Saturday, September 17, 2016

How Civil War & Civil War 2 Could Have Been Much, Much Shorter

NSA-jerk Henry Peter Gyrich has been making the Avengers jump through hoops to keep their government-issued security clearances, going so far as to dictate their line-up.

Well, he's still not happy with how they operate, because jerk, so he's convened a special hearing of the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee to try and strip away their ability to access any government cooperation...

Meanwhile, a mysterious intruder from space is running amok through New York...



SPOILER ALERT: Don't tell anyone, but it's the Grey Gargoyle in a fancy space-suit...

So as the hearing continues...








[Note--by law, Captain America is the one person allowed to violate Godwin's Law with impunity...]




Man, I miss this version of the Beast...

Anyway, the Avengers save the day, and the hearing results do not go quite the way Gyrich expected:

Ouch, Pete.

See, back in the day, "Let heroes be heroes" was a winning argument, not a debatable subject that led to civil wars and public distrust and random character deaths and terribly-written and terribly late Bendis scripts and...

Just sayin.

From Avengers #190 (1979). The final panel above is from Avengers #191 (1980)

5 comments:

Sort Of The Atom said...

Good thing that senator had his 19" Sanyo right there in the chamber!

CalvinPitt said...

If I had to listen to Peter Gyrich I'd want a TV handy too.

And I also miss this version of Hank McCoy.

Warren JB said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Warren JB said...

"Man, I miss this version of the Beast..."

Amen to that.

And yeah. I've come to the conclusion that some writers subscribe too much to the 'comics are a serious form of literary media', or at least misunderstand and misapply it. The recent civil wars (plural, I want to cry) and other recent events are trying to go too gritty, too HBO, too 'relevant'; but the writers and the... setting, or genre, or whatever, can't really handle it in large and sustained doses. Add the facts that it is in the form of constant events, with too many crossovers created or drawn into their orbit, all to make fewer customers buy more titles, or something... I can't adequately describe ridiculous and simultaneously inconsequential it all seems, from the outside. (I'm on the outside, now, after a few years of wondering why I was paying marked-up UK prices on stuff I was enjoying less and less)

I can't say the event in this post is any more consequential - it's basically still addressing serious political or ethical dilemmas by having a bunch of brightly-costumed musclemen rush out to beat eachother up - and I don't want to imply it's more disposable, but I agree that it achieves the same effect with a lot less GoT grimdark, a lot more economy (in terms of both storytelling and the reader's pocket) and a lot more fun. Can I say this is from when they still understood this particular corner of the medium? To misquote someone, they let superheroes be superheroes.

SallyP said...

Boy howdy, I miss this version of the Beast too. Remember when he and Wonder Man used to go out and get sloshed?

Good times.