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THE LAW IS A ASS #302: A Civil War Never Is

  • Uncategorized
  • March 14, 2014

“Whose side are you on?” That’s how Marvel touted its mega-event of 2006-2007, Civil War. Me? I’m on the readers’ side. So, even though Civil War ended some time ago, we’re still living in its aftermath and I’m still looking for a way to prove it couldn’t have happened.

Civil War started because the New Warriors, a team of “poorly-trained” super-heroes, tried to boost the ratings of their reality show by capturing a group of super-villains on camera. One of the super-villains, Nitro, the villain who can blow himself up over and over, decided that rather than be captured, he would blow himself up “real good,” killing over six hundred people, including a school bus full of children.

Everyone blamed the New Warriors. I don’t know why. Maybe because it’s easier to blame the heroes than the super-villain who actually killed the six hundred people. Maybe because Civil War’s plot needed a plot device that would prompt Congress to enact a Superhuman Registration Act. All I know is that in the eyes of the law, the New Warriors shouldn’t be blamed for Nitro’s acts.

See, the law has this thing called the Doctrine of Emergency, which says people can act in emergencies without being subject to normal standards of care. The doctrine exists to encourage good Samaritans, so the law seeks to immunize them if they try to do good in an emergency situation but cause some harm as a result. So if a person performs emergency CPR on a heart attack victim and accidentally breaks the victim’s ribs, the good Samaritan isn’t liable for breaking the heart attack victim’s ribs. In the same way, if a group of super-heroes takes on a group of super-villains who are attacking a city, the heroes shouldn’t be held responsible if third parties get hurt or killed in the fight; and they especially shouldn’t be blamed if one of the villains acts on his own and kills said third parties. God, if the Doctrine of Emergency didn’t exist, can you imagine the property damage and wrongful death suits that would have been brought against Superman after [[[Man of Steel]]]? Instead, he got thanked by some Metropolans in the middle of a bomb crater.

Civil War had major problems in its premise because of the Doctrine of Emergency. The New Warriors shouldn’t have been be liable for the deaths that Nitro caused. Nevertheless, and despite the fact that the law may not be on its side, the Marvel Universe Congress passed the SRA. After all, when has a little thing like the law not being on its side ever stopped Congress?

The SRA required all super-powered individuals in the Marvel Universe to register their identities and super powers with the federal government, so that the government could train meta-humans to use their powers properly. Riiiiight. Our government couldn’t even train FEMA agents how to book passage on Orbitz to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, it’s the perfect organization to teach Captain Wrigley how to keep his mutant-powered minty freshness fresh all day.

Under the SRA, failure to register was a criminal offense. Several of the super-heroes, most notably Captain America, opposed the SRA. They refused to register, and immediately became outlaws and fugitives because the SRA and its registration requirement went into effect the day it was enacted. Which is the second legal reason why Civil War couldn’t have happened.

In the real world, laws have a phase-in periods. New emission control standards don’t go into effect overnight, before any automobile manufacturer had a chance to comply with them. Car manufacturers are given time to get their cars into compliance with the standards; usually years. Registration laws also have phase-ins periods. When the Selective Service Act was enacted, the federales didn’t start rounding up the unregistered at the stroke of midnight on the day the law went into effect. No, the SSA gave people a period of several months to register before they were called draft dodgers.

Why? Well, what if someone was in Europe on the day the law went into effect so couldn’t register? Should he be a criminal under those circumstances or should he be given time to return from Europe and register? Now multiply that problem a millionfold for super-heroes. What if, when the SRA went into effect, a super-hero was visiting the Blue Area of the Moon, or fighting Blastaar in the Negative Zone, or was dead and hadn’t been retconned back to life yet? Should said hero be guilty of violating the SRA?

So, if the SRA had a phase-in period, and it would have had one, that means Civil War hasn’t actually happened yet. Remember, the Marvel Universe time moves much, much slower than real time. In the Marvel Universe, the SRA’S months-long phase-in period probably wouldn’t be ending until right about now. We still have time to give Captain America and Iron Man a copy of Civil War #7, with its oh-so-obvious solution to the problem, and keep them from fighting in the first place. We can keep Civil War from happening.

And that means we don’t have to see Tony Stark become someone unrecognizable to anyone who grew up with him when he was a hero. It means we don’t have to see Reed Richards explain that he was in favor of the SRA, because the law was the law and as long as it was the law, we have to obey it; conveniently forgetting that in his own origin he stole a rocket ship, thereby committing the grandest grand theft motor vehicle in history. It also means that we don’t have to see Captain America scolded for not really knowing what the American people wanted because he didn’t have a MySpace page or a YouTube account. (After all, everyone knows that you really measure how in touch with the American people a person is by counting how many e-mails offering financial aid he gets from deposed Nigerian princes.)

