Comics! Two new teams!

Comics this week included the start of two new teams from Marvel Comics – a company which has learned that nothing sells like excess and can now be counted upon to give us multiple X-Men teams, multiple Spider-Man teams, about 100 different upcoming graphic novels of the various splinters of “Dark Reign,” and, somewhat belatedly, about half a dozen new post-“Dark Reign” super-teams.

The first of these new teams isn’t a first issue – it’s just business as usual for “Thunderbolts” (issue #144! When did that happen? Can there really be that many virgins out there with disposable income?), a book built on the idea of super-villains forming a super-hero team for one reason or another (to dupe the public, to redeem their souls, etc). In the wake of “Dark Reign” and the downfall of Norman Osborn, a new team of Thunderbolts is formed in this issue under the leadership of good guy Luke Cage, and I was surprised by how much I liked it. Of course, I just-in-general like the way Marvel has been increasing its usage of Cage, but the idea of putting him in charge of a new team – at least as written by Jeff Parker (with surprisingly retro art by Ken Walker)– really works.

Of course, the main draw of any new team book is the team itself, the picks, the potential chemistry. That draw is all the more dramatic when the team in question is composed mostly of villains or quasi-villains, most of whom certainly aren’t trustworthy. This time around there are some characters I barely recognize – Mach V, Ghost, Songbird (I know the last only from the epic “Avengers Forever” – no idea what’s her deal in normal continuity), Moonstone, Crossbones – although the way Parker writes them makes me at least curious to know more. The team has its resident in-house genius (in this case Hank Pym) and at least two surprising additions that I, for one, didn’t see coming: the Juggernaut, here portrayed as physically immense and pretty openly threatening (in the ‘real world,’ there’s simply no way Luke Cage would allow onto his team a grinning schemer with Hulk-level strength, but hey …), and … the Man-Thing, a non-sentient muck-monster who can’t speak, can’t understand speech, and has virtually no powers to speak of. Not exactly a team player (although he’s been on a team before! I may be the only person here old enough to remember that, however).



Add such wrinkles to the mix and throw in a genuinely didn’t-see-it-coming cliffhanger ending, and I’m certainly hooked enough to read the next issue.



The second new team really is new: a freshly not-dead Steve Rogers, given a free hand by the President, forms a “Secret Avengers” team meant for covert operations and strategic pre-emptive strikes at the bad guys, sort of a Black Ops version of the higher-profile Avengers. It’s a great idea (although ironically enough, the premise for it given in this issue – which kicks off Marvel’s new “Heroic Age” – is that the world in the 21st century has grown so rotten and un-heroic that such a team is necessary), and it’s a premise obviously being enjoyed by writer Ed Brubaker and “Dark Avengers” artist Mike Deodato (when “Dark Avengers” came to its end, I really hoped Marvel would find another team-book to put Deodato on … the fact that it goes right on being the Avengers is all the sweeter).



And again, the main point is the roll-call. In this case it’s Steve Rogers – dressed in a kind of generic-superhero suit and not carrying his famous Captain America shield (or even a really, really tough duplicate, which is the least you’d think he’d do, considering that his entire fighting style is built around having the thing on one arm) – and a team of Marvel second-and third-stringers: Moon Knight, a kid in Hank Pym’s old Ant-Man get-up, Jim Rhodes and the Black Widow (from this summer’s “Iron Man 2”), the Beast from the X-Men (doing duty here as the requisite in-house genius), Nova, and … in another surprise move I find fascinating, the Valkyrie, an Asgardian warrior-woman and long-time criminally underused member of the Defenders (the Marvel group the Secret Avengers most closely resembles, naturally) – it’ll be interesting to see how Brubaker develops her character.

It was a little weird, seeing a Marvel team-book with no marquee names at all – I assume these characters were chosen by Brubaker specifically on the condition that he could mess around with them to a greater degree than he could with the usual roster of Avengers, and I’ll be looking forward to that in the next issue. This issue also ends with a heck of a cliffhanger, so I’ll definitely be around next time.

Comics! Siege begins!

This week sees the first installment of Marvel Comics’ next Big Thing: a four-part series called Siege. The back story will be familiar to those of you who’ve been paying attention here at Stevereads – Norman Osborn, the murderous ersatz Green Goblin, has professed to be a changed man, wormed his way into the President’s good graces, and been placed in charge of the super paramilitary organization known as H.A.M.M.E.R. He’s recruited his own team of ‘dark’ Avengers, and for several months now readers have been treated to a surprisingly entertaining dystopian version of the usual Marvel continuity … the bad guys have been in charge, hunting down, torturing, and even killing the good guys.

