Civil War

If there’s one thing we’ve learned from our years on the Internet, it’s that there’s no aspect of comics that can’t be broken down and quantified in a single definitive list, preferably in amounts of five or ten. And since there’s no more definitive authority than ComicsAlliance, we’re taking it upon ourselves to compile Top Five lists of everything you could ever want to know about comics. There's nothing fun about the topic, but death is unquestionably a huge part of superhero comics, and this week we're looking at five of the deaths that had the most profound effect on the Marvel Universe.

Once in a great while, a truly terrific fan recreation of a big time movie trailer arrives and shakes the pillars of Heaven. It's a rare feat these days, as there's a lot of people vying for that viral smash hit to break through. I've been there, and made more than a few with friends. There are a lot more clever people than me out in the world though, and they're able to make things like this latest Captain America: Civil War trailer. With the help of some mods and some good capture software, the folks at UpisNotJump have brought The Commonwealth wastelands a whole mess of heroes from the Marvel Cinematic Universe filtered through Fallout 4's lens. This is far from the first video game version of a Marvel trailer that we've seen, but the execution from remixed costumes to the lip syncing is so on point in this video, it's hard not to appreciate the efforts that went into crafting such a well-made work.

Civil War #1 arrived in May 2006, and the Marvel Comics Event in Seven Parts took over the entire line for close to an entire year and was arguably Marvel’s biggest and most successful event to date. There had been events before, such as Infinity Gauntlet, Acts of Vengeance, and House of M, and line-specific events had been a staple of the X-Men since the mid-80s, but Civil War was a new level of huge. Peter Parker’s decision to unmask was national news, and now any time a hero is killed, or resurrected, or gets a new costume, it goes straight to USA Today. Civil War is just as culturally relevant in 2016 as it was ten years ago, with Captain America: Civil War arriving in theatres in a couple of months, and Civil War II by Brian Michael Bendis and David Marquez due in May from Marvel. It still feels like it was just yesterday that Marvel asked us “Whose Side Are You On?”, rather than a whole decade, and Marvel has stuck hard to its event formula in those ten years. Now we have event comics twice a year, and each time we’re told everything will change forever. Let’s look back at the past ten years of Marvel Comics events.

The Marvel Comics line is about mid-way through its giant line-wide crossover event Secret Wars, in which reality has been rewritten by god-emperor Doom, and the heroes have been re-imagined more than a dozen times over in different domains paying tribute to stories from throughout Marvel's publishing history. One of those domains is a version of House of M, another reality-rewriting crossover event that cast the Marvel heroes in different roles, which ran ten years ago. House of M launched the current era of Marvel events, kicking off a steady steam of universe-shaking storylines that continues into Secret Wars. To mark the tenth anniversary of House of M, and ten years of event-driven storytelling, we're asking you to determine which of these events was the very best.

Another week, another batch of Marvel promos for summer 2015 events with familiar titles: Infinity Gauntlet, House of M, Old Man Logan, Inumans: Attilan Rising. They joins a slew of other recycled titles including Armor Wars, Civil War, and Planet Hulk. Then, today, things changed up a little. Marvel sent out an email for its newest summer 2015 event in the same format as it has been (one image with no text besides a title), but it doesn't have the title of an old series, though it does share a subtitle with a series of books that started about 12 years ago. It's called simply Ultimate Universe: The End.

Maybe Marvel is trying to do something about climate change. That's one possible explanation for why the publisher is recycling the titles of half a dozen, and probably more, of its events from over the years. In the past week, Marvel has announced events titled Planet Hulk and Armor Wars, and before that we found out about Civil War, Age of Ultron vs. Marvel Zombies, Secret Wars, and the slightly retitled Years of Future Past.

Civil War was the biggest superhero comic event of 2006, and Marvel is hoping that it can still make an impact in 2015, not even a decade later. The publisher released a teaser image for some kind of revival of the event in summer of 2015; in it, Captain America and a very 2006-looking Iron Man pull Spider-Man, in his spider armor costume, to their respective sides.

The practice of human sacrifice is as ancient as human civilization and has been practiced variously by various cultures, but most often to pacify gods or nature in the same manner of animal sacrifices. For example, maidens being tossed into volcanoes to keep them from erupting, or victims being buried at the foundations of castles, temples or bridges to protect the constructions from ruin. We're way past human sacrifice now, of course, but fictional character sacrifice? Today's super-comics creators seem rather devoted to that particular ritual, with many an "event" story arc beginning with the death of a character, as if they were being sacrificed to bless the ensuing narrative. The latest example is DC Comics' three-book Trinity War crossover, which begins in earnest this week but has been slowly ramping up in several books, most notably Justice League of America, where one of the publisher's oldest and best-known characters was seemingly killed recently. Be warned, for below there are spoilers for stories as old as 2004's Identity Crisis and as recent as Justice League of America #5.

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