Saturday, April 14, 2012

Spoiler Saturday--New Avengers #24!

In the odd little version of the Marvel Universe that Bendis has created, the people worshiped and idolized the Avengers of the Heroic Age. Until Norman Osborn showed up, and gave one little speech. And suddenly, everyone turned on a dime and hated the Avengers (even though it wasn't that good a speech):

I mean, really, who needs the Purple Man or the Puppet Master or other mind control guys, when the Marvel-616 masses can be turned 180 degrees in 30 seconds by a "boo hoo, the Avengers are mean" speech from the man who launched a war with Asgard? Even the media swallowed Norman's bull hook, line and sinker.

Well, every problem has a solution. And Bendis' solution to the straw man he himself conjured up out of nowhere? Have Luke Cage talk some street sense to them:

You, know, whether this was a metaphor for the Tea Party or the Occupy movement or the anti-Ozzie Guillen protests (OK, probably not), the solution Cage proposes--everybody go home and "fix their own houses" and all of society's problems magically get better--is, well, amazingly patronizing and thunderously naive and well, just plain stupid.

Than again, I'm sure Bashar al-Assad is passing this exact same message on to Syrian protestors at this very moment...

Of course, Cage's magic words work, mainly because it's time for Avengers Vs. X-Men and this silly plot thread needed to be "resolved" as quickly as possible.

And, as Luke Cage's position is essentially "using your First Amendment rights is for fools, especially when you annoy us Avengers," it looks like Osborn may have been right about them after all...

6 comments:

  1. Has Cage's grammar always been this bad or just when Bendis got a hold of him? My limited exposure says the latter.

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  2. It's varied from writer to writer over the years. Bendis has been particularly egregious, I think, with his treatment of certain minority characters (see his Brother Voodoo, for example). Only characters with "black dialects" seem to speak phonetically badly, as opposed to various European or other speakers, who all seen to speak perfect English...

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  3. Black dialects? http://www.historyvortex.org/BlackResDalek.jpg ?

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  4. Relatively speaking, does Bendis Avengers still sell well? I don't get it, I just don't get it.

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  5. I've said it before, and I'll say it again. The average citizen in the Marvel Universe is monumentally stupid.

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  6. Christopher Priest established that Cage fakes bad grammar and the standard comic-urban speech (thanks for that, Denny O'Neil... I guess actually talking to black people would have been too much trouble) for effect when he's attempting to reach people. It's a nice idea... I wonder if Bendis knew it when he wrote him that way. :)

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