in different ways. Although they generally get the core of the character, differences between comics feel pretty inconsistent in characterization, tone, and sometimes even the different writing styles clash.

So that is my thoughts on the whole that I have read so far, and here are some of my thoughts on specific series within Civil War. Keep in mind that most of these I am completely new to and my issues may or may not have to do with these specific issues, series, civil war, or anything.

The Civil War Frontline series is kind of like an outsider’s perspective of what is going on, it focuses a lot on news stories and average joe’s perspective. Which is boring at best, and completely bogged down with useless uninteresting text at worse. Each issue has a long “beautiful” narrative comparing what is happening in Civil War to various past events of racism, subjugation, rebellion, etc. etc. OK look I get the metaphor, I got the metaphor the first time someone said it, and the second, and every fucking issue in this whole series! Frontline’s saving grace is the story of Speedball, the last surviving New Warrior, and how the government uses him as a scapegoat for the explosion that started everything. If it were not for this and my dedication to read every comic in Civil War I would be skipping Frontline every time.

On the other hand Captain America is easily the best part of Civil War, now I have a few old Captain America comics… was he always this badass? I guess his first comic cover ever was him punching Hitler in the face, I guess he got his touch back when I wasn’t looking. Captain America was only in really two civil war issues that I have read so far but in that time he managed to single handedly destroy sixteen super trained “cape killer” marines, leap out of the SHIELD helicarrier and land on a passing jet, punch through the cock pit, and surf/drive it to safety, begin work on a beautiful painting, beat the dick out of another squad of “cape killers,” and start a rebel team to fight Iron Man.

Thunderbolts is really exciting for me mostly because I had never even heard of it, its essentially a team of villains who are actually good, but are actually evil, but are doing good, but may be plotting an evil grandmaster plan. Also they may have a transvestite on their team which is always exciting.

There are other series: Amazing Spider-man, Wolverine, Fantastic Four, X-Factor… but they are all pretty uninteresting, mediocre, and kinda boring, but I am sure as I keep reading everything will pick up pace.