Civil War: Thing

The Marvel event Civil War remains the quintessential summary of comics during the 2000s.  Lots of government politics, wildly blurred moral lines, and more superheroes hitting other superheroes than supervillains.  Hell, Iron Man became the Marvel universe’s main bad guy for two years.  But some amazing stories came out of Civil War and the aftermath (plus who doesn’t want an answer to who-can-beat-who arguments? Spoiler alert: Thor) and I’m always a supporter of writers trying to shake up the status quo a bit.  Though through ll the emotional torments and ruined friendships, no one came out of Civil War worse than the Fantastic Four — I mean, besides Goliath and Captain America because of their whole dying thing — and this week we’ll take a look at some of their moments during this crisis.  Let’s read some scenes from Fantastic Four #538-541, written by J. Michael Straczynski and drawn by Mike McKone.  Heads up, the Thing may have been the only level-headed superhero in the entire event.

Just in case you aren’t familiar, I’ll quickly summarize the issues up to this point.  The New Warriors, a brash group of young superheroes, ambushes supervillains Nitro & Friends in a populated suburban area.  They soon realize that Nitro’s basically a living bomb and he wrecks the whole town, killing hundreds of people, and causing the country to go into an uproar.  A bill gets passed in Congress that all superheroes must de-mask, register with the government, and quit all that vigilante stuff.  Iron Man becomes the leader for the pro-registration team while Captain America goes into hiding as the anti-registration leader.  Cue mass fighting in the streets for months.  We pick up here.

Y’see, in the wave of anti-superhero actions, some jerks beat down the Human Torch outside a club. Using clubs.  As for Yancy Street, they’re like the drunk cousins you see every Thanksgiving: always causing trouble and the Thing’ll have to shove them into a cab ride home, because y’know, they’re family.

I would say that the Thing lies between a rock and a hard place, but he’s already both of those.  Mr. Fantastic sits as Iron Man’s number two while the Invisible Woman seeks to sabotage and ruin the government’s plans.  With the Human Torch in a coma, the Thing’s torn between two (subjectively) awful sides.  And truthfully, both sides have faults the size of Fin Fang Foom — a practical lose/lose for poor Ben Grimm.

No more shrugs and watching from the sidelines for the Thing.  Clobberin’ time has made way for decision time.  By midway through the event, the anti-registration side comes off as the good guys if mainly because the good guys are always whatever team Captain America fights on.  But let’s not forget that both teams engage in some morally ambiguous actions.  Iron Man imprisons captured superheroes in the Negative Zone.  Captain America openly boosts his manpower with known supervillains.  So as the Thing gets forced into a corner, it’s essentially picking the lesser of two spandex-wearing-laser-eyes-zapping evils.

Luckily before he needs to choose a direction to throw his punch in, a more important situation arises. When superheroes are busy fighting superheroes, that leaves supervillains free to enact their own dastardly plans unhindered.

Drunk cousin analogy or not, Grimm’s Yancy Street family just lost one of its own.  I’m sad too. You figure that the Thing would have enough frustration seeing the Fantastic Four break apart, watching his friends combat each other, being an orange rock monster, etc., so as the pot boils over, the Thing makes the only logical choice.  The decision that he should have made a long time ago.

We forget that despite 99% of superheroes living in the United States (and 98% in New York City), other countries must have their own radiation accidents or chemical spills or mad scientist experiments creating their own superheroes as well.  So when the Thing flies to France to enjoy some baguettes and xenophobia far away from any internal punching conflicts, he soon finds himself obligingly helping out Paris’ version of the Avengers.  Because why not?  Still, at least for a few issues, the Thing has a happy ending:

On Wednesday and Friday, we’ll look into how the Civil War Mr. Fantastic and the Invisible Woman fractured their marriage and the subsequent repairs.  Get ready for some heartbreak.

