Okay, I didn’t want to get into this because quite frankly, I’m sick of it. The very idea of “Who Do You Trust?” bothers me immensely because I’m one of those namby-pamby little girls that wants to believe that heroes do good the majority of the time and since Civil War, it’s been hard to hold on to that belief. It’s edgy not to trust in your authority figures and that’s why Cyclops has dark ops teams and Iron Man is a villain because he supports government control.
BUT! I make exceptions. While I will try and be Secretless here at Snap Judgments (mostly because my snap judgments is “Argh! Freakin’ Skrulls! Smells like retcon!”), I will give a shout-out to a few ideas kicking around the ol’ skull.
Like the fact that the current Beast in … whatever X-Men book he’s in right now? Which is it? Didn’t he get an off-handed mention in Uncanny as going to look for Xavier? Man, that guy is a hard travelin’ hero!
And he’s a Skrull.
I can’t say I have a lot of facts to back up this judgment, snappy as it is, but I did remember that Joss “All Shall Love Me and Despair” Whedon wanted to change Beast’s look back when he started on Astonishing X-Men (ALL THOSE YEARS AGO) and was told that he had to keep him lionesque because there were plans for that. He’s been very unused aside from exposition and … well, let’s just call it a gut feeling. Not as gut-y as my ‘Black Bolt better be a Skrull because Silent War was lame’ feeling, but something like it.
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It’s not just “namby-pamy little girls” who want heroes to “act like heroes” again. There’s entire cadres of little boys wringing their hands, filled with nostalgia fuelled anxiety, talking like coffee shop revolutionaries about how to start the revolution and depose Dastardly Despotic Dan Didio and Jafar-esque (the bad guy in Disney’s - Aladdin, because at this point I’m in paraphrase central station and I don’t know bad words starting with ‘J,’ clean or otherwise) Joe Quesada so they could “take back our comics.”
I mean, y’know, they’re talking about going back to the days where Xavier was blithely taking control of Johny ‘my power is to set myself on fire, daddyo’ Storm to fight the Cain ‘I’m the Juggernaut!’ Marko; Tony ‘Iron Man’ Stark was mind-wiping the entire world to keep his secret safe; that stupid math hadn’t yet been thought up to explain how Hulk didn’t kill people, and we hadn’t really seen how you could still mess up someone’s life without killing them; Superman was killing Lois Lane every issue or vice versa; Batman was duelling with the Joker over ‘boners,’ along with sleeping in the same bed with a young boy whose uniform from the waist down was green speedos and booties and also went skinning dipping with young, naked boys; and any other number of whacky stuff that, really, isn’t heroic.
The characters are still punching bad guys in the face since Civil War. I mean, since Civil War, the Mighty Avengers and New Avengers haven’t really fought. Strange used a spell one time, and the other times Carol let the New Avengers walk because they’d just saved New York City from symbiotes. Then the New Avengers went to lay the smackdown on the Hood, and the Mighty Avengers went off to have words with Doom (and hey, they actually put Doom in jail! that’s got to be worth something).
Things with the Initiative’ve been messed up, but it’s not really the fault of a lot of characters except, say, Nazi doctor, and Gyrich. The teen heroes are learning stuff just fine (though, the New Warriors are still whining and trying to dodge their guilt and get out of paying their comeuppance - REAL heroes, y’know, would try and make some good come of Stamford, rather than beat people into comas and practically scream “IT’S NOT MY FAULT IT WASN’T ME!” at every opportunity).
There was a time where it was canon that Captain America hadn’t killed in the WW2. I’m sure Brubaker fixed that up, but that whole thing’s just pointing to how silly the notion of what heroic is when it comes to the context of comic books. It’s probably why the Pro-Reg side needed some mustache curling evil tacked on - the conception of heroism is so . . . silly and immature sometimes. I’m not saying everyone should be Ennis Punisher, but if we could just get a little more understanding in what’s heroic with comics, we could really get a lot more out of stories like Civil War.
Already called it, using math.
http://thebraveandtheblog.wordpress.com/2008/03/19/in-which-i-solve-secret-invasion-using-math/