300th Blog: Review of Civil War (Marvel Comic)

Ladies and gentlemen welcome to the 300th blog of Beta is Dead. Four years and countless hours of my life have been thrown into this blog and at 300 entries I’m fairly certain I have enough material for multiple novels. As I mentioned in the last blog today I’ll be celebrating this milestone by reviewing one of Marvel Comics' most important modern crossovers Civil War, which began publication in 2006 and ended in 2007. If there’s one huge problem with today’s comics, especially at Marvel, it’s the seemingly constant stream of big comic events and big status quo altering crossovers. Back in the day these types of things were more spread out and they didn’t always “change everything”. Nowadays there’s at least one big storyline a year (sometimes more!) and when it’s over it they’ve made major changes to the canon only to change everything again by the next one. X-Men: Schism is a fantastic example of this. Schism was supposed to be this HUGE deal, a storyline that divided the X-Men into two warring factions but just a year later all of that was tossed out of the window when Avengers vs. X-Men established a totally different dynamic. Why bother changing up the world if you’re going to just change it again before we get used to it?

Anyway Civil War really is the start of this in the 2000s. It was the next chapter of Marvel’s weird ass agenda of pumping out a bunch of events labeled as one big “epic” saga starting with Avengers Disassembled and ending with Siege. But it was Civil War that really got it rolling as it’s ending shattered the basic foundation of the Marvel Universe (of course most things went completely back to normal a few years later, meaning nothing here really mattered in the long term). For the record this book was written by Mark Millar with art by Steve McNiven.

The question is this: was Civil War a good story? It’s a famous story and a historically relevant and is actually pretty controversial but the quality of book itself isn’t guaranteed. Now the Civil War story was made up of seven issues but there were also numerous tie-ins and side story comics. Since I would have to spend a ton of money to buy all that crap we’re just going to stick with the main miniseries. After all the main book alone should have a complete and satisfying story, right? Right?

Full review after the jump.

[WARNING: There are spoilers freely written throughout this review but seeing as this is an eight year old comic you should probably get over it]

Nerd Rage #16: Road to Marvel's Civil War

Ever wonder who would win in a fight?
No? Too bad

This is my 299th blog, which means two things: 1) Holy shit, I’ve written 299 blogs and 2) the next blog will be #300. That’s a pretty big milestone and one we cannot ignore. A while back, maybe a few weeks or months after uploading blog #100, which if you recall was a rant/review of Spider-Man: One More Day, I was trying to figure out comics that I’d want to review for future big milestones. I decided Spider-Man: One Moment in Time would be appropriate for the 200th blog but there was a comic that I really wanted to review but that I felt deserved an equal amount of attention as those two heinously terrible Spider-Man stories. Then I remembered Civil War, a major crossover for Marvel Comics in 2006.

What’s so important about Civil War? So important that I would sit on reviewing it for years? Well it was a major game changer for Marvel Comics that set a particularly dubious status quo for Marvel both in narrative and the way they conducted business. The effects of this book, as far as the storyline went, lasted for the rest of the decade up until 2010’s Heroic Age. In my opinion Civil War is likely the most important storyline from Marvel Comics during the 2000s (House of M would be the other logical choice).

So next time I’ll be reviewing the main Civil War book, which was seven issues. However today I’d like to talk about important points that lead up to this crossover so that we are all on the same page when I review it, much like I did with One More Day and X-Men Schism.

More useless information after the jump.

Nerd Rage #6a: Road to One More Day

It's Finally Time...

Look, we all knew this was coming sooner or later.  All those snide remarks about Spider-Man and his (lack of) marriage for the past year; I was going to talk about Spider-Man: One More Day eventually and since it’s such a hot topic even today I figured why not do so when the blog reaches 100 posts.  Of course this isn’t anything new as practically everyone with internet access has voiced an opinion about the comic since it hit stands in 2007 but even so if I went on a rant about Cassandra Cain and no one screamed at me one would think I’d be okay here.  We’ll see.  So later this week (Hopefully) I’ll be posting a review of the graphic novel that collects the infamous four issue storyline.  I can’t claim I won’t be biased , of course, but I’ll at least try to give the book a fair shake .

But there’s a problem.  Superhero comic books are tricky in that non-fans who may be interested in checking them out are often confused by the content due to the fact that there’s decades’ worth of continuity to them.  So what’s common knowledge for me and my buddies won’t necessarily be common knowledge for, let’s say, an anime fan who usually just comes to the blog for anime reviews.  So before we can talk about One More Day we need to talk about what led to it and why it happened.  And, because I know that the review is going to be long as hell, I decided to “pre-blog” here so that you won’t have to read a giant novel worth of text next time.  We’re swimming in pretty nerdy waters, folks, and I wouldn’t blame you if you decided to avoid the site for the next week.

More after the jump, if you dare.