On the creation of superheroes as gradual development versus instantaneous inspiration

I've been thinking a lot about where exactly new superheroes come from over the course of the last few months, thanks largely to some of the books I've been reading: Annie Hunter Eriksen and Lee Gatlin's picture book biographies of Stan Lee and Steve Ditko, Douglas Wolk's All Of The Marvels and the late Lou Mougin's Secondary Superheroes of Golden Age Comics. I've also been thinking about the subject because of what I've been blogging about lately, like the Thunderbolts* movie, with its cast of characters created by almost 25 writers and artists over the course of some seven decades, and, of course, the related issue of who, exactly, created The Sentry and how.

Mougin's book, an exhaustive survey of Golden Age super-comics, rounds up the scores of characters created by over a dozen different publishers in the years following the first appearances of Joel Siegel and Joe Shuster's Superman comics (and some of the more distinct characters to follow in his immediate wake, like Batman, Wonder Woman, The Human Torch and Captain America).

Given the pace at which this army of superheroes appeared and then disappeared from the pages of the comic books of the time, one imagines that most were created on-the-fly by the guys who wrote and/or drew them. 

When a modern reader thinks of how someone might have got the idea for a Cat-Man or a Crimebuster, a Wizard or a Boy King, a Daredevil or a Black Hood, a Mother Hubbard or The Face, it's easy to imagine that sort of out-of-the-blue, lightning bolt-style of inspiration, a deadline-driven act of creation that rushed from an image in someone's head to the drawing board to the printed page (For the more unique characters, anyway; a lot of these heroes seemed to come from artists doing their own riffs on a Superman, or trying a different animal theme for a Batman, or rearranging the stars and stripes on a costume to get their own Captain America).

As for the heroes of later generations, though? 

Well, they had these Golden Agers (and their peers from the pulps and radio and film serials and comic strips) as a vast reservoir of inspiration. Not only could later creators find various templates among the biggest  successes of those early years who are still starring in their own comic books today (Superman, Batman, Captain America, etc), but also the heroes I would consider the true second stringers (the characters who ended up on the JSA, for example, and those of publishers Fawcett, Quality and maybe MLJ). And then the more random-sounding also-rans that fill Mougin's book, like White Streak or The Conqueror or The Blue Bolt or Magno or the guys named The Reckoner, of whom there was more than one. 

Many of the later heroes of the late 1950s and 1960s created for DC and Marvel and Charlton and others could be traced back to Golden Age ancestors, and contemplating such second-generation heroes now, it's actually kind of hard to think of a character whose name, power or gimmick doesn't have Golden Age antecedents of some sort. (Seriously, try it!) 

But still, there are some. Jack Kirby and Stan Lee's The Thing, for example, seems to be born more of monster comics than old superhero comics, and wow, where did the idea for the Silver Surfer come from exactly, you know? 

Anyway, some bits of Wolk's book that I found particularly interesting were the examples he gives when discussing the creation of certain characters. 

In the weeks since I read All of the Marvels, these examples seemed to only become more resonant, as I thought about Lee's work with Kirby and Ditko on the first wave of Marvel heroes while reading those picture books and then later reading of the avalanche of superheroes of the 1940s in Mougin's book. 

Very early in Wolk's book—page 5, actually—he mentions that the "Marvel's narrative," the focus of his book, "has a peculiar relationship with his authorship": 

Legally, it's "maker" is a corporation, one that's gotten bigger over time as its body of intellectual property has changed hands. In practice, it was made by a specific group of people whose names we (mostly) know, and whose particular hands are (usually) unmistakable on any given page. But it's also almost always been created collaboratively: if you think any one person is the sole creator of a particular image or plot point, you're probably wrong, which is why it's a mistake to think of any one person who's worked on a Marvel comic book as it's "author."

This passage then leads to an extensive footnote, during which he notes the difficulties involved in untangling who created what.

This can obviously be a contentious subject that fans and sometimes the creators themselves have argued about over the decades, be it how much (or even if) Stan Lee might have contributed to those early Marvel heroes with his collaborators Kirby and Ditko, or the later disagreements regarding the creation of Wolverine and Ghost Rider (the latter of which went to court), or the current issues with The Sentry. 

Wolk writes:

Even the question of who created Marvel's best-known characters is also often more complicated than it looks. It's easy enough to assess who came up with Marvel's first superheroes of the 1960s, the Fantastic Four: Jack Kirby and Stan Lee. (Except that the Human Torch's name and basic design had been created by Carl Burgos back in 1939).

He goes on to cite a few other relatively easier ones, like Captain America (Kirby and Joe Simon) and Doctor Strange (Ditko), before showing how quickly it can get rather convoluted.

Iron Man? That's a little trickier. Lee plotted his first story, but Larry Lieber wrote its dialogue; Kirby drew the first cover and designed the character's initial costume (which barely resembles the familiar rend-and-gold one, designed by Ditko a bit later); Don Heck drew the initial story and invented what its protagonists Tony Stark and Pepper Potts look like.

So the Marvel Universe hadn't even been around a year yet, and there was already a character who seemed to have at least four primary creators, whom Wikipedia lists under "created by" in its article on Iron Man. (As for Ditko, who Wikipedia does not cite as a creator of the character, where does he fit in? Is a redesign considered an act of creation? If it comes some time after a character's debut, is it seen as somehow less important? Does it matter if that redesign becomes the primary, default one?)

The next example is more complicated still. Writes Wolk;

Daredevil? Well, now you're running into trouble. Lee wrote the first story, and Bill Everett drew it, but the cover was drawn by Kirby, who might have designed Daredevil's original costume, too, although the much more familiar red costume was first drawn by Wally Wood starting in the seventh issue. When you talk about the now-familir look and feel and mythology of "Daredevil," though—the tormented Catholic romantic who leaps around the shadows of Hell's Kitchen and fights ninjas and Wilson Fisk—you're mostly talking about what Frank Miller added to the character in the '80s, along with his artistic collaborators Klaus Janson and David Mazzucchelli. (Except that Wilson Fisk had been created by Lee and John Romita Sr. fifteen years earlier.) And so on. 

Wolk doesn't mention it at all here (this is just a footnote, long as it is, of course, and this is outside the purview of his book), but it's worth noting that Marvel's Daredevil, who debuted in 1964, was preceded by another comic book hero named Daredevil from an entirely different publisher. 

The two-toned, boomerang-wielding Daredevil of Lev Gleason Publications, whose creation is credited to Jack Binder and Don Rico, debuted in a 1941 issue of Silver Streak and his own title ran 134 issues, not being canceled until 1956. (This is the character who, long since lapsed into the public domain, one might have seen more recently in the pages of Savage Dragon as "The Dynamic Daredevil" or in various Dynamite Comics as "The Death-Defying 'Devil".)

Mougin does mention the possible relationship between Lev Gleason's Daredevil and Marvel's Daredevil in his book:

The legend goes that publisher Martin Goodman wanted Stan Lee to do a comic based on [longtime Daredevil writer Charles] Biro's hero, in 1964. Since Lee admired Biro's work, that may not be unfounded. But, instead, Lee, Bill Everett, and Steve Ditko created a new Daredevil, switching the original DD's muteness for blindness and subbing a billy club for a boomerang. 

Does that not sound plausible to you? If not, well, Mougin did say "legend", didn't he? (I am curious about his mention of Ditko here, as Wolk doesn't mention Ditko at all when he discusses the creation of Marvel's Daredevil.)

The sense I got while reading this very early bit of Wolk's book was that rather than being created by a single artist or a single writer or even a single writer/artists team, sometimes it's more of a group effort, a creation by committee. That certainly seems to been the case with Iron Man, for example.

As for the Daredevil example, it shows not only that sometimes it's a team or a staff (or, in Marvel's case, a bullpen) that might create a superhero character, but sometimes it can take multiple creative teams and multiple years—hell, here some 20 years!—before a corporate character like Marvel's Daredevil reaches what will ultimately be considered his essential, perfected form.

Far later in the book, in a chapter entitled "Good is a Thing You Do" that is devoted to the debut and early issues of the current Ms. Marvel Kamala Khan and to Ryan North, Erica Henderson, Derek Charm and company's Unbeatable Squirrel Girl (the latter of which was built around a 1991 character designed and originally drawn by Ditko), Wolk gives an even better example of a character being developed into creation, I think. He does so while also illustrating how newer Marvel characters are dependent on older ones, and how even their earliest antecedents can be traced back to still earlier, pre-Marvel ancestors.

"Kamala Khan is yet another of Marvel's collective creations, her real-world origin too complicated to be attributed to a single originator," Wolk writes.

She emerged from conversations between editors Sana Amanat and Stephen Wacker about Amanat's experience growing up as a South Asian Muslim in New Jersey, as well as writer G. Willow Wilson's interest in creating a teenage Muslim superhero ("Sana and I initially had very modest expectations for this book," Wilson wrote five years later. "Our goal was to get to ten issues.") Artist Adrian Alphona came up with the images of Kamala and her supporting cast, although her costume was designed by Jamie McKelvie. 

Wolk also cites the particular creative choices made by colorist Ian Herring and letterer Joe Carmagna as distinct and important, each further defining and differentiating the initial Ms. Marvel comic book series from others in Marvel's line.

We could also note that while McKelvie designed Kamala's costume, a significant component of it, the lightning bolt-shaped symbol, was taken from Dave Cockrum's redesigned costume for the previous Ms. Marvel Carol Danvers dating back to the '70s.

And, of course, the superhero codename "Ms. Marvel" also came from Danvers, who was created, as Danvers, by Roy Thomas and Gene Colan in 1968, but made into the superhero Ms. Marvel by Gerry Conway and John Buscema in 1977.

And, just to make this into a game of superhero telephone, the original Ms. Marvel was a distaff version of the male hero Captain Marvel (created by Stan Lee and Gene Colan in 1967). He took his name from the Golden Age Fawcett Comics character Captain Marvel (created by Bill Parker and C.C. Beck in 1942), and that Captain Marvel was based on Siegel and Shuster's Superman...or at least, the company then known as Detective Comics was sure enough that he was that they took Fawcett to court, accusing them of copyright infringement (The case was eventually settled in 1953, in large part because, in Fawcett's estimation, superhero comics had by then ceased being profitable enough to fight over).

And thus we get from 2014's Ms. Marvel Kamala Khan all the way back to the very first superhero in 1938. 

Anyway, both Wolk and Mougin's books are very interesting reads, and ones that should be of interest to anyone who reads superhero comics. I'll be formally reviewing them in the future, but I wanted to touch on this idea of superhero creation as a process of development in a post of its own. 

The rest of the Civil War II tie-ins that I managed to read.

Civil War II: Gods of War
By Dan Abnett, Emilio Laiso, Stan Lee, Jack Kirby and others
112 pages; $15.99
Number of issues tied to Civil War II: 1 out of 5
Do the events demonstrate that Carol is wrong and Tony is right?: No
Side: Not applicable

This particular trade paperback demonstrates an admirable degree of mercenary cynicism on the part of the publisher. Presented and sold as a special miniseries tying in to Civil War II--note that "Civil War II" is the title, not the sub-title--the four-issue series is in actuality nothing more than the next (and final) four issues of the immediately-canceled Hercules ongoing series by writer Dan Abnett.

In fact, it would take a very generous reading to consider this a tie-in to Civil War II, as to say the events of the series are shoe-horned in would be pushing it.

The first issue, the only one that ties-in to the series whose name the series bears, finds Hercules staring at and resisting a glass of whiskey in a New York City bar, when his old friend Amadeus Cho drops by to check in on Herc, which allows for a quick recap of the events of Hercules. The hero has quit drinking in an effort to try and dispel his reputation as an overly-boisterous, Cretan Bull-in-a-china shop of a superhero, and he is currently living in Queens with a group of mystical allies, contending with new gods called The Rising Storm, gods who wish to supplant the old gods once and for all. They are named Cryptomnesia, Catastrophobia and Horrorscope, and have modern spheres of influence, like, for example, being the god of information. They want to recruit Herc as their god of chaos.

