I like Marvel's movies because they don't get all God damned serious.

Civil War is fun. You get like five minutes of "boo hoo laws and problems and shit" and then Black Panther is fighting Captain America for some reason.

I find it hard to talk about these movies without letting my inner fanboy show. Especially the better ones, and this is one of those.

DC movies always try to be noir. I'm not sure if that's why they don't usually work as well as the Marvel films. When you compare Iron Man trying to kill Captain America with last month's Batman trying to kill Superman, what really makes the difference is that the conflict and the motives are so much better developed in the case of Marvel, and much more real, because there's no contrived resolution.

The fight at the airport is like the Odessa Steps of comic book movies. It will be studied in film classes. At least that's my impression at one viewing. it demands to be seen again.

DC's problem is that they are too busy trying to prove they're "mature" that they forget to give viewers any of the things that made them like their characters in the first place. If you watch, say, the first "Avengers" movie, you'll see that all the heroes are given their moments to shine; somehow DC decided that's a loser's way to do movies.

If Superman and Batman fight, it almost certainly means one or the other, and possibly both, are being written wildly out of character. That's the latest movie. But "Civil War", from all the reviews, is getting its characters exactly right.

The roots of the "Civil War" movie aren't really the comics' "Civil War" dog turd storyline, except on a superficial level. I say it stems more from the "Cap No More" storyline from the mid/late 80s, when Steve Rogers quit rather than be reduced to a mere government operative.

http://www.blastoffcomics.com/2016/05/comics-101-july-15-2014- because-its-right-part-ii-ethics-and-the-work-of-mark-gruenwald/
So right there, we've got Steve Rogers being presented with a similar choice as in the movie, and making more or less the same decision.

But something else happened too, a few months into the storyline: over in Iron Man's comic, Iron Man was going through a story called "Iron Wars", where he realized some of his proprietary tech had been leaked, so he responded by going around and destroying any armor or tech that seemed to be at all derivative. This included going after armored guards at supervillain prisons, and in the process causing enough mayhem to let lots of prisoners go free. Steve Rogers promptly confronted Iron Man over his irresponsibility, and that is where the tradition started of Cap and Iron Man being at loggerheads. The two remain friends for the most part, but any time there's an issue where idealism and pragmatism come into conflict, you can bet it will be Cap on the one side and Iron Man on the other.

Civil War is fun. I liked it.

I read DC comics AND Marvel comics as a kid, but I couldn't tell you the real name of Flash or Green Lantern. In DC, secret identities could be plot devices, but they were never really characters. Peter Parker is a character. Tony Stark is a character. Ben Grimm is a character, and so is Bruce Banner. And they've always been character, so they can be written into character driven stories. They were 40 years in when they decided that Batman was supposed to be haunted and brooding, and the Superman that I grew up with was more Paul Bunyan than Christ. It seems a little contrived, and apparently not just for old guys like me.

There's a twist toward the end of Civil War that's just devastating, and it's not the least bit contrived. It's been building for at least a couple of movies, it's completely consistent with characters and events, and pays off big in OMG.

Since Howard Stark played a seminal role in the creation of Captain America, does that make Steve and Tony brothers?

Five stars for OLD SCHOOL TEENAGE SPIDERMAN!

It looks like Spidey got a reboot without the origin story. I think that's best. Poor Uncle Ben has suffered enough.

"In DC, secret identities could be plot devices, but they were never really characters."

I won't deny that was the case. These days, though, DC is much better about that. At present, Hal Jordan (the only GL worth talking about) is probably being written better than he ever has been, character-wise; you may or may not be crazy about the stories, but Hal himself is aces.

The core structure at Marvel has always been soap opera, which makes sense seeing as Marvel's writers got their start in romance comics. (Patsy Walker, the Hellcat, actually started out as a teen romance character but then moved to superhero comics.) The core sensibility at DC has always been crimebusting: a crime happens, the hero responds. There are strengths and weaknesses to each, but what works for one does not work well for the other: a tireless do-gooder like Superman feels out of place at Marvel, and reluctant heroes who constantly want to quit fare poorly at DC.

I bet you're a Clutch Cargo fan.

Okay, animation this limited would usually be considered terrible, but here it works, because this is essentially a comic book for TV. This must be original comic book art and stories adapted very directly to TV. This is a great idea. It was cheap, true to its source, and made moving to the comics themselves pretty natural for an eight year old Motherfucker.

I stopped reading comics when they went over a dollar apiece. Just seemed too expensive. Shit, when I got into comics they were 12 cents, and a quarter for an 80 page special. But I think I'm going to sign up for 10 bucks a month to read Marvel comics on my tablet.

http://marvel.com/comics/unlimited

IT'S CLOBBERIN' TIME!!

ZITT!

This remains my favorite:

http://www.poetv.com/video.php?vid=42608