It’s yielded some good stories, and one of the things that made those stories good was the background current of tension that’s been building the whole time. Norman Osborn has been written consistently as a smarmy psychopath with only a tenuous hold on his own sanity, and his team of Avengers have for the most part been written as unabashed scumbags. Readers like me have been both fascinated and appalled, and every month the prospect of Osborn’s fall from power – and the face-stomping his team of storm troopers so richly deserves – has grown just a little more delicious in the aniticpating.

Marvel’s in-house ads hint pretty strongly that Siege is the story of that downfall – that the core trio of the real Avengers, Thor, Iron Man, and Captain America, will reunite to bring about the return of the so-called Heroic Age Marvel’s been touting lately. We’ll see if that turns out to be true, but in the meantime, this issue opens with a bang.

Bang as in explosion. Osborn and the evil Norse god Loki conspire to orchestrate an catastrophic incident involving a bunch of energy-wielding bad guys and one Volstagg, a warrior who’s left the fabled city of Asgard (which now floats ten feet above some empty scrubland in Oklahoma, as seen in last year’s new run of Thor’s own comic) in search of adventure. The catastrophic incident involves a crowded football stadium, and Osborn uses its aftermath to justify launching a full-scale invasion of Asgard, spearheaded by his own super-powered shock troops. That invasion is launched in this first issue, which is written by Brian Michael Bendis in his usual spastic way and gloriously illustrated by Olivier Coipel.



Osborn’s surveillance intelligence tells him Thor is not in Asgard at the moment (readers of Thor’s own book will recall that, for the millionth time, he’s been exiled from his hometown), so his hopes of success are high. His ‘dark’ Avengers move in with Air Force fighter jets and catch the Asgardians by surprise, and the fighting is in full fury when Thor does indeed show up – only to get rather unceremoniously knocked around by the bad guys. The issue ends with things looking fairly bleak for Asgard.

The two main problems that usually afflict comic book Big Things are a) inconsistent characterization of the major players, or b) incoherent plotting, and Bendis avoids both those pitfalls in this first issue, and he does quite a bit right besides. The elements are in place here for a tremendously satisfying story – not only the prospect of Thor, Captain America, and Iron Man reuniting but also the classic overreaching Osborn has been doing all along, culminating in this issue when he angrily delegates to an assistant the task of telling the President that he’s going to invade Asgard (“I’m done talking to that man,” he snarls, and a later scene in the White House makes it clear the President feels the same about him). And certainly attacking an entire city full of warrior gods can be classified as overreaching.

So: a fine strong premise-issue (marred only by the inclusion of some script-pages for a fairly pivotal scene in which Osborn explains his decision to his Avengers – no explanation is given as to why Coipel didn’t draw these pages, like he did the rest of the issue), and the ball is Bendis’ to fumble. My fingers are crossed that he doesn’t.

Comics! Captain America Reborn!

In Marvel Comics, the resurrection of Captain America proceeds apace. The second Ed Brubaker/Bryan Hitch issue of the mini-series that will bring back the Star-Spangled Avenger is out, and it's got enough thought-provoking oddities to warrant a quick second comics-entry so soon after our last one. Because, as you all know, I thought the death of Captain America was a stupid plot-afterthought to the overall poorly-conceived 'Civil War' storyline, I'm naturally interested in seeing it fixed. Cap is Marvel's third-oldest continuing character (70 years still seems impossible to believe), and he's also their third most-recognizable character (after Spider-Man and Wolverine) - his absence from the Marvel Universe is the black hole at the center of so many of the problems confronting Marvel's continuity right now, that a well-done resurrection tale could undo a lot of bad karma.

And I do so love a well-done resurrection tale! Comic books are rife with them, of course, and some are done much better than others. The dumbest, sloppiest, most protracted and lackluster of such resurrections was sure Marvel's revival of Captain America's WWII sidekick Bucky (who was good and properly dead for so long that the fact had become axiomatic in the comics world - "nobody dies, but Bucky"), who's returned as some sort of half-cyborg cold warrior named, appropriately enough, Winter Soldier. After the death of Captain America, Winter Soldier donned his uniform and his famous shield - to give solace to a grieving country, and all that. Naturally, he features prominently in the story Brubaker and company have to tell here.