Cho and Herc's hangout time is interrupted by the appearance of The Celestial Destructor in New York City, and...that's the point at which this series intersects with Civil War II...at the very beginning, during the sort of generic scene where all of the heroes of the Marvel Universe unite against a big, random threat for a fight scene. The way in which this figures in is that the Rising Storm confront Hercules in the midst of the battle, but since only he can see them, it makes some of his peers--She-Hulk and Totally Awesome Hulk Amadeus Cho--wonder what's up with Herc. That, and the fact that Iron Man and Captain Marvel called in all of the heroes to confront the Destructor, but not Herc, so he feels left out by his peers again.

And that's about it, in terms of tie-in.

In the next issue, Hercules puts together his own team of mythological characters he calls the Gods of War: Beowulf, Thesus, Gilgamesh and some Asgardians. Their mission? To put an end to the Rising Storm.

In the issue after that, the Storm manage to take over Hercules' mind, and some of his fellow Marvel heroes attempt to take him down, until they realize he's under a spell and manage to break it. I guess this technically provides some hero vs. hero fighting, as Captain Marvel, Spider-Man Peter Parker, Captain America Steve Rogers and Medusa try to bring Herc down, but it's not really Civil War II related. There is a line of dialogue wherein Captain America tells Captain Marvel that The Hulk is their main priority at the moment--I guess Gods of War #3 somehow fits between the moment in which Ulysses' vision of The Hulk killing all the heroes, and the heroes' confrontation with Bruce Banner--and, after the end of their fight, Captain Marvel warns Hercules that they will be watching him.

And, in the fourth and final issue, Hecules and the Gods of War take on and take down The Rising Storm. The end.

Because that isn't enough pages to reasonably fill up a trade paperback, Marvel inflates the page count with a reprint of the Herc-centric pages of 1965's Journey Into Mystery Annual #1 by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. That's a Thor vs. Herc story, if you're wondering.

Deadpool: World's Greatest Vol. 5--Civil War II
By Gerry Duggan, Mike Hawthorne, Scott Koblish, Terry Pallot and others
136 pages; $17.99
Number of issues tied to Civil War II: 2 out of 6
Do the events demonstrate that Carol is wrong and Tony is right?: Eh, not really
Side: Indeterminate from this collection

The majority of this collection is dedicated to the five-part "Deadpool's Uncivil War" story arc, which ties fairly directly into the events of Civil War II at the outset, but then wanders off, its tie-in being more of a thematic one. That is, after Deadpool and World's Greatest's supporting cast deals with the Celestial giant and Deadpool calls bullshit on Ulysses, the rest of the arc deals with the Deadpool fighting...much of his peer group, up to and including his own wife.

Writer Gerry Duggan might lose interest in the events of Civil War II and the idea of predictive justice and free will vs. destiny pretty quickly, but he's able to maintain  hero vs. hero fighting for quite a while--or, at least, merc versus merc fighting.

Having not been reading Deadpool since for pretty much ever, and this collection contains issues #14-#19 of this particular iteration of the primary Deadpool comic, I can only guess as to what was going on before the start of this series. Apparently, Deadpool's "failed reboot of Heroes For Hire" The Mercs For Money--around whom another of Deadpool's endless spin-off series was built--functioned for a time as part of this book's cast.

These were a group of minor-ish Marvel characters that were attached to Deadpool to form a sort of super-team of mercenaries: Stingray, Slapstick, Solo, Foolkiller II, Terror (of Terror, Inc) and Masacre (The last of whom is a character who wears what looks like a home-made Deadpool mask, fights with machetes and only speaks in untranslated Spanish and...that's the one joke associated with the character, apparently).

When "Uncivil War" begins, Deadpool is enjoying and not-enjoying domestic life with his demon wife Shiklah in the underground monster city where Marvel's various 1970s horror characters all live and work together. They are called top-side by the rest of the Mercs to help deal with the Celestial Destructor from the Marvel Universe-wide team-up that kicked off Civil War II, but only Deadpool gets invited to the after-party at Stark Tower (There we see Deadpool chatting with The Vision about Ulysses' powers and then Ulysses himself; Deadpool doesn't buy into precognition).

That he gets invited to the cool superhero parties and they don't is one of the many things that rankles the ranks of his team, but when they discover that Deadpool has been cheating them out of the money he owes them, they decide to break-up with him en masse. To do this, they apparently need to break into a bank in New Jersey in order to destroy the contracts they signed with him. They make their move during the second chapter of the arc, in which Deadpool breaks into The Ultimates' Triskelion HQ to confront Ulysses (Which is kind of a weird, given the fact that they were just having a pleasant face-to-face the issue prior, but Duggan does have Deadpool half-explain why he chose that particular route).

This leads to a long, drag-out fight against The Black Panther which is...out-of-left field, even in the context of a Deadpool comic. From what we're given, BP seems mad that Deadpool broke into the Triskelion, and thus wants to beat him up, Deadpool's taunts and increasingly lewd behavior eventually driving T'Challa to bellow out how he's going to kill Deadpool, all of which seem...less than Black Panther-esque. (The fight choreography in their battle, which stretches out over the better part of eight pages, is pretty superior for a modern Marvel superhero comic book though; usually fight scenes just consist of two characters posing, with no sense that one action leads to that of the next panel.)

From there, Deadpool fights the rest of his team, which is interrupted by an extended flashback scene in which Solo explains how he saved America while dressed as Deadpool, inadvertently making the character more popular and respectable, and then, once the fight is resumed, it is ultimately broken up for bood by SHIELD.

Then Deadpool fights Shiklah for five pages, and hangs out with Rogue, his teammate on The Avengers Unity Squad (the team from the Uncanny Avengers book that launched post-AVX).

The final issue in the collection, set in Marvel's 2099 setting, is only related to what preceded it loosely, as throughout "Uncivil War" DP expressed concern for his daughter and what her future will bring her. Here, we see it. I have to assume this is a story in-progress, doled out in occasional chapters like this, as I could barely make heads-or-tails out of what was happening; that, or one simply needed a better understanding of Duggan's longer-form Deadpool series than what I got from these five issues.

Guardians of The Galaxy: New Guard Vol. 3--Civil War II
By Brian Michael Bendis, Valerio Schiti, Kevin Maguire and Richard Isanove
136 pages; $19.99
Number of issues tied to Civil War II: 3 out of 4
Do the events demonstrate that Carol is wrong and Tony is right?: No
Side: Team Carol

So the Guardians of The Galaxy play a decidedly minor role in Civil War II. In the series' one big superhero battle, when Team Tony (i.e. the Good Guys) confront Team Carol (that is, the Bad Guys) atop the Triskelion, Carol and her handful of teammates seem hopelessly outnumbered. And then Carol dramatically says she has friends all over, and into the fray jump The Guardians. And that is pretty much the extent of their participation.

This trade, or at least 60 pages or so of it, are devoted to Bendis explaining what, exactly, the Guardians were doing just before they joined the battle  on the last page of the fourth issue. It's not exactly the Marvel Universe's most burning question, and it's pretty easy to suss out from the context given--Carol Danvers was a member of the Guardians for a while, and they naturally like her a lot better than they like Tony Stark, even though he too was a member of their team for a while--but, to his credit, Bendis uses the tie-in as a way to break up the the team and move them into a new and different setting. At least for a while.

The collection is of particularly poor value, though. At $20 for just four issues, it's actually more expensive to read Guardians of the Galaxy #11-#14 in trade paperback than it would have been in $3.99/20-page installments; the other 50 pages or so are made up of the 11-page Civil War II story from Free Comic Book Day 2016 (Civil War II) #1, thirty fucking pages of artist Valerio Schiti's pencil art and inked art at various sizes and sundry variant covers.

What's here isn't bad, of course, but it kinda boggles my mind that Marvel still has customers, let alone fans, when the publisher seems to go out of their ways to rip them off with collections like this.

The Civil War II tie-in story arc is three issues, neatly divided into an issue devoted to what the Guardians do before their appearance in Civil War II, an issue devoted to what they were doing immediately before and after the battle and then an issue dealing with the aftermath.

At the opening, the current Guardians line-up--the characters from the movie, plus Angela, Venom Flash Thompson, Benjamin "The Thing" Grimm and Kitty Pryde--are celebrating  a victory that probably occurred in issue #10, and then vote on whether or not they should answer the call for help they received from Carol (Or, as Peter Quill puts it, "Go back to Earth and stick our noses in it"). Rocket, who votes no, is outnumbered, and so they go to Earth.

While various characters have certain concerns about fighting Avengers--although, perhaps as a way of rationalizing their actions in Civil War II proper, none of them are much briefed on who is on what side and why; they just hear Carol's side of things and that Tony is intent on stopping her--the bigger conflict for the Guardians is that Carol tells Peter that Thanos attacked Earth (that part is in the Free Comic Book Day story that is republished here, and in several other collections) and is currently being held prisoner by Carol, and he decides to keep that from Gamora, Drax and the rest of the team, despite the fact that they are going to be murderously, vengefully pissed at him if and when they find out.

In the third, they find out. Just after the Guardians' ship is destroyed, stranding them on Earth, and the team breaks up...after a fight between Carol and Gamora. (I'm not sure what followed in the pages of Guardians of The Galaxy, but the Star-Lord miniseries by Chip Zdarsky was actually pretty great.)

Bendis does a decent impression of the dialogue ticks and character chemistry from the films, replicating it for the Marvel Comics Universe and adding other characters to the mix, and artist Valerio Schiti is great with the character "acting," so even though a great deal of the action in these three issues is the characters talking and bickering, it's fun to look at and read on a panel by panel or page by page basis.

The fourth issue included has but a single page set in the present, in which Rocket eats Earth fast food in a park and laments his lot in life, and then he flashes back to an earlier adventure kinda sorta involving Spider-Man Peter Parker--who is actually unconscious throughout the entire story, while a Super-Skrull impersonates him--that is mostly an excellent showcase for the formidable skills of artist Kevin Maguire. Like Schiti, he is an excellent "actor" of an artist, although his artwork is also much more detailed. It's just a standalone, 20-page story, but it's also a tour de force.

Ms. Marvel Vol. 6: Civil War II
By G. Willow Wilson, Adrian Alphona, Takeshi Miyazawa, Mirka Andolfo and others
136 pages; $17.99
Number of issues tied-to Civil War II: 4 out of 6
Do the events demonstrate that Carol is wrong and Tony is right?: Yes
Side: Team Carol...then Team Tony...then neutral

G. Willow Wilson's Civil War II tie-in arc is sandwiched between two done-in-ones that do a pretty great job of demonstrating the "before" and "after" of the effects of the war. In the before, drawn by original Ms. Marvel artist Adrian Alphona, we see Kamala Khan and her pals from high school competing in a Tri-State Science Fair competition...against a team lead by Miles Morales, aka (the shorter) Spider-Man. In the after, drawn by guest-artist Mirka Andolfo, Kamala leaves America for Karachi, only to learn that as far away as she gets from her problems in Jersey City, she can't get away from being Ms. Marvel...nor from feeling like an outsider.

And in the middle? Wilson eschews showing the events of Civil War II involving Kamala to instead focus on "the home front" of her particular book. Ulysses, who looks an awful lot like Bruno, appears alongside Medusa in the last panels of issue #7 (colorist Ian Herring gives him a blue shirt, which means Ulysses did indeed change t shirts at least once during the civil war), after which point Ms. Marvel is summoned to Captain Marvel's Alpha Flight base and given an assignment: Team with and supervise Becky St. Jude and three other "vetted volunteers" who are going to be acting on Ulysses' intelligence in Jersey City.

