The mental fog after reading this is not clearing up as quickly as I'd like. Was the premise of this that I'd have interesting things to say? Oh god. Oh god no. Oh god what have I done.

The thing that struck me was how quickly and without hesitation the series announced what it was about. "Here is the moral dilemma that will be the premise of this series, kids." I imagine that's sweet relief for people who buy the comics religious-like on a Wednesday, your True Believers, not having to wait for the story to reach the same point as the marketing materials.

But: it's weird reading all at once after the fact because within 30 seconds of finding out that there's an Inhuman who can see the future, Tony Stark and Captain Marvel are like "well, I guess we have no choice but to have an all-out superhero civil war because of this moral dilemma that each of us is able to carefully articulate." I can't tie my shoelaces in the morning if I don't have a cup of coffee. And I can't tie my shoelaces after I have a cup of coffee either. My point is I never learned how to tie my shoelaces-- all I do is fall down.

I think I also immediately figured out why people hate this crossover though:

It's about the Marvel superheros fighting over which of them loves Scott Stapp from the band Creed more.

Was that what happened? Did people buy these comics and just go, "Wait, is that Scott Stapp from Creed? Creed sucks!" For a multi-zillion dollar publishing outfit, they sure gambled a lot on Marvel Comics fans loving With Arms Wide Open.

Why am I reading about this douchebag??

There's some other music person he looks like more but I can't put my finger on it. But he looks like he should be singing about how Jesus is going to high-five him for not having sex before he's married, not mixing it up with Spidermen. That is not really an endearing character design, but maybe I'm just not in touch with the youth of today, their Christian rock, their Dude Perfect youtube videos, etc.

If there's some tremendous political message here, yet, I'm not picking up on it. So far it's just "what if Minority Report had blackrifice in it?" I don't ... I don't know what the answer to that is but I'm going to spend four hours today to find out! Whee!

Well, actually, there is...

I mostly missed the whole Woke Era of Comics at Marvel-- I skipped Thor being a girl, or Captain America being a minority Nazi, or all that stuff. Judging from these two issues, that stuff is really awkwardly done.

Not just in the dialogue which has some ... odd dialogue choices. The dialogue I had to stop and scribble down in my notes: "Carol. Just in time for parcheesi." "That line was parcheesi." "True. But I'm in mourning." ... I don't know what parcheesi is because I'm only a middle-aged man, not Methuselah. What the hell is being said here???

But there's a scene where Tony Stark is torturing Scott Stapp from Creed-- you know, the sort of "the power to inflict violence = awesome" kinda thing that I'd associate with Marvel comics, but then mid-way through this torture scene, Iron Man (Marvel's #1 hero celebrating the military industrial complex) starts lecturing Scott Stapp about implicit bias...? And how implicit bias means we all have received racist ideas whether or not we want to cop to them???

It's fucking weird.

Is the Marvel version of being woke just, like, "there are people out there that don't realize gender is a fluid spectrum -- so we're going to shoot rayguns out of our eyes at them until their skin melts off their flesh"? Like, I don't know how progressive you can be when your entire genre is rooted in a fetishizing an ability to inflict mass violence.

It's nice these people are trying. The results seem very awkward though.

What else do I have in my notes... "Stan Lee's biggest sin was that everybody after him wants to write wisecracks." And that's it for my notes.

Let's go to the mailbag!