That story is almost as old as the character of Cap itself. A key thing to remember about the Marvel Universe is that everybody in it has already had to deal with the death of Captain America once before: at the end of WWII, Cap and Bucky were lost and presumed killed in an explosion - the world didn't know that the super-soldier serum flowing through Cap's body preserved his life and put him in suspended animation, from which the Sub-Mariner and the Avengers accidentally revived him decades after the world thought him lost. So a second return from the dead isn't really pushing things for the character, provided it's handled well (note to the Marvel bullpen: kindly don't kill this character off again).

This particular resurrection story is, so far, being handled well. Brubaker is capable of some taut plotting, and he's settled on a classic mechanism of rebirth for his character: that old standby, the time-travel story. The two issues of "Captain America Reborn" that have appeared so far (the first one with a nifty cover, the second with a crap-assy cover)(which makes the third anybody's guess) have two parallel plots: the efforts of the new Bucky/Captain America and his allies to infiltrate the lair of the government bad guys they suspect had a hand in killing the 'real' Cap, and the 'real' Cap narrating long vignettes from his life - which he's mysteriously re-living from beyond the grave. In this issue, he wonders what's going on - he's inside his own memories, unable to alter them but not simply re-experiencing them; he's thinking for himself, about himself, as the reels of his life unspool.

But is it his life? This second issue opens with a scene from 1944, where Cap and a bunch of grunts are storming a fortress somewhere in Europe. The grunts are under heavy fire, and Cap is there to save the day - and also to fight the Nazi super-villain Master Man, which he does in one beautifully drawn and choreographed fight-sequence of some six or seven panels. If some of you are thinking that's a bit quick, you're not alone - I thought the same thing. Master Man, after all, is an invulnerable super-villain strong enough to take on the whole of Captain America's WWII super-team the Invaders, including the Human Torch and the aforementioned Sub-Mariner. In the current Marvel continuity, Captain America could no more take on Master Man alone - and beat him - than he could beat the Hulk without help. So let's go to the tape, shall we?


Cap launches himself up at the descending Master Man, slams him against the fortress wall, plants his boots against his enemy, spring-boards backwards, and lets the two of them plummet to the ground, with Master Man absorbing the impact and Cap pile-driving down right on top of him, leaving Master Man unconscious. Boom. Fight over. But in current Marvel continuity, Cap couldn't make such a catapulting leap, and Master Man could easily shrug off such an impact. So what's going on?

The narrative shifts to Bucky/Captain America getting his ass kicked by the bad guys, and when it shifts back to the 'real' Cap, we're seeing a scene very familiar to comics fans: skinny little Steve Rogers volunteering to be experimented upon by kindly, brilliant Professor Erskine, in an attempt to create the world's greatest super-soldier. Steve drinks the super-soldier serum, undergoes the radiation-bath, and quintuples in body-mass, suddenly bristling with muscles. And as all fans know, that's when tragedy strikes: a Nazi saboteur lurking in the watching crowd shoots and kills Erskine, thereby insuring that Steve Rogers will be the only person to receive that precise super-soldier treatment. And in the instant of Erskine's death, an enraged Steve Rogers smashes through the plate glass and hurls the Nazi to his death against the energy-combines in Erskine's lab.


Except in this version, this 'memory' our narrating Cap is re-living, he doesn't just kill the Nazi saboteur - he leaps up forty feet to do it. Even spurred by grief and rage, the Captain America of the current Marvel continuity could no more do that than he could flap his wings and fly to the moon.



But there is a Captain America who can do these kinds of things. He's the Captain America from the 'Ultimate' universe Marvel created some years ago in order to tell more updated, bad-ass versions of the origins of some of their oldest characters. As I've mentioned here before, the Captain America who debuted in Ultimates was in many ways a preferable version of the character: more of a soldier, and much, much more than a superb athlete dressed in a flag - that Cap was a genuine super-being, indefinably tougher, stronger, and faster than even a perfectly-conditioned normal man. The Ultimates Captain America very probably could defeat Master Man in six panels (if memory serves, he defeated the Hulk in about the same amount of space, albeit temporarily), and he could certainly clear forty feet in a rage-fueled leap.

So I'm starting to wonder.

I'm starting to wonder if Marvel hasn't given Brubaker and company permission to tweak their Star-Spangled property just a bit. I'm wondering if one of the most successful and well-conceived creations of the 'Ultimates' universe is simply being moved over to normal Marvel continuity.

In short, I think the Cap I've been reading for lo, these many decades really is dead and gone. So ... long live Captain America?