These Carol Cadets, as Kamala calls them, are all normal human beings, so she's the only super-powered person among them. They get to crime-fighting right away, and some of it is fairly funny, as when Ms. Marvel grows giant and picks up a guy and tells him not to rob the bodega he's thinking about robbing, before dropping him and rushing off to deal with a more pressing emergency. Pretty much everyone Kamala knows informs her that this whole predictive justice thing is bullshit, her sister-in-law comparing it to the way black people were policed and noting that incarcerating innocent people can essentially turn them into criminals, but Kamala doesn't entirely wake up until it gets personal. A classmate gets citizen-arrested and put in a homemade Guantanamo by the Cadets (who dress like Hitler Youth), Carol snaps at Kamala when she tries to voice her concerns and Bruno gets very badly injured trying to rescue a classmate, leading to the sudden end of his friendship with Ms. Marvel.

In an attempt to fix things, Ms. Marvel conspires with a Canadian ninja to commit a crime Ulysses will predict, and then to reveal to the Cadets, Captain Marvel and Iron Man that it was a fake crime. It doesn't...quite work, but it brings the storyline to an end somewhat satisfactorily, allowing Wilson to focus on the emotional fall-out, as the thing between Kamala and Bruno is much, much bigger than the Civil War II stuff. At least for Ms. Marvel.

Wilson vocalizes concerns about Carol's dumb initiative in ways other Marvel writers don't. For example, Kamala immediately asks Carol if this isn't a little like profiling, which is, you know, bad, and Carol retorts that it isn't profiling an entire group of people, which is bad, but profiling a single individual person. It's the difference between Pakistani-American Muslims with dual citizenship who live in Jersey City and Kamala Khan, I guess (Ironically, in the epilogue issue, Kamala gets pulled aside for extra frisking at the airport because her last name is "Khan"; Wilson seems to acknowledge that Kamala is familiar with the negative aspects of profiling, and is mainly involved with this nonsense at all because it's her hero Carol Danvers who is asking her to be).

Hijinx, the leader of the anti-capitalist Canadian Ninja Syndicate, pretty directly references Minority Report too, which is something I think everyone who talked about Civil War II on the Internet at all did, but I don't recall seeing anyone in the pages of one of these tie-ins do.

The presence of Hijinx doesn't quite sit well with the emotional content, particularly the scenes of Kamala's family history, which Wilson writes and Alphona draws throughout the Takeshi Miyazawa-drawn arc. The presence of these scenes is important, particularly as they show how Kamala is the culmination of a few generations worth of stories, and noting that her family's very presence in America is the indirect result of a real civil war, but the rapid tonal shifts of this story arc, and this trade collection, are a little off-putting.

That said, this is one of the more ambitious of the Civil War II tie-ins, and, with three great artists involved, one of the all-around better-looking.

Spider-Woman: Shifting Gears Vol. 2--Civil War II
By Dennis Hopeless, Javier Rodriguez, Veronica Fish, Tigh Walker and others
112 pages; $15.99
Number of issues tied-to Civil War II: 3 out of 5
Do the events demonstrate that Carol is wrong and Tony is right?: Yes
Side: Reluctantly Team Carol...then anti-Carol...then neutral

The comic book starring Spider-Woman Jessica Drew is in a particularly precarious place regarding the events of Civil War II, because Carol Danvers is Jessica's best friend and a semi-regular supporting character in the series, but, in order for Jessica to side with Carol, it would mean that she would have to take the side of an argument that is clearly wrong and, essentially, choose to side with the bad guys (or, here, the bad good guys) rather than the good guys (the good good guys).

So how does writer Dennis Hopeless address this? By having Jessica trying very, very hard to stay out of it as completely as possible and, when forced to confront the events in the miniseries, using it as a turning point in her relationship with Carol. Unlike so many of the other comics in which a colleague argues with or comes to blows with Carol, this one has real dramatic resonance, because their relationship has been consistently portrayed as so close...not just in past Marvel Comics from over the decades, but in previous issues of this very series by this very creative team.

As with the Ms. Marvel collection discussed above, Spider-Woman Vol. 2 has three issues that tie-in to Civil War II, and they are book-ended by two done-in-ones that do not. In the first, newly back-in-the-game Spider-Woman takes on and takes down Tiger Shark, a villain that rather vastly overpowers her, with the support of her team Ben Urich and The Porcupine. In the last issue, Jessica and her baby son Gerry meet The Porcupine and his daughter Kalie on the beach, where Porcupine battles The Sandman.

The Civil War II tie-in comes in three distinct phases. In the first issue of these, Jessica, Roger, Ben and Gerry are in Canada, investigating the most recent outbreak of Wendigos. Jessica is rather pointedly ignoring Carol's repeated phone calls trying to sell her on the idea of "predictive justice", and focusing on her detective work provides a pretty great excuse. Carol eventually just shows up in person to solve the case for Team Spider-Woman--well, to help them beat down all the Wendigos--in order to finally make the pitch face-to-face. Jessica still isn't convinced, but Carol doesn't want her on Team Carol at this point; she just wants her detective team to follow-up on a bunch of the smaller Ulysses predictions, in order to make sure they check out.

The next issue follows Spider-Woman and her boys as they travel the country--and beyond!--checking on Ulysses' predictions (none of the ones that appear in other comics), and Spider-Woman is forced to admit that the Inhuman future predictor is seemingly batting a thousand and there may be something to predictive justice after all. Unfortunately, she's in the process of making that phone call to Carol just as news breaks that Hawkeye Clint Barton has just shot Bruce Banner in the head with an arrow, killing him.

The final installment has a pretty enraged Jessica--one friend killed another friend because of events set in motion by her best friend, after all--trying to investigate what the fuck exactly happened and why, ultimately leading her into conflict with Carol, who basically just absorbs all of Jessica's blows and insults in her Alpha Flight base, until Jessica's rage is spent and she tells Carol off, saying that they are over.

The major problem with Civil War II was always that Carol is so clearly wrong all the time, but writer Dennis Hopeless does a fine job of first making a case for why Carol might believe in Ulysses' powers--that is, Spider-Woman confirming that they are all coming true so far--and then focusing on the drama of friends fighting, rather than just random superheroes fighting one another. It's extremely effective, in large part because Hopeless has already demonstrated how tight Carol and Jessica are, and also because the light, comedic tone of the book makes the emotional content of the Civil War II tie-in such a sharp departure. It's not exactly a 180-degree turn, but the book definitely shifts sharply, and it does so purposefully.

Every nice thing I've ever said about pencil artist Javier Rodriguez still applies here. His artwork is fantastic, his story-telling superlative and his layouts consistently clever and engaging. He pencils the first two of these five issues, with Alvaro Lopez handling the inks. Rodirguez does the layouts for the third issue, while Veronica Fish finishes it. Then Fish handles the next issue solo. The fifth and final of these is a collaboration between Tigh Walker, who is credited simply with "layouts," and colorist Rachelle Rosenberg.

Whether serendipity or planning, it all works out quite well, as the Rodriguez/Fish collaboration coming between the Rodirguez-penciled issues and the Fish-drawn one eases the reader into the transition nicely, to the point that I barely noticed it. The Walker/Rosenberg issue is a stylistic departure, but the art is still great and the story itself is a departure. While the others may have been connected, this one is literally about Jessica taking a day off--the only mention of the events of the previous issue is when she turns off the TV with a "Nobody. Cares." when Captain Marvel appears on it--and she stays in plain clothes while Roger suits up as The Porcupine to battle a Spider-Man villain far higher on the rogue's gallery ratings that he is.

In the Wendigo issue, Spider-Woman sports a cool white and powder-blue version of her costume, and when she tries to infiltrate Alpha Flight, she has a gray and black "stealth" version of her costume. I liked them both a lot.

The Totally Awesome Hulk Vol. 2: Civil War II
By Greg Pak, Alan Davis, Mahmud Asrar, Mike Del Mundo and others
136 pages; $17.99
Number of issues tied-to Civil War II: 4 out of 6
Do the events demonstrate that Carol is wrong and Tony is right?: Inconclusive
Side: Netural-ish

Bruce Banner, the original Incredible Hulk, is one of the three major collateral damage characters in Civil War II, along with War Machine James Rhodes and, to a lesser extent, Banner's own cousin, She-Hulk, the latter of whom is merely horribly wounded and then changed forever (temporarily), rather than outright killed off like the other two.

Naturally then, Marvel's Hulk book--The Totally Awesome Hulk, starring teen genius Amadeus Cho--is practically forced to comment in a major way on the events of Civil War II. The problem for writer Greg Pak is that the events of Civil War II completely contradict those of earlier issues of Totally Awesome Hulk, of which there were only six before those collected here. The events of Civil War II contradict those of Hulk so much, in fact, that it seems Bendis had not even read Banner's latest appearances before writing him into Civil War II, or at least been, you know, told about them in enough detail to fake like he had.

So, to review, there was a catastrophic nuclear meltdown occurring off the coast of Africa, threatening to lives of millions on the continent. Bruce Banner turned into The Hulk and leapt into action, planning to absorb all of the radiation himself. Unfortunately, the nuclear energy and his own gamma energy reacted in some comic book science-y way that turned the Hulk himself into the meltdown, and so the assembled super-scientists were preparing to teleport him to the Negative Zone so that he could explode there without killing quite so many...probably because Iron Man didn't have a rocket all prepped and ready to shoot him off into space instead.

Amadeus Cho shows up and, using his own super-science brain, concocts a way to not only save the day, but also permanently cure Banner from being The Hulk...and, shortly thereafter, Cho becomes the new Hulk himself. ("Trade secret," he tells Banner when asked how he accomplished this feat).

But in Civil War II, the future-predicting Inhuman Ulysses has a vision of The Hulk killing all the other Marvels, and when Captain Marvel, Iron Man and a who's who of the Marvel Universe confront Banner en masse, they discover that he has been recklessly experimenting on himself in an attempt to cure himself of ever being the Hulk again which, um, Cho had already done. Months ago. And then Hawkeye Clint Barton shot Banner to death with an arrow because to his keen eyes it looked like Banner was about to transform. That shouldn't be possible, of course--either the fact that Banner was about to transform or that he could be killed by an arrow in the head--but it was then revealed by Bendis that at some point in the past Banner had asked Hawkeye to kill him with a specially-prepared arrow if it seemed like he was going to become The Hulk again. I don't know. It was all very dumb.

So that's what Pak got to clean up. For the most part, in Civil War II and pretty much any other Marvel book, the two stories contradicting each other so directly could be dealt with by frantic hand-waving, and generous readers just forgiving it as the sort of thing that happens in big, dumb superhero comics events like this (Civil War II required an extremely generous readership, really). Pak doesn't have that luxury, though, as readers of Totally Awesome Hulk are the (unfortunately small) sub-set of Marvel readers who would realize and perhaps even care how big the gulf between the Banner-related events of Civil War II and where we last saw Banner really was.

Pak addresses the problem mainly by ignoring it altogether. In the six-issues of the title collected here, two feature Banner, Cho and what could be called "The Hulk Family," while the next four pick up after the Hulk-related events of Civil War II. It's a rather unconvincing solution, but read all on its own, it works, and the writing and the art on all six of these issues is pretty damn good.

The two-part storyline running through #7 and #8 is illustrated by Alan Davis and Mark Farmer, a superior art team whose presence here raises the question of why they are so infrequently seen on mainstream superhero comics these days. I assume, and hope, it is by choice. It's hard to imagine there are editors looking at these guys' work and thinking they are too old or out-of-style or something. The story-telling is impeccable. The first of these issues is basically a Banner solo story, as he wanders about the world, constantly surprised by the fact that he is finally Hulk-free. At one point, Cho rescues him from a fight--over a stolen shirt, which is actually kind of funny--and recaps recent history to him before bounding away. At another, Iron Man confronts him, and asks him about his issues, as it seems like he just might be trying to kill himself.

In the second half, Cho finds Banner burning up with fever, and takes him to an old Hulk hide-out in the desert, where he and his little sister Maddy try to nurse him back to health. Maddy calls She-Hulk and Rick Jones, and they all spend some quiet time together, ultimately focusing not just on Bruce's wellness and unusual (for him) happiness, but an emerging problem with Cho's more id-driven  version of a Hulk.