Norman Osborn’s recruiting drive: Mystique

Norman Osborn’s X-Men team completes its roster today — a team assembled full of morally ambiguous, lied to, and unwillingly-forced-into-servitude superheroes/supervillains.  The full group led by Emma Frost consists of Namor, Mimic, Dark Beast, Cloak, Dagger, Weapon Omega, Daken, and finally our wildly unpredictable shapeshifter Mystique.  Y’see, recently Wolverine and Mystique settled some differences (bloody, explosive differences) and the encounter left Mystique dying and abandoned in the desert.  She survived.  Let’s not worry about how.  Now that she’s unemployed, Osborn figures she could use a gig obeying his every command as part of his pseudo-PR-stunt X-Men.  At least he doesn’t have to manipulate Mystique — there’s a respect/open rudeness between supervillains of their caliber.  Today, we’ll take a look at a scene from Dark X-Men #3, written by Jason Aaron and drawn by Jock.

Makes sense Mystique would want to sully Wolverine’s reputation after the hell he put her through (and he does eventually come back to finish the job he left a few years after this).  But how much more damage could Mystique inflict?  Wolverine’s mental state holds up about as well as tissue paper in a rainstorm.  He snaps and massacres groups of innocent people at least once a solo series, blaming everything on mindwipes or memory repression or no more beer.  The superhero community just accepts that all the good Wolverine does is worth him flying off the handle and killing bears with his bare hands while he runs around the woods naked every once in a while.

It’s almost impressive how long Osborn held onto his sanity during Dark Reign.  The dude handled nonstop problems and issues — the same issues that undid Iron Man’s rule — and yet until Siege he never reverted into his Green Goblin crazy pumpkin-chucking persona he triggers as quickly as stepping on Bruce Banner’s foot turns him into the Hulk.  Well, I don’t think he Green Goblin’d publicly.  I mean, not around cameras and stuff.  So Mystique, who battles foes mainly by immediately detecting and hitting all the right emotional nerves, now gets to argue with a man as uncaring and vindictive as herself.  In a sick way, it’s refreshing to see a completely honest Osborn.

Y’know how I mentioned earlier that Mystique defeats her opponents with emotional manipulation?  I’m sorry, I meant kung fu.

The problem with an extended lifespan, like Mystique possesses, is that after her hundred plus years of life, not much is left on her bucket list.  She reverts back to a teenager whose iPad broke: she just sort of wanders around, joins random groups of dubious people, and finds out what trouble she can get into.  Her current goal?  Totally murdering Wolverine for leaving her for dead in the desert tops the list. And what’s the best way to get to Wolverine?  Besides free back hair waxes?  His family, of course.

To be fair to Mystique, Wolverine has lots of sons.  Most he doesn’t know about.  But the Japanese name could only indicate the mother’s identity being Itsu, the woman Wolverine loved with all his heart and soul.  Osborn just uttered the magic words.

With Osborn’s team now complete, it’s time for him to begin the mission: annoy the real X-Men.

Norman Osborn’s recruiting drive: Cloak and Dagger

We continue our series, where Norman Osborn — the Nick Fury replacement during the Marvel event Dark Reign — recruits superheroes/supervillains for his new X-Men team.  Y’know, because the old one doesn’t do everything he says when he says it without ever questioning or arguing with him.  So far, he bosses around Emma Frost, Namor, Mimic, and Dark Beast, but today he expands his roster with the delightful duo Cloak and Dagger.  Except that neither of them are mutants.

They used to be mutants.  It’s complicated.  As teen runaways, they were injected with a synthetic drug by a mob scientist that triggered their superpowers (Cloak’s teleportation/”dark dimension” doors and Dagger’s knives made out of light/healing powers).  Writers eventually retconned that the drug simply spawned their latent mutant powers.  Then writers retconned that.  Currently and officially, the two are not mutants, have never been mutants, and never will be mutants — despite one of their solo series in the ’80s titled The Mutant Misadventures of Cloak and Dagger.  Today though, we will cover a scene from Dark X-Men: The Beginning #2, written by Paul Cornell and drawn by Leonard Kirk, beginning with the normal mayhem expected of superheroes.

With their whole origin a horror movie brought on by a drug-wielding mad scientist, you can imagine our two protagonists spend significant portions of their day battling drugs and dudes with machine guns protecting drugs.  As a side note, I love a character who’s named after the clothing he wears. Following Cloak’s example, allow me to present my new superhero name: Sweatpants.