Back Issues: Captain America!

On the eve of Marvel Comics finally resurrecting Captain America (who they killed off at the climax of their hugely disappointing "Civil War" event), it's natural to look at the character's storied past. Remembering the times when the character has been written and drawn really well comes as a comfort, especially since we don't yet know how Marvel will screw up the character's return. We know they will screw it up - this is Marvel we're talking about, after all - but we don't yet know how. Will the returned Cap be a Wolverine-style sourpussed killer? Will he have superpowers? Will he be radically altered, philosophically?

We'll know shortly, and in the meantime, I've been enjoying some back issues. Not as many as you'd think - this character virtually invites dumb handling, and most writers haven't resisted the temptation to make him a simpleton.

For two issues during the short run of the Cap spin-off title Sentinel of Liberty, Mark Waid amply resisted that temptation in a nifty little tale I love to re-read. The fact that it's drawn by Ron Garney, one of the best draftsmen working in comics today, just makes it all that much sweeter.

The story begins right after Captain America has been rescued by the Avengers from ice-bound suspended animation. Iron Man has taken him to Brooklyn in a well-intentioned attempt to make him feel a little less displaced - but their first stop is the spot where Ebbets Field used to be, so Cap - a diehard Dodgers fan in his youth back in the 1940s - isn't exactly filled with reassurances. And the crowd of spectators don't help - Cap is chewed out by one old guy who tells him he ought to be ashamed of himself for pretending to be Captain America.

The two issues are narrated by Iron Man, and Waid captures his wry conceitedness perfectly as he himself wonders if Cap can ever really belong in the present day:

I'm sure Cap was capable in his day .. but we asked him to resume his costumed-acrobat act as if nothing has changed in his absence! Poor guy must feel like a caveman! America's become a lot more complicated - and dangerous - since he left. How can anyone expect him to be on his toes in a world so far advanced from the one he calls home?

These worries are immediately tested - giant robots with mind-dominating eye-beams show up and start enslaving passersby. Cap and Iron Man spring into action, with Iron Man offering maddeningly condescending advice that's meant to be helpful: "Cap! Stay back and protect the civilians! Let me handle these bruisers!"



And he does just that - until one of them crushes one of his jet-boots and hurls him straight at an oncoming bus crowded with people.

Iron Man can't recover his balance in time to avoid totalling the bus, and here Garney's genius is on full display: we see Iron Man flying toward the bus, we see the panicked passengers and driver - and then flashing across the page we see Captain America's shield, thrown with perfect timing to be between Iron Man and the front of the bus at the moment of impact (Capt's shield is composed of a unique alloy of adamantium and vibranium - so it's not only indestructible, it absorbs and repulses impacts).


It's a thrilling little sequence, as Iron Man bounces off the shield and lands in a heap. "Cap?" he asks, and Cap says, "the civilians are okay" - zing! Iron Man asks "Was that sarcasm?" and then rips into one of the robots.


And promptly gets mind-controlled! And the robots' first command: destroy Captain America! That's how the first chapter ends.

The second chapter continues Iron Man's narration with the great line "Looking back, it's a miracle he didn't mop the city with me." This can't help but put a smile on the face of comics geeks, because it reaffirms the special status Captain America has in the Marvel Universe, a status exactly paralleled by Batman in the DC Universe: he's a first-rank heavyweight despite having no superpowers. It's a tricky role, and lots of writers fail to convey it. But Waid gets it perfect in this little story, set up by Iron Man's bemused recollection of how badly he underestimated his adversary:

I remember thinking, even in my haze, that Cap didn't stand a chance against me. The Brooklyn battlefield he remembered was decades gone. He'd been in our time less than forty-eight hours - not nearly long enough to acclimate to his new world. In desperation, he bounded towards the vacant lots he remembered from his youth - only to find himself instead in the middle of a superhighway! Even with one bootjet crippled by the robots, I figured I was more than a match for a disoriented acrobat wrapped in a flag. Despite my muddled mind, I almost felt sorry for him.

And then the punchline: "What a waste of perfectly good brain cells."

Cap proceeds to use wits, agility, and some handy construction equipment to cut Iron Man down to size, and when the giant robots try to hypnotize Cap himself, their efforts fail - his willpower apparently being significantly stronger than that of skirt-chasing, martini-swilling Iron Man. The robots are defeated in short order, and Iron Man discovers a new respect for the man he considered a relic from the past. It's a neat little story, nothing epic, perfectly capturing one moment in these characters' relationship with each other.

