interna batali

The majority of today was spent reading Civil War, the Marvel series from a few years back.  It was written in direct response to the Bush era war on terror, which is summarized in one of the first issues:

This is a little more blatantly liberal than the rest of the series, which admittedly has a strong liberal bias, but is a good summery of the sentiments at the time.

It starts with a depressing disaster in which a group of mostly well meaning "heroes" attempt to take on some villains that are clearly out of their league, and ends with 600 people, including over 60 children, dead.  Not surprisingly, the blame falls on the "heroes" that should have never precipitated the event in the first place, and to some extent it is their fault.

And then the series plays on the most universal fact of earth:

People are stupid.

Really fucking stupid.

People freak out and cry to the government to help them.  And just like any time the government steps in to attempt to fix a bad situation, things go straight to hell in a beautiful little hand basket, gift-wrapped, scented with lavender, and a gift card.

I'm about a quarter of the way through the series, which with all of the side stories comes to somewhere between 3000 and 4000 pages of comic.

As fun as the series is to read, and as many good points as it does bring up, sometimes its hard to read.  One issue to the next of even the same series can have dramatically different artistic styles, and the writing is sometimes campy to the point of being sickening, especially spider man.  Twilight has better dialog than that guy sometimes. (Stretch, I'm looking at you, with your butterflies line).

At this point, I'm calling it a night, and I've taken Fahrenheit 451 off the shelf to read that just to get some real literature into my brain.  Not that its not good, but reading 4 months worth of comics in a day cannot be good for you.  Nor is the desire to.

Peace.

Out.