This Magazine Kills Fascists looks at times that comic books and superheroes have dealt with tyrannical, corrupt and outright fascist world leaders — not because we think we can find a solution, but because art can provide inspiration in the face of oppression.
Today, for absolutely no reason at all, we're going to talk about the time a violent and unqualified businessman was raised up to a position of global importance and how he used it to give his unqualified criminal friends jobs, swindle America and was ultimately brought down by his own fragile ego. Like I said... no reason at all.
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 Unlimited app is a gigantic, messy cache of awesome and terrible old comic books: a library of 13,000 or so back issues of Marvel titles, available on demand for subscribers with tablets or mobile phones. Like any good back-room longbox, it’s disorganized and riddled with gaps, but it’s also full of forgotten and overlooked jewels, as well as a few stone classics. In Marvel Unlimited Edition, Eisner-winning critic Douglas Wolk dives into the Unlimited archive to find its best, oddest and most intriguing comics.
In this week's edition: Replacing Peter Parker with Otto Octavius for 31 issues was a neat demonstration of how strong Spider-Man's supporting cast is -- and The Superior Foes of Spider-Man has removed its title character from the equation altogether and gotten a terrific series out of it. Even before the big mind-swap, though, there was a little tradition of Spider-Man comics without Spider-Man in them. (He doesn't appear in Amazing Spider-Man #654.1 or #676, for instance, both among 2011's best done-in-one issues of the series.) Here are some of the most entertaining examples on Marvel Unlimited.
Before the Kinect-powered fighting game Marvel Avengers: Battle For Earth was a twinkle in Ubisoft's eye, THQ was reportedly at work on a similarly Skrull-centric Avengers action game. The game was canceled, with various character renders and a little bit of gameplay footage eventually surfacing online, but what of the game's concept art...
After several summers of Marvel superhero movie tie-in game releases, it's felt a bit weird not to see at least some kind of corresponding release for The Avengers -- especially having seen what might have been from THQ. That changes this fall as Marvel and Ubisoft team for The Avengers: Battle For Earth, an upcoming Kinect title for Xbox 360 and Nintendo's Wii U based on Marvel's Secret Invasion
For a good long while, comic book fans had plenty of reasons to be fed up with Skrulls. Those scaly green shapeshifters were literally everywhere you looked in the Marvel Universe - worst of all, sometimes you didn't even know it was a Skrull until it was far too late...
Press Release
In 2008, the Marvel Universe will be consumed by Secret Invasion, the comic book event over five years in the making, written by Brian Bendis and penciled by Leinil Yu.
Only one question remains: Who Do You Trust?