Update: Civil War II Still Sucks

So, for those of you keeping up and those of you who haven't, I just wanted to check in and remind you that Civil War II is still a thing that's going on and it's still pretty stupid. I mean, granted, it's not nearly as stupid as DC fans starting to petition to end a website for keeping count of how many people think a movie they like is good or bad (because that's all Rotten Tomatoes is, really), but it's still pretty stupid for reasons other than the ones we've already discussed. So, it merits at least some discussion....which will occur after the jump.





In the latest issue, Tony Stark has hit a wall with the problem that is Ulysses, the MacGuffin Inhuman who can kinda sorta see the future (which is apparently supposed to be a big deal because Marvel has written the X-Men into such mediocrity that we've forgotten that psychics are a thing). Iron Man has analyzed the kid's brain and discovered that there's no real x factor to his ability. It turns out his visions are all mathematically/probability based. He's like the kids in the milk in Minority Report except his brain has no "minority report" to offer an alternative in case he's wrong. With nowhere else to turn, Tony goes to Steve Rogers (who, last I checked, is a Hydra sleeper agent) and calls a sitdown with all of the key players, including Captain Marvel, the kid's biggest proponent, to explain his findings. Except for Carol, of course, the heroes vote pretty unanimously that it might be a good idea to shut this little psy-ops project down. Carol just sort of flies out through the roof which can easily be taken as a big "fuck you" to all of her hero friends. It turns out that Ulysses has gotten it wrong at some juncture. He envisioned a Hydra agent with a suitcase nuke who, when arrested, turned out to be an aide with an empty suitcase. Carol decides to keep her detained indefinitely until she can find something to pin on her. Of course, not too long after this, Iron Man shows up with just about every Avenger he could get his hands on and confronts Captain Marvel to shut her down the hard way. Captain Marvel sees his Avengers and raises him the Guardians of the Galaxy. Because that's a fair fight.

The primary problem here is that at least in the first Civil War, they least TRIED to keep up the illusion that there was some gray area in the Superhero Registration Act. Here, there's even less hollow pretense than before. It's been plainly obvious that this precrime shit is wrong and once our heroes realize it, there's nothing to distract us from the fact that Brian Bendis is obviously devolving Captain Marvel into a mustache twirling villain. Granted, it's not actually as bad as the intolerable Snidely Whiplash that Tony Stark became in the first Civil War, but it's technically worse because it undoes all the work Kelly Sue Deconnick put into making Carol Danvers a well rounded marquee character. Noelle Stephenson once said on Twitter that diversity means having positive images of women but also seeing women being a mess at the same time (because this is excused all the time with unlikeable male figures of fiction like House, Sherlock and Sheldon Cooper). This is all fine and good but when you've established your character's baseline as a hardcore law officer, Wyatt Earp, champion of the law type, making her a crooked cop for the sake of advancing the plot gets you a big red X on the Bechdel Test.

So, yeah, Civil War II has officially ventured from "bad" to "unforgivably atrocious" in the time it takes anyone paying attention to come up with reasons to loathe Jared Leto.


Anywho, my comic reviews for the week on Tokyo Ghost and Invincible Iron Man are available on Black Nerd Problems for your viewing enjoyment. And don't forget about the latest update in my webcomic project with Katie Coats, Neverland: The Untold. Feel free to comment, share and save at your leisure. Diverse content is all around you thanks to savy audiences like yourselves and worth of mouth.