The eleventh issue skips ahead, and opens with a slightly inaccurate recap page, saying that Amadeus has just heard the news about Hawkeye having "executed" Banner. In reality, the story picks up after Barton was acquitted of the crime and walked away a free man--one of those many things you just have to ignore about Civil War II is that it includes the world's fastest, least-realistic murder trial, which seems all the speedier given that it would have to be, in the world of the Marvel Universe, the trial of century: A founding Avenger, killed by another long-time Avenger, as part of some weird suicide/murder pact, over vague reasons involving bleeding-edge science and...untestable, bio-organic super-powers exhibited by a mutant-esque minority group...? It takes our justice system years and years to decide issues regarding the sale of wedding cakes to same-sex couples, but Hawkeye is cleared of murder in weeks, if not days.

Anyway, Cho is in the fetal position in a Cleveland hotel with Maddy, while Carol Danvers, Captain America Steve Rogers and a whole bunch of armored, armed, flying SHIELD agents show up with weapons pointed at him to ask him not to get mad or anything (Apparently, Danvers didn't learn anything from the Banner Hulk episode). The bulk of this issue is devoted to their stand-off, although towards the end Cho does Hulk out and start leaping towards Barton, with Carol and her then-ally The Black Panther keeping close watch over him. Michael Del Mundo draws this issue, which means there are three in a row that are pretty spectacular-looking. Del Mundo's style looks little like Davis', of course, and is highly-painterly; it's a little unusual here for how much it focuses on normal people in conversation. Cho spends more time as himself than he does as The Hulk.

Del Mundo's final image of the issue, of the Panther in a suit of adorable kitty cat-themed battle armor, is amazing:

And, finally, in the last three issues we get to the heroes-fighting-one-another aspect of the event series. T'Challa decides to take point on keeping Cho away from Barton, violently if it comes to that. It comes to that, although whose fault their clash ultimately is could be up for debate. It becomes a moot point when Maddy gets in over her head fighting the monster she would prefer Cho focus on instead of confronting Barton, and T'Challa and Cho have to team-up to save her...although she ends up saving both of them from either having to sacrifice themselves or from doing something terrible to the other.

It is, perhaps, strange that Pak has T'Challa step up to take on Cho instead of using Carol in that role, as Carol was used as the heavy in most of the Civil War II tie-in books, and, as we know, T'Challa eventually turns on her when he decides she's taken things too far. On the other hand, the fact that he wasn't used quite as often in the role of the antagonist made his presence here seem a little more refreshing, and the fact that he was there at the beginning of Cho's Hulk career and is, like Cho, a super-scientist, makes him a more fitting opponent.

Also, it allowed first Del Mundo and then Mahmud Asrar to draw the cat-themed Hulkbuster armor.

The Ultimates: Omniversal Vol. 2--Civil War II
By Al Ewing, Kenneth Rocafort, Djibril Morissette and others
136 pages; $17.99
Number of issues tied-to Civil War II: 6 out of 6
Do the events demonstrate that Carol is wrong and Tony is right?: Kinda complicated here, but the events demonstrate that Carol is wrong more than that Tony is right.
Side: The Ultimates all start on Team Carol...and then they gradually splinter

As one of the books starring one of Captain Marvel's several superhero teams, The Ultimates was in a somewhat difficult position for the events of Civil War II. Because Brian Michael Bendis made Carol so unequivocally the bad guy of the main event series, Ultimates writer Al Ewing has to meet the challenge of making Carol and her position sympathetic, while simultaneously explaining why the rest of her team follows what is pretty clearly a bad idea for so long, as well as foreshadowing the eventual cleavage in the team which, in Civil War II proper, happens more or less all of a sudden.

Ewing pulls it off pretty well. From the very first issue, there are pretty dramatic differences between several members of the Ultimates line-up--Captain Marvel Carol Danvers, former Captain Marvel Monica "Spectrum" Rambeau, The Blue Marvel, The Black Panther and Ms. America. The first and most significant of these is between The Blue Marvel and The Panther, over how to deal with the captive Anti-Man. After the introduction of Ulysses, there are disagreements about how to use predictive justice and how far to go, with everyone eventually turning on Carol to some extent--only to be interrupted by a greater threat.

The events of Civil War II wind in and out of the narrative, although Ewing mostly concentrates on what happens between those events, and how the members of the team react to them, and view Carol's place in them. So in the first issue, we see Project PEGASUS working on a cosmic cube initiative, which draws the attention of Thanos. In the second, we see the team preparing for the deadly fight with him shown in the pages of Civil War II, and then the aftermath. In the other issues, Blue Marvel begins to question Carol's use of Ulysses' powers in the cases of Hawkeye's murder of Bruce Banner and her rendition of the banking lady with the empty briefcase.

The team does finally come to blows, with America grabbing a chair and hitting Carol with it while the adults all argue with words, but that fight is pre-empted by Thanos' escape from his cell in the basement of their headquarters. The final issue is sort of an epilogue, showing where the various Ultimate end up after the events of Civil War II. Essentially the team is dissolved and all five have gone their separate ways, with Carol having made up with everyone except T'Challa.

Their break-up obviously isn't meant to be permanent. While the final issue in this collection is the final issue of Ewing and company's 12-issue run on the series, it was immediately relaunched with Ultimates 2 #1, picking up on the cliffhanger ending of the last pages of this particular collection. I guess this is a pretty salient example of how screwed up Marvel is...and was at this point. Instead of being a single, 24-issue series, the book ran for 12 issues as The Ultimates and 12 as The Utimates 2...ending with #100, not #12, because...well, who knows why.

The premise for the series was that of a pro-active super-team, a done-to-death idea, yes, but Ewing's take was not to put them forward as the sort of extra-aggressive super-team that goes out looking for trouble, but which finds unsolveable cosmic problems, and then solves them. In that respect, they're a bit of a mix of The Fantastic Four and The Avengers (In fact, the first volume of the series seems to have been devoted to confronting Galactus, who appears occasionally in this volume).

The official artist of the series was Kenneth Rocafort, whose layouts are sometimes pretty strange, and he has a weird habit of drawing weird, brightly-colored geometric patterns that evoke old-school Trapper Keeper art to me and...don't really seem to serve the particular story in anyway. They must just be some personal style flourish, as he did the same with his DC Comics work. He can't keep up with the accelerated, more-than-monthly schedule, as few artists seem able to do, so Djibril Morrissette fills in quite a bit, drawing parts of three issues that Rocafort couldn't. Christina Ward draws the final issue as a fill-in artist.

While the ins and outs of the predictive justice business and the other Ultimates' allegiance to and/or rebellion against Carol meets the Civil War II plot requirements, perhaps the most satisfying aspect is that it fleshes out Thanos' role. The character is supposed to be such a threat to the Marvel Universe that his rather random popping in just to kill War Machine in an earlier chapter and then wandering out of the story felt kind of out-of-left field. Here he's given motivation, is presented as a serious threat and problem and something of an ongoing one, necessitating a rematch with a handful of the characters who were present at the early Civil War II fight.

I hate that the other Ultimates call America "Mac." It doesn't make sense to me.


***********************

Here's the first post I wrote on Marvel's many,  many Civil War II tie-in collections. Here's my post about Civil War II itself. And here's my review of Civil War II: Choosing Sides. Taken all together, these four posts and, I don't know, four million words may seem like a pretty damn thorough accounting of the Civil War II event, but I still didn't cover everything. From what I can figure out from the Internet, there's still Civil War II: Fallout, Civil War II: Kingpin and Squadron Supreme: Civil War II, plus a whole bunch of shorter stories that didn't end up collected in trades with the words "Civil War II" in their titles, but even I have my limits...

I had thought about trying to cover all the Secret Empire tie-ins, or at least as many as I could stand to read, but I think trying to read all the Civil War II tie-ins taught me to never, ever try something like this again.

Marvel's Civil War II tie-ins: There sure are a lot of these things

Michael Cho

Well, I've read and written probably far too many words on Civil War II, Brian Michael Bendis, David Marquez, Justin Ponsor and company's big event series pitting Captain Marvel Carol Danvers and Iron Man Tony Stark into deadly conflict over whether or not to use a new character's fortune-telling superpower, should I also read and write about all the tie-ins...? Probably not! But I did anyway. Please note that this is not a complete list of all the tie-ins; there are a lot more than this, but these are the ones I found that I was interested in reading. I may come back for a follow-up if it should turn out that I missed some good ones. In the mean time...

Agents of SHIELD Vol. 2: Under New Management
By Marc Guggenheim, German Peralta, Ario Anindito, Garry Brown and others
112 pages; $15.99
Number of issues tied-to Civil War II: 5 out of 5
Do the events demonstrate that Carol is wrong and Tony is right?: Yes
Side: Neutral-ish

This trade paperback collects the last four issues of the ten-issue Agents of SHIELD comic book series, itself the relaunched version of the 12-issue SHIELD series. The remit seems to have been to chronicle the adventures of the Marvel Universe versions of the characters from the TV show of the same name, but I guess there wasn't enough interest in that particular concept among Marvel comics readers/buyers to keep it going for long. Hell, this trade collects almost the entire second half of the series, and many of those characters play fairly small, supporting roles (One even spends the majority of this collection unconscious in a coma). The main focus is on Agent Coulson and how the events of Civil War II impact him and his career.

While the cover indicates these agents of SHIELD are pretty firmly on Team Carol--which would make sense, given that SHIELD Commander Maria Hill is--it's a bit of a fake-out. In the first issue, Hill does indeed sic them on Iron Man, who, we are told, has just kidnapped Ulysses from New Atillan. Contrary to the events of Civil War II and common sense, in this story Iron Man leaves Ulysses unattended for a while to set up a trap for Coulson and company, so he can make his pitch to Coulson about how this whole future profiling thing is, beyond being morally wrong, just plain dumb, and doesn't really work. Coulson agrees, so Hill fires him.

Having heard Iron Man's pitch, Coulson, who has now gone solo and gone rogue, wants to hear Captain Marvel's, but she's not returning his calls, so he sneaks into her office on a satellite, reads some files about a prediction that indicates Daredevil is going to get killed by The Wrecking Crew and, in the first of many instances of this very thing happening (in the books reviewed in this particular post, if not chronologically), Carol's attempts to prevent a vision from happening actually causes it to happen. The only thing that stopped the vision from coming true here was Coulson being present to save DD from impalement.

In the final two issues, writer Marc Guggenheim steps away from the events of Civil War II somewhat in order to wrap up the various plotlines in his ending series, but the events of those tie-in issues feed into the various resolutions. Having not read the first six issues of the series, I can't tell how well these four actually wrap it all up, or if the demands of the crossover derailed the overall plotting, but it sure seems like Guggenheim managed to incorporate Civil War II pretty well, although, for the most part, the characters who aren't Coulson have relatively little to do.

I was surprised to find this collection included the 30-page one-shot special Civil War II: The Accused #1. For the life of me I couldn't figure out why Marvel saw fit to stick it in here of all places (it's a pretty direct tie-in to Civil War II, and doesn't feature so much as a cameo from any of the characters in Agents of SHIELD). It took me a bit to figure out who the creators were, but that explained it (I guess): Guggenheim also wrote The Accused, so in that respect it kinda sorta belongs in a trade collecting other Guggenheim-written Civil War II tie-ins.

Essentially a Daredevil story, it opens with a splash page of Hawkeye Clint Barton surrendering after killing Bruce Banner in Civil War II #3 and proceeds to tell the story of the trial that followed. Guggenheim answers any and all practical questions one might have about the trial, which Brian Michael Bendis didn't even feint toward caring about, including whether Matt Murdock was an attorney for the prosecution or the defense (the former), why on Earth Murdock was involved at all and how such a high-profile murder trial got to trial pretty much overnight (I'm still not clear on why it was being prosecuted in New York City, but whatever).

