Civil War paperback

Marvel Comics' big "event" this past year was its Civil War: the community of superheroes is divided over the issue of whether they should be registered with and regulated by the government. Things turn violent quickly as the pro-registration heroes and the government set out to arrest and imprison (in the negative zone!) all the dissenters. The interconnect universe of super-beings is torn apart in a war between heroes.

This big event starts when a group of amateurish superheroes battling supervillians cause an explosion that kills 600 school children.

The writer of the series, and other commentators, have noted that this can be seen as a political parable. That we more adult, sophisticated readers can see the analogy between this story and the American response during these post 9/11 years. Yet as I read this book it seems more like a metaphor of issues of gun control. Superheroes are vigilantes running around with loaded guns. The big incident in the comic, involving a school, makes me think more of the Columbine-types of tragedies rather than our war against terrorism. It's interesting that the writer Mark Millar lives over in Glasgow Scotland. Not being a resident of the US, perhaps he lacks much of a realistic perspective of issues in America. There are plenty of ways in which war against terrorism has effected things in the US, but the metaphor of a Civil War doesn't touch on these things at all.

This works as a minor parable concerning the right to bear arms without registering--but as a grand reflection of the effects of 9/11 on our society this one tells us nothing.

The Silver Surfer

This Silver Surfer cartoon is so cool. I enjoy it as an adult and I would have peed my pants over it back when when I was a comic book fanatic eleven year old. Back then, in the 1970's, I'd be lucky to get a brief glimpse of the Surfer maybe once a year in the pages of comic books. He was the most exciting of the marvel characters--I longed for all things cosmic! Now-- in this future I call my adulthood--the things I longed for as a boy are freely available. Silver Surfer cartoons, available whenever I want them. Endless reprints of the Kirby/Lee classics, all at my local library and bookstore. Quality live action movies about my favorite heroes. It's all so easy now. All 13 episodes of this great cartoon are up on Utube. Hopefully they'll come out on DVD some day. What I've posted here is part 1 of episode 1--if you like this you need to find part 2 of episode one--and, in fact, the origin story goes on for the first three episodes. From there the Surfer continues on from one wacky cosmic adventure to another throughout the 13 episodes...

Power of Spiderman

I wonder how much the success of Spiderman is being driven by kids. In the 4th and 3rd grade classes where I've been student teaching, the kids knew the exact date of the movie's release weeks ahead of time. They would ask me what I was going to be doing on May 4th back in mid-April! And two students were pulled out of class early that Friday so that they could go to the movie with their dads! I think these kids have grown up watching the first two Spidey movies over and over on DVD and so they'd built up this huge excitement over the coming movie, which might often be reinforced by superheroes being a way to bond with Dad.