Whoever finishes a revolution only halfway, digs his own grave.

-- Georg Buchner

So when we last left off, the Civil War characters were going to go talk to Hulk because Scott Stapp had a vision of Hulk being real mean-like. So then: it cuts ahead to a Trial of the Century for Hawkeye -- because Hawkeye decided to murder Hulk from a nearby tree, rather than let Hulk get mean-like. Trials Of the Century usually take (a) months to start and (b) months to finish, but this all took about 24 hours in Marvel time.

(Daredevil is either prosecuting the case or the defense attorney on the case-- it's hard to tell because he's aggressively examining everyone, without any of that fuddy duddy "advocacy" business getting in the way.)

Anyways, the jury lets Hawkeye go because they're like "oh Hawkeye killing the Hulk-- well, that was more like assisted suicide than murder." Uhm: but assisted suicide last I checked was still illegal. So.

Anyways: then there's a lenghty part where everyone in the comic turns to Carol Danvers and is like "Carol Danvers, you are a horrible woman who no decent person could ever feel any affection towards." (But it's okay because Marvel is feminist now). And then Carol Danvers rolls her eyes, flies through somebody's ceiling, and threatens to rob a woman of her civil rights until finally-- FINALLY-- a bunch of superheros show up to start the Civil War.

Four months seem like a long time to wait for a Civil War to start in a comic book called Civil War 2. But it's not like I'm in a hurry. Where do I have to be today? Well, I have some laundry to do. My shirts don't smell right. People are starting to notice. I can feel their stares.

Let's shift over and do a lame joke...

Cue my Lame Joke Theme Music!

[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=auUPqxI1vqg[/embed]

...

Goddamn, I need better lame joke theme music.

I'm out of practice!

I DON'T HAVE WHAT IT TAKES ANYMORE.

I remember when I got caught experimenting on myself. There's no shame to it!

AND THAT'S BEEN OUR LAME JOKE DEPARTMENT.

On the "why wasn't this a big crowdpleaser" level... I don't know that the story's especially un-engaging. It's moving from big moment to big moment. Well, unless you like the Captain Marvel character-- if you like that character, I'd have to think this would be dismaying because that character's not been presented as a valid character in this, very much.

You can say the same is true of Iron Man in the first Civil War except... Iron Man was kind of in a shambles after Civil War. Didn't they have to reboot Iron Man's brain a year after Civil War, erase his memories, etc.? It would seem the "let's make one character a total villain" thing would be something you'd want to course-correct about that first Civil War, but if anything, this seems more extreme because all of the good characters like Tony Stark and none like Danvers.

But besides that... I don't think the art's that exciting. The rendering is nice but look at this page-- it's a page where Tony's talking about all these exciting things that got prevented thanks to Scott Stapp, but ... It's a drawing of Modok, a drawing of some guys rappelling towards a building (presumably a building where something exciting happened?), and a pinup of some superheros posing.

There's no storytelling going on here, really.

How exciting would that be for fans?

The art has to tell a story-- otherwise, it's not comics. It's just pin-ups.

Do you think that contributed to fans not getting excited? Or are modern comic fans so divorced from the art-appreciation part that it doesn't even make a difference anymore? I couldn't even guess.

Like, what emotions am I supposed to be looking at here?

I don't really quite know...

Determination? Anger? Curiosity?

I'm kind of at a loss.

Oh wait, Sasquatch and five characters I can't name are siding with Carol Danvers -- nevermind.

Anyways, politically, this comic continues to be deeply weird, though I can see from the clock I'm running out of time.

But the comic seems to be engaged in an argument that racial profiling is bad even though it's right a lot of the time...? Which. That's a weird way of phrasing that argument. It's sort of reminds me of Zootopia, where that movie was like "we all should want more harmony with minorities, who are fundamentally predators but maybe have the ability to control their predatorial natures." Uh, that would be a lot cooler without that second half of that sentence!

Isn't the better argument that racial profiling is bad because an evaluation of something's morality sometimes goes beyond statistics and numerical results? I don't know. We'll see where this goes.

Favorite dialogue in this stretch: "And?" "And?" "And?" "And?"

...He's getting paid by the "And?" Baby needs that "And?" money.

And it's 4pm.