As a Daredevil story, and one with more lawyering than Daredevil-ing, it's a fine one, and Guggenheim manages to expand on the events of the Civil War II issue without really repeating anything from them, given the strange way in which Bendis formatted his script for that issue, which included a bunch of jumps back and forth between the confrontation between the superheroes and Banner and Carol, Tony, Clint and Matt's words in court. Adding a wrinkle to the proceedings is a government conspiracy to ensure that Clint is found guilty, so that the feds can reinstate the Superhero Registration Act (the thing that lead to the warring in the original Civil War series), but Murdock manages to put the kibosh on that.

I can't make sense of the credits enough to be sure if The Accused was drawn by Ramon Bachs and Garry Brown, or just Brown, but I really liked the art, regardless. There's a lot of ink on the pages, and most of the mask-less scenes look appropriately dirty, gritty and even somewhat ugly, while when Murdock does put on a mask and becomes Daredevil, everything looks smoother and more streamlined.

All-New, All-Different Avengers Vol. 3: Civil War II
By Mark Waid, Adam Kubert and others
112 pages; $15.99
Number of issues tied-to Civil War II: 3 out of 4
Do the events demonstrate that Carol is wrong and Tony is right?: No
Side: Neutral (although most of the line-up ultimately join Team Tony for the fight scene in the Civil War II, while the others just sit the fight out)

Despite the relatively large role that members of this Avengers team play in the main series--this is Tony Stark's Avengers team, after all, and it includes Spider-Man Miles Morales--the three regular issues of All-New, All-Different Avengers collected herein stick to the fringes of the conflict, amounting to a series of three solo stories that all at least touch on the conflict.

In the first, The Vision plays Go with Ulysses, while asking him about the Baby Hitler dilemma, and he then goes off to kill Baby Kang The Conqueror (Interestingly, at least to me, this issues shows that Captain Marvel had The Black Panther and Spider-Man Peter Parker build a special chamber they stuff Ulysses in for the purposes of getting him to spit out prophecies faster. This seems in contrast with the main series, and this is the first I've seen of Parker playing an active role in the events. After the Celestial Destructor wrap party, he all but disappeared from Civil War II, only appearing at home watching the big fight on TV.)

The second, starring The Wasps and Jarvis, is even more limited in its connectivity. The trio watch vague news coverage of a battle between Captain Marvel and Iron Man, and the trial of Clint Barton for murdering Bruce Banner, and Wasp II freaks out a little at her disillusionment of the very thought of superheroes fighting other superheroes (Honey, this is the Marvel Universe, not the DC Universe; they've been doing this since Day One). She tries to fitfully science a solution to the problem before Wasp I and Jarvis calm her down and assure her this isn't a science problem so much as a human problem.

Finally, in the third, Thor visits Heimdall on the rainbow bridge, since Heimdall can see the future as well. He tells her a story about a time during the earliest days of The Avengers when the Odinson sought him out, and asked him whether or not they should intervene in a war between Doctor Doom's Latveria and a neighboring country, based on his visions of the future. They decided to do so, and it didn't go all that well for them. Mark Waid and Adam Kubert do a kinda neat trick in this story, with the framing sequence told in normal fashion, but the entirety of the flashback being formatted sideways, so that a reader would need to turn the book and read it vertically rather than horizontally.

That accounts for the first 60 pages of the 112-page book. The rest? That would be the All-New, All-Different Avengers Annual #1, the one devoted to guest-creators illustrating Ms. Marvel's fan-fiction (and I don't know, maybe the table of contents and some pages of variant covers?). That's a fun issue, which I covered elsewhere previously.

All-New Wolverine Vol. 2: Civil War II*
By Tom Taylor, Marcio Takara, Ig Guara and others
144 pages; $19.99
Number of issues tied-to Civil War II: Three out of six
Do the events demonstrate that Carol is wrong and Tony is right?: Yes
Side: Team Leave Us Out of It (after fighting against the forces of Team Carol)

The first issue herein is a rather unlikely team-up with Squirrel Girl, who shows up on the All-New Wolverine's doorstep in the middle of the night, holding an actual wolverine. His name is Jonathan, and Squirrel Girl thought he would be needed because she mistakenly thought that Wolverine could communicate with wolverines the way she communicates with squirrels. It was an honest mistake, and one that gives Laura and her little clone sister Gabby a pet wolverine.

Why is Squirrel Girl there at all? Well, it seems that Laura has "wronged the squirrel world," and S.G. wants her to make amends, so the two go off on an adventure to rescue a squirrel together. Though there's obviously a lot of silliness to it, writer Tom Taylor uses this issue to resolve the issue of whether Laura and Gabby are going to remain together or not, which ultimately allows him to demonstrate a way in which the all-new Wolverine is superior to the previous model...or at least trying to behave in the way she wished he had when he was still alive.

That's followed by two issues of Laura and Gabby going up against one of the greatest antagonists in the Marvel Universe: Mr. Fin Fang Foom. It seems things go wrong during the sale of a very mysterious, very deadly weapon of mass destruction, which turns out to be what Gabby repeatedly, alliteratively refers to as "Fin Fang Pheromone," a liquid capable of drawing FFF to a target.

Laura is recruited by SHIELD (and Gabby tags along) because the first Wolverine they sent in ended up in the belly of the beast. So Laura goes inside the giant dragon to rescue the older, futuristic, alternate dimensional version of the man she was cloned from, Logan from Old Man Logan.

Artist Marcio Takara has a really great panel set inside Fin Fang Foom, in which Laura, up to her knees in his stomach acid, strikes the same, somewhat iconic pose that the original Wolverine struck in that old issue of Uncanny X-Men, where he emerges from the sewer water and looks up, talking out loud to the not-present Hellfire Club about how they've taken their best shot and now he's gonna take his.

Captain Marvel Carol Danvers and Iron Man Tony Stark, both playing remarkably nice for two pals about to engage in a civil war in a month or so's time after the events of this story arc, arrive to help out, but ultimately the only way to save SHIELD's helicarrier and New York from the Fin Fang Pheromone-crazed Fin Fang Foom involves off-panel nudity and a jetpack. (Speaking of nudity, I notice Fin Fang Foom is going commando throughout this entire adventure. It may be more realistic for a giant, humanoid dragon monster to not wear giant tiny purple shorts, but it still looks off to me.)

Takara draws all three of these issues. That's followed by the Civil War II tie-in arc, drawn by pencil artist Ig Guara and three inkers. Old Man Logan has now joined the cast, having been dragged back to Laura and Gabby's apartment to recover from having his lower half skeletonized by his time being semi-digested in Fin Fang Foom's stomach acid (Miraculously, not only does his flesh grow back, but apparently his healing factor also regrew his jeans, boots and belt!).

The future-predicting Inhuman Ulysses has a vision in his office or cell or dark room at the Triskelion. Here's how he words it:

Wolverine. And an old man. A young girl. Flying through the air. And...I saw an angel? And screaming. And blood. A whole lot of blood.

Yeesh. Those little cryptic snippets are the basis upon which Captain Marvel and the other heroes siding with her take violent action, often against their peers? Seems a like playing the stock market or formulating national foreign policy based on Nostradamus or a few random verses of the Book of Revelation.

It's apparently enough for Maria Hill to mobilize a Captain America Steve Rogers-lead strike force to storm Laura's apartment and ask to detain The Notorious OML, on the belief that he's going to kill Gabby. Complicating matters further is the fact that he does kill Gabby in his own timeline, although as has been repeatedly established in his own book and the the X-books, his future is an alternate one, and things happen/happened/will happen quite differently in that world than they do/have/will in this one.

So the logistics of this story are really kind of a mess, with Captain America and SHIELD and OML all operating on visions and/or memories of the future, and fighting each other. Laura and Gabby are therefore caught in the middle of what has turned out to be a self-fulfilling prophecy (It turns out that if you expect Logan might commit a violent act upon those around him, sending a SHIELD SWAT team to fill him full of drug-tipped darts and a Captain America to smack him around and speechify might actually provoke him into violence, rather than deescalate the situation. Surely Team Carol will learn their lesson, and they won't make this exact same mistake over and over and over again!).

The arc ends with Laura telling Cap and SHIELD off, by essentially calling the entire premise of Civil War II idiotic, and forcefully saying she and Gabby would prefer to be left out of the rest of the crossover, thank you very much. Based on the logic of SHIELD here, it's hard to disagree; as with the original Civil War, one side is clearly being set-up as the wrong side, and there seems to be even fewer pains taken to articulate an argument for the Captain Marvel-lead side for acting in anyway that could conceivably be seen as "right," no matter how much one squints or tilts one's head (Interestingly, the original Civil War made Iron Man look like an evil and/or ignorant villain just prior to his big screen debut in his first film, while Civil War II is doing the same to Captain Marvel just prior to her big screen debut in her first film).

Which isn't to say there aren't moments in the arc. Burglars breaking into Laura's apartment, only to find Gabby, two Wolverines and an actual wolverine waiting for them was kind of funny, and Gabby calling Old Man Logan "her interdimensional dystopian future grandpa" was kind of cute. Taylor and his artistic collaborators continue to find the perfect balance between silly normal girl and usually hidden killer with Gabby, who is a fun character...except when that darkness slips out for a panel or two.

Captain America: Sam Wilson Vol. 3--Civil War II
By Nick Spencer, Daniel Acuna, Angel Unzueta, Cris Peter and others
112 pages; $15.99
Number of issues tied to Civil War II: 2 out of 5
Do the events demonstrate that Tony is right and Carol is wrong?: No
Side: Team Tony

Nick Spencer is a rather popular comic book writer to complain about these days, as a lot of folks seem to have very, very strong feelings about the current direction of the Captain America franchise, but often lost in those conversations is the fact that Nick Spencer is a very, very good comic book writer, and his Captain America comics, at least the Sam Wilson ones that I have read to date, have all been excellent ones.

The very thing that I've seen some readers complain about online, that Spencer's comics contain politics, is one of the things I like about them (and arguing that a comic book character who was created to argue a particular political position--that is, United States involvement in World War II--shouldn't be political is kind of idiotic). After all, it's not like Spencer is writing diatribes, or twisting the characters to suit transparent ideological positions of his that can't be sustained by the characters themselves. Or, worse, that his comics are boring. They're not. They're highly entertaining, they're incredibly engaging and, yes, they do deal with politics.

Superhero shared universes as old and as well-stocked as the Marvel Universe are, in fact, ideally suited to political comics. I mean, it's awfully helpful that if you're writing a pop culture narrative and you need a character to represent, say, black rage, there is already a pre-existing black character whose actual name is quite literally Rage. Short of political cartooning, wherein the artist might scrawl the word "Rage" across a character's chest in the tableau, you can't really beat that.

Like several other of the series mentioned in this particular post, Civil War II seemed to come up on Captain America: Sam Wilson awfully fast, as the book was still dealing with the fall-out of its previous storyline, a smaller-scale inter-book crossover, in the issue just before the Civil War II tying-in takes place. The first issue collected herein deals with Standoff fallout.

Two issues deal rather directly with Civil War II. The majority of #10 revolves around James Rhodes' funeral, with a kind of neat scene where Sam meets with many of Marvel's most prominent black superheroes: Sam's current girlfriend Misty Knight, Black Panther, Luke Cage, Storm, Doctor Voodoo, Spectrum and Nick Fury (Blade is busy but sends his regards, Nick Fury Jr. isn't sure if he should be there or not, considering how new he is at it). That's followed by Sam's eulogy, which touches on a fairly meta idea about the importance of a black man stepping into Iron Man's legacy (it was a relatively long time ago, in the comics, but Rhodes was Iron Man before he was War Machine), and he even discusses why Rhodes kept it secret at first.

It's a pretty good issue, all around, although because I call Mike Deodato out for it later, I will point out here that artist Angel Unzueta and colorist Cris Peter do a poor job on the crowd scenes at the church, rendering a weird, inorganic-looking mass of beige figures crowding the streets outside of the church and, worse, lining up a crowd of what look like golems or gingerbread mannequins in folding chairs behind the fully colored superheroes in one scene.