So Marvel’s Civil War couldn’t have happened. And we can ignore all those stories that came during and after it. Well, not really, but sometimes don’t you wish you could? I was born in 1952, some ninety years too young to have been in the American Civil War. And after thinking about Civil War all over again, I realized that I wish I had been too young for Marvel’s Civil War, too.

Author’s Note: I wrote a few installments of “The Law Is a Ass” for Comics’ Buyer’s Guide which, for a variety of reasons, it never printed. From time to time, I am going to run one of these previously unpublished installments, slightly edited to bring them up to date. This is one of those times.

The Strangest Mutant of All is Back in ALL-NEW DOOP #1!

  • Uncategorized
  • March 14, 2014

This April, the weirdest mutant of them all takes center stage in his very own limited series! Today, Marvel is proud to present your first look at ALL-NEW DOOP #1 – from Doop co-creator and legendary X-writer Peter Milligan and blockbuster artist David Lafuente!

Who is Doop? Actually…what is Doop? (more…)

Martha Thomases: Comic books make me a better person

capstone_contest-3297499I love comic books.  I have since I was five years old.  I even love comic books I don’t like. I love the way the whole of words and pictures is bigger (and better) than the parts.  I love the way that great storytellers can take a blank piece of paper (or  computer screen) and <a href=”

target=”_blank” rel=”noopener”>make anything happen.

Comic books make me a better person.

This point was brought home to me this weekend, when I read this amazing story.  In case you don’t read it (and you should because, like I said, amazing), it’s about an autistic young man who found a way to articulate his feelings and communicate with other people through Walt Disney Studios animated films.

Now, I don’t know much about autism,and it is not my intention here to act like I’m any kind of expert.  However, in reading the story, I was reminded how much I learned about people from popular culture.  The kid in the story used Disney cartoons.  I liked them, too.

But it was comics that really taught me empathy.

Any fiction (and quite a bit of non-fiction) can put the reader into the head of another character, will let you see the world through her eyes.  Comics can do this, and also let you see exactly how difference another being’s experience can be.

For example, when I was a kid, I loved the Legion of Super-Heroes.  I started pretty much when the team did, with three members, two boys and a girl, all white as the driven snow.  I liked Saturn Girl, but she was not a lot like me.  I had trouble imagining what it was like to be her.  However, as I read more stories, the team got more members.  Triplicate Girl had brown hair, just like me.  Shrinking Violet was shy, just like me.

And there was Chameleon Boy, with his orange skin and his antenna.  He was funny. and cracked jokes, just like me.  Brainiac 5 had green skin, and he was so smart that sometimes he annoyed the other kids, just like I did.  I learned that I could identify with someone who didn’t look like me, whose body didn’t work the same way mine did, who came from a place way way different from Youngstown, Ohio.

Superhero comics literally taught me how to see the world through the eyes of others.  What I mean is, sometimes the artist would depict the scenes from a character’s point of view, not from the outside.  Along with captions and thought balloons, it was like being in another person’s head.

Later, when I was in Sunday School and learned about Marrano Jews, I already had some understanding of what it meant to have a secret identity.  I’d seen people who had them who were not Jewish (although most, I would later learn, had been created by Jews).  It helped me to understand other kinds of people who might feel they had to hide their differences from the mainstream.

It’s a little bit roundabout that I made the leap to understanding other humans through Durlans, Coluans and Kryptonians.  I felt what it was like to be alien from actual aliens, not from meeting people from other countries.  I felt what it was like to be different inside from the Thing in The Fantastic Four, not from knowing someone of another race or gender identity.

Does that sound condescending?  That’s not my intention.  I’m trying to explain how a five-year old, or an eight year old — and sometimes a 60 year old — needs stories (graphic and otherwise) to see the humanity in other humans.  That’s what artists do.

And I’m grateful.

Dennis O’Neil: How Long Can You Go Without Faking It?

Story ideas are pretty malleable. I once presided over/rode herd on/sweated out an 1,100+ page continuity that began as a plot for two 15-pagers.  Hemingway is credited with writing a story in only six words.  (Go on. Google it.  I’ll wait.)  I did something a while back, just a bit over 500 words, that, I think, qualifies as a story, though some might disagree, (and because we cherish the First Amendment, if for no other reason, we welcome their dissent.)

Slick magazines, back when my mother was reading them, featured stories complete on one page.

Superman’s origin, which, you might recall, involved an exploding planet – we’re not talking small, here – was originally told on one page and the first Batman story ran a mere six pages, but it was very close to a Shadow novel that must have been in the neighborhood of 45,000 words.

[[[The Great Gatsby]]], often cited as a great novel, is 47,094 words. [[[War and Peace]]], ditto on the great novel label, goes 587,287.

So, is there a point to all this?  Let’s try to find one.