I wanted lots and lots of such moments in "Civil War" and didn't get them (well, didn't get many of them - there were a couple), and gawd only knows what moments - perfect or very, very much otherwise - will crop up in "Captain America - Reborn." Still, because the potential is there, I'll be sure to investigate.

Comics! The King is dead, and all that!

The thing you have to understand about today's comics, the thing that trumps everything else, is how goddam GOOD they are, almost universally across the board. And by 'good' we here at Stevereads mean 'written for adults' - in the very best way that can be meant. Not 'adult fanboys,' but actual card-carrying adults. Dramatic storytelling. Expert pacing. On-spot characterization. And artwork that's better than it ever has been.

The latest batch of comics Elmo stole from my archnemesis Pepito illustrates this fact handily enough. Every title in the pile, each individual one, is pound for pound better than most of the issues in each title's history.

Even devil's advocate - Brad Meltzer's current incarnation of the Justice League is undoubtedly a failure; the pacing is all wrong, the narrative flow is an unmitigated disaster; you'd need an abacus to count all the missed chances, dramatically speaking.

This should be everything, keep in mind: a newly-intelligent Solomon Grundy manipulating Amazo to destroy a fledgling Justice League - that's grade-A stuff, mythic stuff. And even in devil's advocate, even on a title that's a failure, there's a degree of intelligence and energy in the storytelling that if nothing else give hope of better days ahead.

(Even so, we had to laugh at the scene where an enraged Vixen dive-bombs Amazo from high overhead, accelerating to 217 miles per hour; right before impact, she whispers 'triceratops,' so I guess we're supposed to think she's manifesting the weight and power of a triceratops in order to hit Amazo that much harder ... and she does, oh-so-coolly ripping him in two. Somebody should get a memo to Meltzer right away on what would REALLY happen if she hit a solid target at 217 mph with 9000 pounds of mass behind her. We won't spoil the surprise here at Stevereads, but you should all be thinking not of lame-ass third-tier superheroes but of Seaworld ... where the first three rows WILL GET WET!)

But devil's advocate isn't necessary for most of this batch. Jeff Smith, for instance, is always a delight, and the second issue of his Shazam! mini-series is full of good stuff - from a Doctor Sivana unabashedly modelled on Dick Cheney to a version of talking-tiger Mr. Tawny that actually manages to be cool (of course, if anybody can make a talking cat cool, it's Jeff Smith). The only qualm-causing aspect of the issue is Smith's revamp of Mary Marvel - getting her powers as per usual, but staying a little five-year-old girl. To say the least, the effect is creepy - so we're earnestly hoping the powers that be at DC don't take it into their heads to make Smith's mini-series in any way part of normal continuity.

Still, Smith's artwork and writing are so clean, so much fun - we earnestly wish he'd consider doing a comic book version of Lil' Abner. He'd be perfect for it.

Then there's the latest issue of Detective Comics, featuring quick, intelligent writing by Stuart Moore and highly detailed artwork by Andy Clarke, artwork that takes a little while to catch up to you. There's nothing remotely earth-shaking in the issue - standard Batman-and-Robin-vs-bad guy stuff, but considering how many titles at Marvel and DC are in the midst of reality-redefining catastrophies, that's something of a blessing.

Did somebody mention reality-redefining catastrophies? Well of course that's the heart and soul of DC's '52,' and after a sucky issue last week, this week rebounds incredibly, packing all the pathos, drama, and ass-kicking of an old-fashioned Lee/Kirby multi-issue epic into a mere 25 pages. We here at Stevereads have in previous entries praised the creation of heavy-hitting new characters like Isis and Osiris - well, we should have spared ourselves the trouble, since they both get offed in this issue (she's napalmed and he's EATEN ... hee). But we're not complaining, because in the process the powers that be at DC are transforming Black Adam into something remarkable. We thank whatever gods may be that he (and Renee Montoya) are turning out to be the real stars of '52,' not the much-hyped and thoroughly ridiculous lesbian Batwoman (and where's the press attention for the latest issue of Outsiders, which featured lesbian action so graphically depicted I wanted to shield Elmo's eyes?).

Discerning eyes will have noticed that all the successes so far are from DC, and there's a good reason for that: Marvel is currently experiencing a downward-spiral of suckitude unseen since the launch of the New Universe, many moons ago, and nothing seems to be able to stop the tailspin.