The following issue, the one in which Daniel Acuna takes over as artist (and sticks around for the rest of the collection), has both Iron Man and Captain Marvel making their respective pitches to Sam during different team-ups. Spencer has Sam see what Ulysses is doing for himself fairly quickly into the conversations, and he boils it down to a single thing a lot quicker than Bendis manages: It's profiling. He does allow Carol and Tony to both make convincing enough sounding arguments, though, and even allows Carol to say what sounds a bit like a right wing talking point regarding political correctness getting in the way of getting things done these days, but she's also allowed to be self-aware of it while making it: "So if I've gotta be the bad guy here, the one that takes the necessary but scorened action, fine--"

Sam's response?

I admire your spine, Carol. I really do. Even when I think your'e marching in the wrong direction--and I definitely think that's the case here.

But hey, if it's any comfort-- --I do hate being on his side.

And, to Tony, Sam flies away with an "Even when you're right, you're an $@#!"

The rest of the collection involves a private, over-zealous police force that seems to be a little too aggressive in its profiling of minorities, The Americops, and Rage and Sam's doomed attempt to try to find a middle-ground between the aggressive, profiling, militant police tactics and Rage's aggressive, vigilante violence. As is usually the case for poor Sam, it doesn't really work out well for him, and he ends up in a fight, and looking bad in the court of public opinion. His solution to that particular problem, which involves an appearance by Night Nurse, is to institute a sort of bird-powered superhero analogy to body cameras.

Also, USAgent appears to fight Sam and try to take back the shield, and after their fight scenes, which interrupt the other fight scenes, we see that something sinister and Secret Empire-y is apparently going on, but that's something for the next line-wide crossover.

Captain Marvel Vol. 2: Civil War II
By Ruth Fletcher Gage, Christos Gage, Kris Anka, Marco Failla and others
120 pages; $16.99
Number of issues tied to Civil War II: 5 of 5
Do the events demonstrate that Tony is right and Carol is wrong?: No (In fact, it does a lot of work to not make Carol look like a boorish lunatic)
Side: Team Carol (obviously)

If the choice between Captain Marvel Carol Danvers and Iron Man Tony Stark were to be made based solely on the quality of the collection of their series tied to Civil War II, then it's no contest: Team Carol all the way. I was actually pretty surprised by the quality of this book, which benefits from some great art by the like of Kris Anka and others, and by the extent to which it ties into the event series. While the majority of these issues take place in and around Carol's Alpha Flight base and her missions with Alpha Flight, during which she never encounters Tony or the majority of the superhuman community, it spans the story arc of the event series, from her spending time with the soon-to-be-late James Rhodes to her apparent post-Obama meeting in Civil War II #8.

It also manages to tell something of a distinct story of its own, complete with its own conflict and villain that runs parallel to the series in the sub-title, and that is based in the pre-existent elements of the book.

Part of the reason I was so surprised by the quality of this trade was my complete lack of interest in this particular Captain Marvel as a character (which is maybe Brian Michael Bendis' fault? I think he wrote the vast majority of Carol Danvers appearances I have read, mostly during the time she was still going by "Ms. Marvel") and her somewhat awkward current status quo, which seems to have appropriated elements of Canadian X-Men Alpha Flight and SWORD (introduced in Joss Whedon's short Astonishing X-Men run). As this collection is opening, she's repairing Alpha Flight Station, where Alpha Flight's Puck, Sasquatch and Aurora, SWORD's Abigail Brand and a bunch of no-name characters in matching Alpha Flight uniforms work with her as the first line of defense against hostile alien invaders.

She answers to what looks like a the ways and means committee of the Galactic Republic's senate from the Star Wars prequels, with holograms of various leaders from Earth and space appearing with their official-looking podiums in a big, black room to occasionally berate her. These include some dashing, handsome Canadian guy, long-time Marvel Universe bureaucrat Henry Gyrich and The Black Panther, who is also on Carol's superhero team, The Ultimates.

Again, that set-up isn't the least big appealing, but I'll be damned if the two people named Gage who write this book don't make it work, and do a damn fine job of showing Carol's reactions to the big events of Civil War II here in a way that seem organic to her worldview. They even do a pretty great job of showing Black Panther's evolving understanding of Ulysses and his visions, with T'Challa expressing his concerns to her fairly early, and Carol doing a great deal of work to address those concerns going forward, because she shares them (In the main series, of course, T'Challa pretty much just turns on a dime from Team Carol to Team Tony, and Carol is generally portrayed as completely uncaring of any potential downsides to policing the future based on the predictions of a new super-person).

One of Anka's consistently great covers

Despite the Anka's consistently great covers, which often depict Iron Man and other events from Civil War II, these issues stick mainly to their supporting cast. Various characters from Team Carol, particularly among The Ultimates and early allies that would later side with Tony like Ms. Marvel and Spider-Man Miles Morales, appear in very small roles, akin to cameos, basically. She has a long-ish talk with Hawkeye Clint Barton after having arrested him for killing Bruce Banner, and there's a scene where Magneto floats by to posture, but we don't see her ever come to blows with Iron Man here, or try to arrest Miles or any of that jazz.

Civil War II: Amazing Spider-Man
By Christos Gage, Travel Foreman, Dan Slott and others
120 pages; $15.99
Number of issues tied to Civil War II: 4 of 6
Do the events demonstrate that Tony is right and Carol is wrong?: Sorta
Side: Team Carol

What side Spider-Man Peter Parker is on is actually kind of important, as he's one of the relatively few moral characters of the Marvel Universe, whose allegiances and alliances telegraph to readers who is right and who is wrong. That's why he played such an important role in the original Civil War; his switching from Iron Man's side to Captain America's being something of a turning point to signal that Tony Stark and company had finally crossed a line.

He was actually largely absent from the main Civil War II series, however. He gets a good zinger at Tony's expense in the first issue, and then seemingly sits the rest of the "war" out, watching the battle unfold on TV rather than participating (Nevertheless, Marvel put him on the cover of both the first issue and, weirdly, on the cover of Civil War II #4). So it's up to Gage to explain whose side Spidey is on and why, and he did so not in the pages of Amazing Spider-Man, which apparently sold well enough that it didn't have to tie-in to the event, but in a stand-alone miniseries.

The series is set mainly in the earliest parts of the Civil War II timeline, apparently just after Ulysses moved in with The Inhumans. Spidey asks his best friend Johnny Storm, who lives with The Inhumans while Reed and Sue are enjoying their no doubt temporary retirement, if he can spend some time with Ulysses to get an idea of how his powers work. While showing Ulysses around Parker Industries' Manhattan HQ--Man, I haven't read ASM in so long, I didn't quite realize how hard they were pushing this Spider-Man-as-old school-Iron Man thing, complete with Spidey posing as Peter's employee--Ulysses has a vision, of Spider-Man fighting Clayton Cole, a former sound-based villain named Clash who is now a researcher at the company.

This naturally leads Spider-Man to start looking at Cole for warning signs, which just as naturally pushes him closer to climbing back into his old Clash suit to fight Spider-Man ("Oh, man," Spidey says to himself, "I did not just self-fulfilling-prophecy myself"). Gage does a pretty great job of writing Cole as a sympathetic character, spending the better part of an issue showing how he just can't get past his criminal past, which leads to the dissolution of a promising relationship, plus constant harping from his rather terrible-seeming parents and pressures from old associates from his life of crime. In fact, Gage probably does too good a job of making Cole sympathetic, as there were several scenes where I felt tempted to yell at the trade in my hands, and tell Spidey to back off. (Ultimately, Spider-Man makes the point that only Clash is responsible for Clash's actions...but readers see more than Spidey does and, to be honest, it's Peter Parker's decision to maintain a secret identity and to do it really, really poorly for someone who's had 10-20 years of practice, that pushes Cole away.)

As for the Civil War-ishness, Spidey spends some quality time with Ulysses, who oddly never changes clothes over the course of the days the story is set over (Actually, Ulysses is wearing a white t shirt in almost every single appearance in all of these books; I do hope he's got a closet full of white t shirts, and that he hasn't just refrained from changing clothes for, like, weeks), and gives both his and Peter Parker's diagnosis and allegiance to Captain Marvel. His experience in the preceding story would seem to have argued against doing so, but he seems convinced Ulysses can stop other peoples' Uncle Bens from getting killed, I guess, and thinks it's mostly a matter of Ulysses honing his powers and of Carol Danvers not abusing them.

Oddly, when Carol asks Spider-Man if she can count on him to fight when the fighting starts, he says she can, but when the fighting does start, this Spider-Man is taking a shower and watching Venom fight Miles Morales on the TV news.

In general, I'm not crazy about Travel Foreman's style, but I think it worked pretty well here, at least with the many talking scenes (the first action sequence, in which Spider-Man fights the, um, Vulturions, is kind of messy and hard to follow). And there are an awful lot of talking scenes. This is actually an all-around rather dramatic Spider-Man story. I kinda dig Clash's costume, too, which has a Spider-Mannishness to it, complete with the sort of "logo" that a kid might draw in his notebook at school.

After the conclusion of the mini-series, the book reprints 2014's Amazing Spider-Man #7 and #8 (from the previous volume of Amazing Spider-Man, not the current one; that was a whole reboot/re-numbering ago). A two-part Ms. Marvel crossover from around the time of the "Spider-Verse" event, I couldn't figure out why it was included here aside from the fact that it had Spider-Man in it and was scripted by Gage from a Dan Slott plot, until I got to the very end: That's when Spider-Man sees Clayton "Clash" Cole in action on the side of good, and Peter Parker gives him a job at Parker Industries.

The villain of those issues also shows up as an antagonist in the Captain Marvel collection discussed above, which was co-written by Gage.

Civil War II: X-Men
By Cullen Bunn, Andrea Broccardo, Gerry Conway and Mike Sekowsky
112 pages; $15.99
Number of issues tied to Civil War II: 4 of 5
Do the events demonstrate that Tony is right and Carol is wrong?: No
Side: Mostly Team Carol

In the pages of Civil War II, both sides of the conflict claim one of the two main X-Men teams as allies. Team Carol gets the team from Extraordinary X-Men (minus Old Man Logan and Nightcrawler, both of whom side with Iron Man), while Team Tony gets the team from All-New X-Men. What exactly drove each of these two teams of mutant superheroes to the particular faction they threw in with? Why did Logan abandon his team and take up claws against them? Why did teenage Iceman from the past side with Tony, while grown-up Iceman from the present side with Carol? These are some of the questions I wondered after, and expected to find answered in this four-issue miniseries devoted to the X-Men's role in the so-called civil war.

They aren't.

In fact, the All-New X-Men characters don't appear in this series at all, which instead focuses on the Extraordinary team's differences with the Uncanny X-Men, lead by Magneto (remember, this was an X-Men franchise relaunch ago, so the various team line-ups and titles have been scrambled yet again). At the time, they were the tertiary X-Men team, their relative lack of importance in the Marvel Universe apparent from the fact that none of them even appear in the pages of Civil War II proper.

While the series does indeed feature X-Men in conflict with one another, it is really more about the mutants' ongoing conflict with the Inhumans, which would see resolution in one of Marvel's smaller, franchise-specific events: Inhumans Vs. X-Men.

Writer Cullen Bunn opens with a sort of "Masque of the Red Death" riff, in which rich mutants seal themselves in a fancy air-tight party tower as the wandering Terrigen Mist cloud is about to wash over Dubai. Magneto's X-Men team--Psylocke, Sabertooth and M--force their way in and force them to take in all of the city's mutants, but an attack by a new(-ish?) form of Sentinels exposes them all to danger, until Storm's X-Men show up to save the day (These are Grown-up Iceman, Old Man Logan, Teenage Jean Grey, Magik and Nightcrawler). How did they know to show up when they did? Ulysses.

Magneto isn't happy about the fact that the Inhumans have a powerful weapon like Ulysses in their arsenal, since Marvel has set up this weird existential conflict between the Inhumans and the X-Men centering around the aforementioned cloud that doesn't make a lick of sense if you stop to think about it, which one is forced to do when reading about it, which is, like, all the time in X-Men comics, and certainly here.