Story ideas, and literary forms, might be malleable, but that doesn’t excuse scriveners from the labor of plotting and structuring. You can’t just plunk yourself down at the keyboard, decide you’ll do an 1,100-pager and begin to perpetrate the opening of this Sahara of a continuity. No, check that: you can begin the aforementioned perpetration, but a prudent person might advise against it. The danger is that, toward the end, you might find a lot of loose ends that defy knotting, or you might have given your characters problems that they can’t solve and still stay true to whatever else you’ve established.  Or you might just run out of plot. Then, you begin to improvise. You fake it. You pad. Are you, by now, boring the reader? Admit the possibility, anyway.

It happens.  A person far wiser in the ways of Big Media recently confirmed what I’d read somewhere.  Sometimes, writers and producers of television entertainment begin a protracted and complicated storyline with no clear idea of how they’ll get from A to B. They make it up as they go along.  Sometimes they get away with it.  Sometimes.

I know that some Nineteenth Century literary luminaries – Charles Dickens and Fyodor Dostoyevsky to name two – serialized their novels before publishing them in hard covers.  I wonder: did they make it up as they went along?  Did they do outlines?  Plot summaries?

What we did, my comic book colleagues and I, was make pretty detailed outlines, in consultation with our freelancers. We all knew what story we wanted to tell and had a reasonably firm idea of how it should end.  There was a few small disagreements: some of my merry men wanted the outline to be detailed; I wanted to leave wiggle room and preserve the option of someone having a better idea along the way.  But we generally knew where we were going and how to get there.

One more thing: that outline assured us that we had enough plot to justify the number of pages we were planning to occupy.  We could and did permit side plots to run in parallel with our central story, but we wanted none of that padding stuff.

Is here any padding in the preceding 551 words?  Well…

Mike Gold and His Invisible Donuts

(For reasons that will become obvious, this, my first column in about a month, is to be run both on www.MichaelDavisWorld.com and on www.ComicMix.com. Go nuts; read it twice and offer contradictory comments!)

I have a friend named Larry Schlam, a noted child’s rights advocate and a former Bronx street-corner singer. Back around 1973 he and I were cutting through the Montgomery Ward store in downtown Chicago and I wanted to stop at their donut shop, which was excellent. Larry, who is prone to eating frog’s legs and sushi (not necessarily together), explained the concept of “empty calories.” This past month, I learned the concept of invisible donuts.

This winter, the convention has been to slip on the massive ice floe that has engulfed most of this nation east of the Rocky Mountains. That’s not for me. I don’t roll that way. A month ago I took a fall about thirty feet below the ice, at the Times Square subway station. Had this not been an accident, I would have had the foresight to bring along a coffee can to collect contributions. Intention aside, I managed to pulverize my left shoulder – and, of course, I’m left-handed. I’m damn near left-everything.

But I say “pulverize” instead of “break” because that’s exactly what happened. Several X-Ray technicians, emergency room personnel, and my surgeon-to-be all wondered why I wasn’t on a morphine drip. Nonetheless, my shoulder replacement surgery was scheduled for about two weeks later, doubtlessly so I had time to reflect upon my behavior. However, I was given Oxycodone and Vicodin to battle the pain. They said I was stoic. I said it hurt.

Both are opiates and are taken recreationally by some. Contrary to common wisdom medicine is an art form and not a science – what works for you could be no more effective than a Skittle for me. The meds helped with the pain, but the concurrent high was insufficient for me to break out my Jimi Hendrix albums. So it goes.

When it finally came time to go under the knife, I was told I’d be in hospital for one night, maybe two. Surgery was scheduled for the last Monday in February. But I woke up on Thursday with a bit of grogginess and that whole unmentionable catheter thing (yes, guys, you too can squirm). Being in compos mentis, I figured I was wrong and the surgery must have happened on Wednesday.

Well, I was wrong. The new shoulder went in on Monday, and Tuesday evening I had a severe reaction to the anesthesia. My blood oxygen was down to a near-lethal level and I was acting like – in the words of my gifted daughter Adriane – a 220 pound drunken three year old. Evidently I was funny and charming, but I scared the hell out of the assembled medical practitioners. As I do not drink alcohol and do not have a street drug problem (they called around to confirm this), they were dumbfounded.

Meanwhile, I was having a blast. Prior to my blood oxygen train wreck I announced to the assembled masses that two boxes of invisible donuts had just materialized on my chest. Given the circumstances, I believe there was some attempt to quantify the humor of my revelation. A short time later, Adriane saw me pantomiming eating those donuts. She asked “Are you, ah, eating those donuts?” I responded mouth-closed (even in my condo in Wackyland, I endeavor to remain polite) by opening my eyes brightly and nodding happily.

