The Second Worst Comic Book Of All Time!

Of course, the worst comic of all time is Civil War: Frontline, by a large margin:

But that's not all! Everyone forgets that, in the back half of the issue, our intrepid reporters literally applaud Tony Stark for mind-controlling Norman Osborn into attacking the Atlantean ambassador in order to ramp up a threat of a war to convince heroes to register. No, that really happened.

But there's another abominable comic I stumbled across in the Quarter Bin the other day, and man, it's even worse than I remembered:

SPOILER ALERT: The Flash doesn't run in this story. And The Blackhawks don't fly. You never even see their planes.

So what does happen? Barry Allen is helping a scientist with a goofy experiment, and accidentally ends up thrown back in time to...

 Wait wait wait...

Now, since the Germans occupied Belgium from May 1940 till February 1945, it's hard to understand how Barry comes up with Germans in Belgium automatically equals The Battle Of The Bulge.

Well, it turns out that it actually is the Battle Of The Bulge. I suppose we could assume that Barry is lousy at history but got lucky. Or that JMS used a really lazy storytelling shortcut.

Oh, and Barry broke his leg in the accident, so he can't run super-fast (but conveniently, he can walk...?):

 Fortunately, he can still do super-speed stuff with his hands:

 This eventually leads to a meeting with...

It turns out the Blackhawks were on leave when the massive German counter-offensive left them stuck behind enemy lines. And after several pages of Blackhawk being a dickweed, he takes Barry to their temporary base...

 ...just in time to face a Nazi platoon!

 But Barry has a better idea than guns!

Now, this is the part where Blackhawk thanks Barry for ending the battle quickly, and saving ammo, and probably their lives, right? Right?

Really.

Really. 

Really.

You can't incapacitate the enemy. You have to kill them, or you're a coward. (Leave aside the fact that bricks hurled at that speed may well have killed some of the Germans...) (Also leave aside that the story never establishes what was done with the incapacitated Germans. Did Blackhawk go out and execute them while they were unconscious?)

I imagine that if Superman had shown up and knocked out the Nazis with super-breath or something, Blackhawk would tear him a new one, as well. Super-heroes are all pussies!!

By way of contrast, though, how about normal soldiers? Like in Sgt. Fury #3 (1963)?

They take out a whole Nazi platoon. And instead of killing them, they capture them, and send them off to be questioned. And the prisoners get to ride in a truck while the Howlers walked back!! So according to JMS, Fury and company must all be cowards!!

Now, DC promoted JMS's run on Brave And The Bold pretty heavily. "If you love these Silver Age characters, JMS will remind you why you do!"

So how does Silver Age Barry Allen deal with his dilemma? When they come across some dead Americans...

...he takes the uniform and weapons off a dead soldiers body and proceeds to spends "weeks" killing people with guns and not using his super-powers.

Yay, Silver Age...?

Look, if you want to do a story about how great the "Greatest Generation" was, more power to you. If you want to tell us how heroic soldiers are, I'm down with that (although the "soldiers' only job is to kill" seems to belie that theme just a tiny bit). And if you want to make the point that super-heroes don't belong in war stories because their presence somehow ruins the realism and makes light of the heroism and sacrifices of normal joes, I hear you--and Roy Thomas took care of that decades ago, by using the Spear of Destiny to keep super-powered beings out of Axis territory during the war (which apparently JMS never bothered to look up...)

You also could have had Barry lose all of his powers (or chosen a non-powered hero...Batman? Blue Beetle?), so the choice wasn't "using a gun vs. using still pretty damn effective super-powers."

But no, they had t5 tell that story at the expense of humiliating super-heroes. By taking Barry Freaking Allen, who thinks his way around bank robbers using super-speed and science, and making him feel ashamed for using his powers, even when those powers were demonstrably more effective than anything the soldiers were doing!?! Is it necessary to denigrate super-hero comics in order to build up war comics? Did JMS seriously believe that the only way we could properly appreciate WWII soldiers and celebrate the anniversary of the Battle Of The Bulge was to make super-heroes believe they were cowards for not ditching their powers?

So a story, where the Flash doesn't run and the Blackhawks don't fly, that trashes super-heroes as cowards unless they pick up a gun and start killing as much as they can? Yeah, that's a terrible, terrible comic book.