Storm is worried Magneto is going to do something stupid, like kidnap or assassinate Ulysses, and thu spark a war with the Inhumans prior to the release of Inhumans Vs. X-Men #1, and there's your conflict: Uncanny X-Men vs. Extraordinary X-Men over whether it's cool that Ulysses is foretelling the future, framed through the perspective of mutant/Inhuman race relations and the profiling of Magneto based on his past as a supervillain (Bunn uses the word "profiling" a lot, and seems to have gotten the memo that it was the subject of Civil War II; it's played with in several ways, not just in profiling the future, but also in profiling characters based on their past actions or, in Nightcrawler's view, the way God and the universe operate).

The miniseries is mainly a series of rapidly escalating skirmishes between the two teams, ending with Magneto facing Ulysess, the two factions of mutants on his heels, only to be shown a vision that if he proceeds, the mutants will end up killing one another. There are a couple of surprises, like Nightcrawler abandoning Storm to side with Magneto (which maybe kinda sorta explains why he's on Team Tony, although Storm takes him back before this story is over), Psylocke abandoning Magneto to side with Storm and Rachel Grey being recruited to fill-in for her since I guess every X-Men team needs a psychic...?

I liked the Fantomex vs. Gambit fight and the pair's later encounters, as I kinda like both of those long-coated, sneaky mutants, and I don't think I've seen them sharing scenes before.

Bunn introduces the characters by labeling them upon first appearance (in each issue), which is no doubt handy, given how many damn characters there are and how the bi-annual relaunches are making it harder than ever to be able to keep up with Marvel's merry mutants. It really drew attention to the fact that they keep calling the Logan from the pages of Old Man Logan "Old Man Logan" instead of just "Logan." I guess he doesn't want to be called "Wolverine" anymore, which is fine, whatever, but why is his, like, official superhero name Old Man Logan? They don't call Steve Rogers "Old Man Steve"...

Broccardo's artwork is fine, but terribly unremarkable. Which is still far better than bad.

Overall, the series is kind of a letdown, but then that's mainly because it doesn't do what a reader of Civil War II might want an X-Men tie-in comic to actually do. Of course, since Bunn was crafting his story somewhat independently of Brian Michael Bendis, and at the same time Bendis was working on the main series, he probably only knew the outlines of Civil War II, and not which mutants would actually show up in it...that, or he wanted to involve Magneto's team while connecting this tie-in to the future of the franchise, and this was the way to do it.

The 80-page story is followed up by a reprint of a "Black Bolt and The Inhumans" feature from 1971's Amazing Adventures #9, by Gerry Conway, Mike Sekowsky and Bill Everett. Its relevance? Well, it has Magneto in it, I guess...? Visually, it's a stark reminder of how damn weird the Inhumans used to be in their original, Jack Kirby designs, and how the flatter, more garishly-colored comics of that era accentuated their somewhat monstrous and, well, inhuman qualities. It also reminded me that Gorgon existed; I haven't seen him in any of the many modern Inhuman appearances. I assume he died at some point, but I don't really care enough to look it up.

Invincible Iron Man Vol. 3: Civil War II
By Brian Michael Bendis, Michael Deodato, Mark Bagley and others
144 pages; $24.99
Number of issues tied-to Civil War II: 3 out of 6
Do the events demonstrate that Carol is wrong and Tony is right?: Yes
Side: Team Tony (obviously)

Well this took some balls. This 144-page, $24.99 hardcover collection includes just three issues of the title comic book, the back half of the book filled with fairly random filler in the form of 2008's Mighty Avengers #9-11, issues that are only connected to the first half of the book by the fact that they are comics scripted by Bendis that also feature Iron Man, Doctor Doom and Carol Danvers. This then is an instance when waiting to buy a trade of an over-priced $3.99 comic is actually more expensive, as it only would have cost you $11.97 to buy the serially-published issues of Invincible Iron Man collected herein.

Of course, those issues--Invincible Iron Man #12-#14--were the only issues left in the series before it was relaunched with the same writer but a new number one, and I suppose it must have made sense in someone's head to collect the last issues of Invincible Iron Man (volume two) and the first issues of Invincible Iron Man (volume three) in different collections, but it sure looks like a terrible idea in retrospect. Marvel really should have collected these issues with the preceding collection, War Machines, or waited until they had two or three issues of the relaunched Invincible Iron Man to fill this out.

Because really, I don't know how a reader could plunk down $25 for this thing and not feel ripped off.

As for the relevant issues, the first opens with Tony Stark sitting on the ruins of Stark Tower, eating a sandwich. Apparently, someone knocked the tower down at some point, but I'll be damned if I can figure out where. Double-checking Civil War II, in the second issue of the miniseries The Inhumans arrive there with the intention of toppling it after Iron Man abducted Ulysses from New Attillan, but Carol, some superheroes and SHIELD show up to stop them from doing so, but in #5, the issue containing the civil battle, Iron Man tells Karnak, "I'm glad to see you...I have the bill for the building you tore down." The rest of that issue and the next then flash back to Tony trying to explain the fact that he faked his own death in War Machines to the relevant people, his learning of James Rhodes' death, a flashback to a time when Rhodes was still alive and then missing the funeral, which Deodato draws in extreme longshot, using some kind of weird computer effect to fill out the crowd.

The final issue has Tony, an alcoholic, deciding he needs a meeting, so he puts on his disguise of a generic, boxy baseball cap, a jacket and sunglasses and goes to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. By coincidence, you know who else shows up? Carol Danvers, also in a generic, boxy baseball cap, a jacket and sunglasses! I...didn't even know that Carol Danvers was an alcoholic, nor that Tony was her sponsor. This leads to an eight-page conversation between the pair outside of the church the meeting was occurring in, where Bendis gives them one last opportunity to talk things out like grown-up human beings before he has Carol pretty much murder him in the climax of Civil War II (Oh, um, spoiler alert? Don't worry; he's not dead, just in some weird coma-like state he apparently planned for so Riri Williams can be Iron Man for a while).

It might be something of a poignant end, were it not for how much of those three issues if focused on wrapping up Bendis' apparently aborted plans for this particular volume of his Iron Man run/s and the fact that someone--he, himself?--decided to launch Civil War II before his Iron Man storyline had really run its course.

Well, that and the fact that it is immediately followed by an nine-year-old story arc with next to no relevance, other than the vague reasons I had previously mentioned (and, perhaps, it came from a status quo following the original Civil War, the one in which Tony was the bad guy. He is, after all, leading the/a Mighty Avengers team against the/a New Avengers team, something Luke Cage flashes back to as an example of how sick of fighting friends he is in the pages of Power Man and Iron Fist, discussed below).

New Avengers Vol. 3: Civil War II
By Al Ewing, Paco Medina, Jan Vlasco, Carlo Barberi and others
160 pages; $19.99
Number of issues tied to Civil War II: I'll say 6 of 6...but it's a pretty loose connection, with no bearing on the Civil War II sries
Do the events demonstrate that Carol is wrong and Tony is right?: Not really
Side: Neutral-ish

It's kind of odd that this collection is sub-titled "Civil War II," given that the actual story arc filling its pages is given the more accurate (if perhaps less marketable seeming) title of "AIM Vs. SHIELD." And writer Al Ewing does seem far more interested in continuing his own storyline, which followed Roberto "Sunspot" Da Costa from the end of Jonathan Hickman's run on Avengers/New Avengers, wherein Da Costa bought AIM and transformed it into Avengers Idea Mechanics, an mostly autonomous nation state fusing good guy superheroics with bad guy mad science to make the world a better place.

This volume serves as the climax to his 18-issue, three collections-longn run, in which Da Costa's AIM fights against both Ultimate Reed Richards' WHISPER and his New Revengers and SHIELD (particularly a faction lead by an a-hole Agent John Garrett). It is actually kinda difficult to review-review this volume, given that one of the great pleasures of it is how much work Ewing put into the plotting, so there are plenty of surprises and reversals in it, the spoiling of which would actually spoil them.

Luckily, I can just stick to the Civil War II-ish aspects for the purposes of these few paragraphs.

In the first of the issues contained herein, the "public" New Avengers, the ones who didn't turn on SHIELD and the U.S. government in the previous collection (and the Standoff tie-in), are shown participating in the battle against the Celestial Destructor: Hawkeye Clint Barton, Hulkling, Squirrel Girl and, of course, Wiccan, whose role in the battle was also depicted in Civil War II proper.

By the second issue, Clint is in jail over shooting Bruce Banner to death, and there's a Ulysses vision of Songbird speaking at Roberto's funeral factored in. But mostly, it's a big-ass fight between the New Avengers' huge, diverse cast of mostly weird heroes, Evil Richards' new team of similarly weird and even more obscure villains and lots and lots of Dum Dum Dugan Life Model Decoys lead by Garrett.

It reads surprisingly well on its own, discrete from either Civil War II or the previous two trades, and though Ewing does get to put some punctuation on his run, it will continue, albeit into a new title, making following it in the future...difficult, to say the least (U.S.Avengers, which may not be long for this world; it's solicited through at least its ninth issue, but according to the most recent sales estimates I've seen, it dipped below 20K almost immediately upon launch)

Power Man and Iron Fist Vol. 2: Civil War II
By David F. Walker, Flaviano, Sanford Greene, Scott Hepburn and others
Number of issues tied to Civil War II: 4 out of 5
Do the events demonstrate that Carol is wrong and Tony is right?: Yes
Side: Team Leave Us Out of It (although a confusing flashback in Civil War II implies Luke and Danny were working with Carol prior to the trial of Clint Barton, while Luke joins Team Tony by Civil War II #4)

This arc is bad, but it's still fun, and maybe as good as a tie-in to such a dumb event series could be if it really did try to honestly engage with the event instead of simply side-stepping it as fast as possible. Walker writes these characters extremely well, and has a lot of fun with Luke's refusal to swear and in recovering the often very goofy characters from Cage's deep past, and other failed or half-forgotten street-level characters from Marvel's past, and reintroducing them, often portraying their past portrayals as youthful indiscretions, or perhaps trying to be something they weren't...or, in at least one case, trying to hang on to something they never were in the first place.

The artwork by Flavianao and Sanford Green is great, and I could look at those two guys' drawings of the two guys in the title all damn day; I particularly like, as I believe I mentioned when discussing the first volume, how huge this Luke Cage is drawn, in relation to Danny, Jessica, Danielle and the whole world around him. He's a literally bigger-than-life character.

Walker's way of dealing with the Civil War II plot is interesting, and I find myself wondering whether the plot for this arc, which isn't quite concluded in this volume, is one he would have written anyway, and he was just forced to fold Carol Danvers in, or if his non-Civil War II plot was an intentional echo of Civil War II, inspired by its plot.

After Luke Cage, Danny Rand, Jessica Jones see news footage of the battle with Thanos that took place in Free Comic Book Day 2016 and ended with War Machine James Rhodes dead and She-Hulk in a coma, and the two heroes attempt to visit Shulkie at the Triskelion but are turned away. They are warmly greeted by Carol, however, who then asks if they can give her a minute of their time so she can explain what's going on.

Jump to the two of them walking to their car, reiterating that Civil War II is dumb and they hope they can avoid being in it (they can't!).

"What was all that 'predictive justice' stuff Carol was talking about?" Danny yells. "Sounded like a bunch of fiddle-faddle to me," Luke says, and they agree to sit this one out, as they are also sick of hero vs. hero fights. On a two-page spread, between two tiers of them talking about it, there's a nice big spread of the Luke Cage-lead Avengers (from the second volume of the Bendis-written New Avengers, I want to say) fighting the Carol Danvers and Iron Man-lead Avengers (from the pages of the Bendis-written Mighty Avengers). Cage, who sided with Captain America in the pages of the first Civil War, was basically in a kinda cold war with the government-sanctioned Avengers between the end of Civil War and the post-Secret Invasion "Heroic Age," I think.