If you can admire anything about the ruthless Osborn, at least he handles stressful situations extremely well.  Fire rages all around, soldiers are shooting at them, Cloak just threatened to banish Osborn to eternal darkness, and he hasn’t so much as raised his heart rate.  Unfortunately for our poor superheroes, Osborn spent years of effort and hard to work to become Spider-Man’s arch-nemesis and all-around Marvel universe pain-in-the-butt (joining the impressive ranks of important crossover villains like Magneto, Doctor Doom, and Loki).  The two never stood a chance against Osborn the moment he landed in his Iron Man ripoff armor.  Like Batman, he’s always prepared. Unlike Batman, Osborn’s a horribly evil life-ruining terrible person.

Yes, Osborn’s offer is really good.  Of course, most deals with the devil tend to be.  Also, if you’re a Republican and noticed Obama shaking hands with a bonafide supervillain, feel free to share this on your Facebook wall.  Don’t worry, no one reads political status updates anyway.  Most importantly, Cloak and Dagger don’t have a choice.  Dagger even mentions that on the next page.  Either they accept Osborn’s offer to be his personal weapons and mutant PR tools (both definitions of that word) or he destroys them to smithereens the second they refuse.  After all, they’re attacking government property and Osborn has shook hands with the president.  Oh, and just like Namor, he’ll never miss a chance to rub in his victory.

Tomorrow, we finish up with Mystique.  Finally, Osborn gets to talk to a fellow sociopath.

Norman Osborn’s recruiting drive: Namor

Over the next three days, we’ll explore a different side of Norman Osborn — less pumpkin bomb chucking and more persuasive words with open threats.  If you like your Green Goblin stories with zero combat and solely pages full of conversation, then you’re in luck for the rest of the week.  Please don’t click away, I promise I only choose to highlight comics I like.  After the past two and a half weeks of romance and battles, I figured we could use some good ol’ fashioned character development. Then we’ll return to kissing and punching, but today enjoy a scene from Dark X-Men: The Beginning #1, written by Paul Cornell and drawn by Leonard Kirk.

Following the Marvel event Secret Invasion, Norman Osborn takes over as the reigning government secret agent commander — replacing SHIELD with HAMMER.  Same group, just way more morally ambiguous and with a leader who still has both eyes.  He creates his own team of supervillain Avengers and then in a Pokémon Gotta Catch ‘Em All scenario, he figures he should create his own team of X-Men as well.  If Dark Reign had continued a few more years, he could have had a Fantastic Four and Guardians of the Galaxy too.  Even longer and it’d be a revival of the Champions.  Just y’know, evil.

He starts off by recruiting Emma Frost by essentially promising to leave the X-Men alone if she can beat up any cranky mutants once in a while.  Well, when you have Emma Frost, the fishy Namor isn’t far behind.  Mostly to admire her behind.  With his kingdom of Atlantis destroyed, the mutant Namor aligned himself with the X-Men.  We pick up with the naked Namor showering on a helicarrier, where he stays clothes-less the entire scene.

I should probably explain.  A rogue Atlantean terrorist group attacked Los Angeles, and Namor refused to denounce them despite Osborn’s insistence.  So Osborn sent in the Sentry (schizophrenic with the power of a million exploding suns) to wipe out the group.  He totally did.  Yet Namor is standing in front of the (former) Green Goblin even with Atlantean blood recently spilled.

Yes, Osborn asks a relevant and important question.  But unlike, say, how superheroes phrase their queries, he can’t help provoking a man who could smush Osborn into goblin putty with a single finger — a man who has no issues fighting without first putting on underwear:

And now the real battle begins.  Osborn threw the first jab, and he’s going to finish it with an uppercut or whatever boxers do after jabbing.  Because while poor Namor speaks like the proud royal battleaxe he is, our vulnerable half-Atlantean has only one secret wish (it’s not Emma Frost).

Even when Osborn wins, he still has to rub it in.  If this makes you feel better, Emma Frost and Namor eventually betray Osborn while Cyclops simultaneously establishes Utopia as a mutant safe haven. But for right now, say hello to the second member of the Dark X-Men: Namor.

Tomorrow, Dagger and Cloak!  They’re not even mutants!