Then again, this story was nominated for an Eisner award, so I probably don't know what the hell I'm talking about.

FF Week #20--The Human Torch's Civil War!!

Remember that time the Human Torch was forced to fight solo against Paibok The Power Skrull, Devos The Devestator, and ex-wife Lyra?

Uh-oh.

Hey, no classes tomorrow!!

Now, if this had happened during the oughts, and, say, Mark Millar had been writing it, then the public would have turned on super-heroes, there would be a registration act, Tony Stark would become a fascist, dogs and cats living together...

But whatever else you can say against the 90s, they were a little bit more laid back about accidental cataclysm:

Outright dismissal of charges?!? No civil suit? No political grandstanding and repression of civil liberties? What the hell?!?!

Like I said, a more laid back time...

From Fantastic Four #371 (1992) and #376 (1993)

Civil War Revisited: Pre-Crime!!

Well, between vague promos and vague movie announcements, Marvel's Civil War has been talked about an awful lot the past few days.

One article, when describing the nearly-a-decade-old Marvel event, described it as "well written."

Hahahahahaha.

Now, this blog wasn't around during those days, even though I've made my disdain for Civil War: Front Line #11--The. WORST. COMIC. EVER.--quite clear.

But since it's back in the news, I'm glad to have the opportunity to share with you the exact moment--the very second--when it was clear that this series would be pretty damn stupid.

It's issue 1 of the main series, and we're up in the S.H.I.E.L.D. Helicarrier. Maria Hill is quizzing Captain America about what the heroes' reaction will be to the pending Super-Human Registration Act, and whether Cap will lead the Avengers in enforcing it:

No, I'm not going to ding Mark Millar too hard for criminally blurring the distinction of whether S.H.I.E.L.D. is a national or international organization. Marvel writers have been blowing that one for decades. S.H.I.E.L.D. is an international organization, and has been since their founding. And anyone who says different is kinda wrong.

Still, even though it's a common mistake, it should be noted that this mistake really undermines the series' premise in a big way. Having S.H.I.E.L.D. enforcing the SHRA is akin to having NATO or U.N. troops enforcing the Patriot Act on U.S. soil--not bloody likely.

But again, common mistake, let's give him a pass.

No, what's more important is something that Hill says. Close-up, please:

See, the SHRA hasn't become law yet. It hasn't even been voted on in Congress yet, and doesn't look to become the law of the land for at least a month.

That's kinda crucial, as Cap and Hill argue about the act:

"CHIK-CHAK"??? Really?

Yes, really.

Let's be clear--S.H.I.E.L.D. agents are drawing their weapons on Captain America and are preparing to take him down BECAUSE HE DISAGREES WITH AN ACT THAT CONGRESS HASN'T EVEN VOTED ON YET. He hasn't broken any law yet, made any threatening move...apparently, in Mark Millar's view of how politics work, agents (federal or international) can draw their weapons on you for merely expressing a contrary opinion on a hypothetical law.

Ah, but it's just some out of control lackeys, right? This isn't official policy, is it?

Uh, yeah, it is. The director of S.H.I.E.L.D. is going to detain Captain America refusing to promise to help her enforce a law that hasn't passed yet.

And that's when you knew there was little hope of Civil War making a lick of sense.

Look, there were some interesting ideas in the mix for Civil War. A discussion of vigilantism, of private citizens holding essentially weapons of mass destruction, of post-9/11 America being willing to trade some freedom for security...I'm not saying that these are necessarily great ideas for a comic full of costume wearing super-heroes. But somebody else might have been able to make the idea work, at least a little better.

But when you try to make super-heroes a metaphor in your real-world allegory, and can't even get the basic facts about the real world right, you've lost before you started. By carelessly turning this into Minority Report--where people can be punished before they commit crimes, indeed before the law even exists--you're no longer making a slippery slope argument, you're setting up a very stupid strawman that takes everyone away from your real arguments. If your text doesn't make any sense, your sub-text doesn't, either.

All because Millar couldn't find a better way to get Captain America initially involved, and needed an action scene in a book where people spend pages and pages standing around talking politics.

"Well written" my ass.