Walker then returns to matters related to his book, as a bunch of reformed criminals and their family members attempt to hire the Heroes For Hire to find a bunch of ex-cons who have since gone straight but disappeared shortly after encountering a group of mysterious vigilantes. And then those vigilantes attack! Followed by the police!

This ends with Danny Rand in jail for assaulting some officers, where he tries to figure out the disappearances. Many of those who have disappeared are also in jail there, and they ended up there without officially being charged or getting trials. Outside prison, Luke calls in favors from many friends to try to figure out the one clue they have, a mysterious device that mixes facial recognition software with the ability to manipulate and falsify criminal records. This is what the vigilantes were doing to bust their victims.

So you can see how this thematically kinda sorta ties in to Civil War II, as innocent--or at least innocent-until-proven-guilty--people are being attacked, arrested and punished for crimes they didn't actually commit. Civil War II comes back to the fore when Ulysses--the prophesying Inhuman that Carol Danvers is using to predict possible future crimes to prevent before they happen--has a vision of Luke Cage leading a break-in at Ryker's to free the incarcerated Danny.

In fact, a confused and frustrated Cage calls Songbird and Centurius to join him as he looks at Ryker's, in the hopes that they can talk him out of doing something stupid and figure out this whole mess, and then "Sweet Christmas, Easter and Hanukkah," in swoop Danvers, Mockingbird, Puck, Spectrum, Storm, Deathlok and a whole bunch of SHIELD troops. They are there to stop Ulysses' vision from coming to pass by arresting Luke first and, just as in Agents of SHIELD and All-New Wolverine, Carol's intervention is exactly what causes the vision to come to pass (slow learner, I guess).

There's a lot of fighting between all parties. I particularly liked the fight-then-team-up sequences involving Mockingbird, who Walker writes close enough to Chelsea Cain that she sounds like the same character, and Songbird, because they have similar names. And I'm always calling Songbird Mockingbird by accident.

It ends with Cage making a couple of speeches in Carol's direction, and then Danny making another one, and she's eventually shamed into dropping it and they help round up the prisoners and clean up the jail. As for the A-plot, which becomes the B-plot, Luke's team is just about to crack where the doohickey being used to find and incarcerate people came from, when a very powerful person in a hoodie teleports to his safehouse and steals it from the hands of his allies.

The rest of the collection is devoted to Sweet Christmas Annual #1, in which Walker and artist Scott Hepburn creates a Christmas Even story involving Luke, Danny, Danielle, Spider-Woman Jessica Drew and her baby,The Son of Satan, The Krampus and Santa Claus. If you haen't read it yet, chances are it is every bit as awesome as you are imagining it to be right now, based simply on the guest-stars appearing in it.

Rocket Raccoon and Groot Vol. 2: Civil War II
By Nick Kocher, Michael Walsh, Bill Mantlo, Al Milgrom and others
112 pages; $15.99
Number of issues tied-to Civil War II: 3 out of 5
Do the events demonstrate that Carol is wrong and Tony is right?: No
Side: Team Carol

The Civil War II tie-in arc in this collection is book-ended by two comics. The second is a reprint of 1981's Incredible Hulk #271 by Bill Mantlo, Al Milgrom and company, included because it is the first appearance of Rocket Raccoon...and, one suspects, to act as filler. The first is Rocket Raccoon and Groot #7, a done-in-one story by the title's regular creative team of writer Nick Kocher, artist Michael Walsh and co-inker Josh Hixson. That's the issue the cover of the collection came from; that's not James Rhodes' or Bruce Banner's grave they are looking down on there.

I was really quite struck by how stand-alone that first issue was, and how purely comedic it was. Yes, it starred two Marvel characters of a rather high-degree of popularity at the moment, but it was otherwise pretty far removed from the Marvel Universe, lacking in the familiar settings (being in outer space and all) and guest-stars, villains and other Marvel Comics building blocks that generally show up in the publisher's other comedy-focused series, like Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, Patsy Walker, AKA Hellcat and the the recently canceled Howard The Duck. The mode was, additionally, comic in a way that is unusual for Marvel. Unlike the above-mentioned series or, say, a Deadpool comic, it wasn't superhero comedy so much as just comedy.

For the three-issue Civil War II tie-in, the book takes on the more standard superhero comedy set in the Marvel Universe shape, opening with Rocket and Groot in a big meeting with the rest of Team Carol, in which Captain Marvel is doling out various assignments for her predictive justice enforcement (the scene is somewhat at odds with the events of Civil War II, where the pair appear with the rest of the Guardians as a sort of ace-in-the-hole during the one scene in which Team Carol and Team Tony actually come to blows, but given the nature of this book, that's more than forgivable).

Rocket volunteers himself and Groot for a minor assignment (a baby powder robbery in Georgia), and while Captain Marvel knows its for a sneaky, self-serving reason, she lets them go, because it's just Rocket Raccoon and Groot, after all. That sneaky, self-serving reason? Rocket is in pursuit of a bounty he missed a few years ago. Unfortunately for him/fortunately for us, Gwenpool is also in pursuit of the same bounty, and thus it's Rocket and Groot vs. Gwenpool.

This was my first exposure to Gwenpool, but as you may already be aware, her whole deal is that she breaks the fourth wall, like, constantly; she's a comic book character who knows she's a comic book character in a comic book. That means she's constantly talking directly to the readers, which of course is interpreted by all the other comics characters as her being even more completely insane than her namesake.

I don't know how this works in her own book or other appearances, but writer Nick Kocher has a lot of fun with her, and she's pretty perfect for a crossover "tie-in," like this, as she knows how those things work. Since she, Rocket and Groot and lower-tier characters, they are in greater danger of being killed off than anyone else, so the further they stay away from the conflict in New York, the better. When their little side quest leads to a plot from an alien villain to kill Carol, she insists Carol is going to be okay, as it's not like they are going to kill her off in this book instead of Civil War II, and, besides, Kocher wouldn't have the authority at Marvel to kill off Captain Marvel anyway, that would take a writer of Brian Michael Bendis' stature.

At which point in her expanation, Gwenpool sees Kitty Pryde walk by and, when she asks what she's doing there, Kitty confesses she actually has no idea. So maybe it is a Bendis book, after all?

Like the done-in-one that precedes it, it's a pretty fun little story, and Kocher gets some good zingers in. Michael Walsh's art is refreshingly un-Marvelous, too. This book very much resembles an "indie" book in its look, which certainly works to its advantage for sequences like the one in which a grenade hits Gwenpool, shredding her clothes, but leaving the "R-rated" parts covered. She uses this as evidence that she is, in fact, in a comic book, and Walsh's particular style makes it about as un-sexy as it can be, allowing for a joke that would normally be accompanied by cheesecake without any sort of exploitation (Whether or not that's a good thing will depend on the reader, of course, but it's an example of the style draining the book of the expected superhero aesthetic).

To call the book a Civil War II tie-in is a big, long, hard stretch, especially given that they used Civil War II as the sub-title, but it's an enjoyable book on its own, and doesn't depend on any knowledge at all regarding Civil War II.

Uncanny Avengers Vol. 3: Civil War II
By Gerry Duggan, Ryan Steman, Pepe Larraz, Richard Isanove and others
112 pages; $15.99
Number of issues tied-to Civil War II: 5 out of 5
Do the events demonstrate that Carol is wrong and Tony is right?: No
Side: Neutral

Uncanny Avengers is one of the many Marvel titles I tried reading in trade for a while, but ultimately ended up getting lost among all the relaunches. Checking on Wikipedia just before writing this sentence, I see now that there have been three volumes--as in, the book has launched three times--since it debuted in spring of 2013. This particular collection, the third collection of the third volume, is the ninth overall collection of the series (not counting an omnibus, which was just another format of collecting the previously collected stuff), which means there are nine trade paperbacks floating around with the words "Uncanny Avengers" on the cover and spine. Three of those nine say Uncanny Avengers Vol. 1--i.e. one-third of the collected issues of Uncanny Avengers--on the cover or spine. There are further two different Uncanny Avengers Vol. 2 and two different Uncanny Avengers Vol. 3. So if you ever want to try reading the book from the beginning, well, good luck with that!

The premise upon the series' launch was that it would be a joint Avengers/X-Men super-team, the so-called "Unity Squad" of Avengers meant to show the world that super-powered humans and powerful mutants could work hand-in-hand for the greater good in the wake of the events of the Avengers Vs. X-Men series. Since then, Inhumans seems to have been added to the Unity Squad to, as the line-up at the start of this particular trade includes super-humans Captain America, The Wasp and Doctor Voodoo, mutant heroes Cable, Deadpool and Rogue, Inhuman Synapse, Inhuman-who-thought-he-was-a-mutant-for-decades Quicksilver and The Human Torch Johnny Storm, who is of course a cosmic ray-empowered human superhero who is neither Avenger nor X-Man, but has been hanging out with The Inhumans for apparently sexual reasons.

The very first of the five issues collected herein is the most directly tied to the main Civil War II series. It opens with a scene from Civil War II #3, where Hawkeye Clint Barton puts an arrow in Bruce Banner, as told from Deadpool's point of view ("Hey, Clint! What are they arresting you for--one count of "living the dream"?), and about the first half or so of the issue involves Deadpool breaking into prison to have a chat with the incarcerated Clint, and making him an offer of sorts. Pretty good character moment for both.

Then Ulysses gets brought into the picture, giving Captain America Steve Rogers one of his by now expected incredibly vague predictions:

The children of the atom... ...will wage a war. The son of Cyclops doesn't belong here. And he's keeping the wrong company right now. Your team isn't very honest with each other.

That is accompanied by an image of a screaming Cable firing big guns, a coupla generic-looking soldier types in helmets and boots lying dead around him. Never mind the fact for a moment that Cable, "the son of Cyclops," is literally from the future, and firing big guns is pretty much his whole deal, Cap doesn't seem to have learned anything from All-New Wolverine, as he gathers up a coupla generic-looking soldier types in helmets and boots to confront Cable, who basically just blows him off as he boards a plane--containing Rogue, as well as Toad and Sebastian Shaw. They are on a secret mission to follow up on a possible way to put an end to the Terrigen Mist cloud which, well, I don't really want to get into it here, but it's one of the dumbest plot points either of the Big Two has ever turned to for a status quo, one that writers like Gerry Duggan just have to try and deal with until the editors decide to finally do away with it.

That takes up most of the next issue, as the mutants are breaking into labs to get research on the mist...which leads to a confrontation with Captain America. They manage to beat the crap out of him until Rogue intervenes, but the ultimate result is that Rogers disbands the Unity Squad and walks off (Oddly throughout their exchanges, both Cap and Deadpool refer to "the mutants," which implied Deadpool himself is not one; did I miss something, and they altered his origin, as they have a few other prominent mutants of late?).

It turns out that this disbandment comes at a bad time--and it's kind of unfortunate that the whole Nazi Cap storyline is running simultaneous to this one, as it's difficult to tell exactly if Steve is acting the way he is because he's stubborn and thinks he's right, or because he's secretly evil and waiting to take over America in the next crossover (For what it's worth, he seems "himself" throughout all of Bendis' Civil War II, rather than being much of an a-hole). Because The Hand has stolen Banner's body, with plans to do their thing: He ultimately emerges as an undead, bigger-than-usual Hulk with a scary samurai mask.

Despite Cap's decision to disband the team, Rogue and Deadpool decide not to share that with the team as they form up and go to Japan where they fight first ninjas and then The Hulk, getting a little help from Elektra.

It's all pretty good super-comics, with some fun, funny character moments, and a rather impressive feat of plotting in that Duggan is able to essentially cater the threat and the action to his team's various super-powers.

All of the art is pretty good, but I was personally a little surprised at how much I preferred that of Pepe Larraz to that of Ryan Stegman, if only because the latter's name is so much more familiar to me than that of the latter.



*I actually already reviewed two of these collections, All-New Wolverine Vol. 2 and Power Man and Iron Fist Vol. 2, in previous posts, but am including somewhat condensed versions of those reviews in this post as well, for the purposes of putting all my reviews of the various Civil War II collections in a single place.