Not even something as well-done and sweet at the 45th anniversary issue of the Fantastic Four, which did have its moments (like the charming tone of Ben Grimm's dealings with little Franklin and Val, or Sue matter-of-factly referring to Ben as the heart and soul of the team, or Doctor Doom - of all people - pointing out the evils Reed Richards committed during the Civil War). But nothing write Dwayne McDuffie can do gets around the fact that the FF split up and fought AGAINST each other in Civil War (a point worth repeating, no? During the climactic battle of Civil War #7, Reed Richards is there to beat and LOCK UP his wife and her brother). The issue's main story ends with Reed and Sue leaving the team to 'work on their marriage,' but it can only turn a blind eye toward all the open cans of worms left over from Civil War.

The main one of these is the fact that Civil War tore Marvel's community of superheroes in half, and it LEFT things that way - sign up or get locked up in the Phantom Zone, period. Not a dream. Not a hoax. Not an imaginary story. The basic state of affairs now in Marvel Comcics is a fascist dictatorship - that kinda makes it hard to go back to telling ordinary superhero stories about Mole Man attacking Manhattan.

Which makes the first issue of Brian Michael Bendis' 'the Initiative' launch of the Avengers all the more ironic, since in it, Mole Man DOES attack Manhattan, and a newly-minted team of Avengers spring into action to fight the menace.

You can't help but trip over problems, right from the first page, when the Wasp asks 'Am I to assume a training exercise to see how we work together is completely out of the question?'

She gets a smug response, and a very large amount of property damage ensues - exactly the kind of thing the Registration Act was designed to prevent.

The battle itself isn't all that interesting, except for the fantastic artwork of Frank Cho. No, the issue's only real point of interest is the sequence of scenes in which Tony Stark and Carol Danvers, standing before a cool wall-display of every 'right-thinking' superhero currently in play. Like a couple of mouth-breathing virginal fanboys (pause here while Hippolyta deadpans 'is there any other kind?'), they set out to assemble 'the greatest roster ever.'

Cue the irony here, since the roster arrived at is the single worst one since the dark days of the Forgotten One and Doctor Druid.

Iron Man, of course, and the Wasp, and the always-pleasing presence of the Black Widow (the Steve Epting-pencilled stretch where she led the team stands as one of the best runs on the title). But after that, things start to fall apart - Ms. Marvel is OK, but the perennially-boring Wonder Man is here straight out of the 80s, right down to the inability to fly and the Reagan-era tracksuit. Add to that the only superhero in the Marvel lineup MORE boring than Wonder Man - the Sentry, as dumb and derivative a character as anybody's dreamt up in quite some time. Super-strength, vague energy-powers ... whatever! Yech. And that pales beside the final member, the Greek god Ares, who for the last 30 years has been one of Thor's super-villains. He cares nothing for mortal life, and he carries an enormous axe - but hey, at least he registered.

Still, the discussions are interesting. Carol Danvers asks the question Avengers (indeed, super-team) fans have always asked: why not just assemble a team of powerhouses? At one point Carol declares that the Wasp was the best Avenger, and at another point Stark says the same of Thor. Neither nominates Captain America, and the reader can't help but notice the reason why: because Carol and Stark are both victorious Nazis, and Cap is off in a gulag somewhere. It couldn't matter less whether or not our team stops Mole Man: it's bad guy v.s. bad guy.

The whole thing is made all the more depressing by Bendis' comments in the letters page (you almost expect disagreeable parts of each letter in the future to be blacked out). He promises a big surge of super-villains in upcoming weeks, and he writes "Now that we know who the heroes are, we will set up for the villains."

Some of us - especially those of us who maintain that there's no second, subversive meaning behind all this Civil War nonsense - aren't quite so certain we now 'know' who the heroes are, but it's instructive to know that Bendis doesn't have that problem.

But then, none of this touches on the week's comic that everybody's most likely to have heard about, right? Talk about press attention: in the latest issue of Captain America, a handcuffed Steve Rogers is heart-shot by a hypnotized Sharon Carter. See the news on your local evening broadcast.

There are at least eight different ways this could be reversed, but we here at Stevereads think not. Given the current fascistic atmosphere at Marvel, we think the Steve Rogers Captain America might very well be dead, the identity to be replaced by ... well, what the Hell difference does it make WHAT replaces him? The whole foundation of the Marvel universe is now rotten beyond recall, except by some kind of total rewrite. Which would be - will be - boring and time-consuming and utterly manipulative.

It's a sad state of affairs, but at least we still have DC, surfing an almost unprecedented high.