I’m told I spent Wednesday in the ICU until my numbers recovered, and I was discharged the following Friday. My new shoulder has more chrome in it than a ’57 Buick and I still can’t use my left arm for more than a few minutes – this piece will have taken me about six times as long to write. After a few more doctors, I’ll be starting physical therapy in a couple weeks. Larry Hama, who’s been through this type of thing and just had a hip replacement, advised me “Whatever the therapist tells you to do, do it.” That’s good enough for me.

So I haven’t quite disappeared from the planet as of yet. I’m blessed with good friends, comrades who cover for me without squawking, a wonderful slew of professionals at Norwalk and Stamford Hospitals, and a daughter so awesome and self-sacrificing I wonder what I did in a prior life to deserve her.

Invisible donuts are just as satisfying as the real thing – but getting them is a bitch.

Mike Gold will get back to performing his weekly two-hour Weird Sounds Inside The Gold Mind ass-kicking rock, blues and blather radio show on The Point, www.getthepointradio.com and on iNetRadio, www.iNetRadio.com as part of “Hit Oldies” every Sunday at 7:00 PM Eastern, rebroadcast three times during the week – check www.getthepointradio.com above for times and on-demand streaming information. He thinks this will happen on Sunday, March 16th. Gold also joins MDW’s Marc Alan Fishman, Martha Thomases and Michael Davis as a weekly columnist at www.comicmix.com where he pontificates on matters of four-color. Gold also joins ComicMix’s Marc Alan Fishman, Martha Thomases and Michael Davis as a weekly columnist at www.michaeldavisworld.com, and chances are you’re presently reading these words at one of those two venues.

Michael Davis: Who’s Sorry Now?

It’s been a while since I’ve taken someone to task with a good old fashion rant, so…

Last week I missed my ComicMix deadline.

Not that anyone noticed.

Usually when I missed a deadline it’s because of illness or stupidity.

Not that anyone cares.

I drive myself pretty hard and take on a lot of stuff and there are times when I drive myself too hard.  When those way to often moments happen I’m subject to the worst migraines and I’m unable to work.

How bad are these headaches? You know the expression; ‘I wouldn’t wish that on my worst enemy?’  Well I would, because I’m just that kind of bastard. If I miss a deadline because of illness a migraine is almost certain to be the reason.

I did not miss list week’s deadline because I was ill. So that leaves being stupid. (more…)

Box Office Democracy: “Mr. Peabody & Sherman”

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  • March 11, 2014

I was a big fan of [[[The Rocky & Bullwinkle Show]]] as a child and while I enjoyed almost all of the segments “Peabody’s Improbable History” was a particular favorite.  I don’t know what it is but time travel and know-it-alls have always appealed to me.  It was because of this fandom and the horrific earlier attempts to make films out of the Jay Ward cartoons that made me approach Mr. Peabody & Sherman with particular trepidation.  I’m happy to report that these fears were unfounded and that Mr. Peabody & Sherman is a generally delightful movie.

After perhaps a bit too much exposition (the original cartoon never seemed to need much more than talking dog, pet boy, time machine) Mr. Peabody & Sherman gets right into a trip to Revolutionary France that plays like a more action-packed version of an old-school Peabody short.  It even closes with a pun.  From there the movie packs on a rather stunning amount of plot when all I really wanted was more of the classic formula.

This is the peril of the modern reboot movie; they often lose the fun in favor of a more modern approach to storytelling.  I don’t care about Sherman being bullied for having a father that’s a dog, I don’t care about irrationally angry school counselors that want to involve Child Protective Services, I only care about Mr. Peabody hosting a dinner party because the characters attending are voiced by Stephen Colbert and Leslie Mann, and I don’t really need Mr. Peabody to learn a lesson about being a good father.  I just want time travel and jokes and for a good percentage of those jokes to be terrible puns.  I don’t think that’s too much to ask and the movie delivers on this frequently but I left the theater wanting more.

Mr. Peabody & Sherman is better than it is bad and I enthusiastically await a sequel (it seems on pace for those kind of numbers assuming the rights aren’t a mess) but there are so many tiny flaws holding this one back from the excellence that was in its grasp.  I’ve seen enough terrible kids movies the last two years that very good is more than enough for me but if I were Rob Minkoff and I had directed this and The Lion King I would feel like this one could have been a bigger deal.

Announcing the Mix March Madness 2014 Seeding Round!

  • News
  • March 11, 2014

UPDATE: Seeding round is over! Go vote in Round 1 now!comicmixmarchmadnessfeatured-550x98-7569623

Yes, it’s that time of year again, the time where bracketology reigns supreme and the cry around the nation is “Win or Go Home!” Last year’s Mix March Madness Webcomics Tournament was incredibly popular, and so we’re doing it all over again– and raising money for the Hero Initiative in the process! Find out how…

(more…)

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