Welcome to The Multiversity Address, Multiversity Comics’s recap series for Marvel’s “Civil War II.” After, Jess, Alice, and I died in the process of covering every single “Secret Wars” tie-in, we opted to just let me recap Marvel’s latest revival of a classic crossover.
Obviously, we’ve got spoilers for “Civil War II” from here on out.
At the start of “Civil War II” #1, Ulysses is reacting to being written by Brian Michael Bendis.
When we last saw Ulysses, he had just been given Inhuman powers from the Terrigen Mist cloud that overran his school. They also turned his crush into a huge monster, but that doesn’t get brought up here so you can just assume she murdered absolutely everyone on his campus. He also had a vision of Manhattan in hellish flames, which is pretty standard for Marvel’s version of Manhattan. And the real Manhattan if we’re being honest, with ourselves.
Ulysses gets picked up by the Inhumans who adopt him as one of their own. Since Ulysses can see visions of disastrous events in the future, the Inhumans get some goodwill from the Avengers by warning them about some upcoming stuff. What kind of upcoming stuff?
A fucking Celestial just drops in the middle of New York City and causes an all-out brawl between almost every hero in the Marvel Universe and an unstoppable force of cosmic horror. If you thought that this huge epic fight would be more than a blip in this crossover’s narrative, then I am very sorry to disappoint you. This is a “serious” comic so we’re going to spend a few pages kind of fighting monsters and villains while the rest of our screentime will be spent on the vapid arguments that are going to come up later on. Doctor Strange and his crew (which includes Hellstrom for some weird, amazing reason), are able to send the Celestial away with everyone’s help. The Avengers call it a job well done and decide to celebrate.
If you’re ever confused as to who the bad guy in the fight between Iron Man and Captain Marvel is going to be, remember that Carol Danvers asked Tony “Half Of My Blood Used To Be Whiskey” Stark to buy drinks. Savage. That’d be like if the Red Hood and The Outlaws were sighing in relief after saving the world and Arsenal’s like “Wow I’m really glad we came through there!” and Jason Todd’s just like “Yeah, how about you buy us some fucking heroin, Speedy.” Maybe that scene already happened. I don’t know, I don’t read “Red Hood and The Outlaws.”
At Tony Stark’s “I’m Not Swear, I Drunk” party, Tony toasts everyone for beating a goddamn space god without a single person dying, which is honestly pretty crazy. Speaking of dying, War Machine shows up to remind us that he’s a character who means a whole lot to his best friend, Tony Stark. This is the first time War Machine and Iron Man have been on the same comic page since 2004 but they are best friends who mean a lot to each other, for real. Just look at the way they’re wearing matching dumb outfits.
You don’t wear white skintights to match someone else’s black skintight unless you’re best friends or at least a professional wrestling tag team. Anyway, Rhodes goes off to enjoy his last day on this Earth while Iron Man gets to business. He and a bunch of other heroes meet up with The Inhumans in Iron Man’s kitchen where they introduce everyone to Ulysses. Not sure how his powers work, Iron Man suggests they bring in Young Jean Grey, the playwright behind Straight White Men and We’re Gonna Die, to check out Ulysses’s brain. Captain Marvel’s like, “Aren’t the Inhumans and mutants in a big kerfuffle because the Inhumans are directly causing the X-Men to die?” and Iron Man’s like, “As long as Fox owns their movie rights, I couldn’t give a fuck.” Young Jean Grey checks Ulysses’s brain and finds that there’s nothing in there about his powers that she can read. Spider-Man then asks Young Jean Grey how the fuck she still hasn’t been sent back to her own time.
Continued belowCaptain Marvel gets really excited about Ulysses’s powers, since The Ultimates’ whole thing revolves around preventing disasters from happening. Iron Man asks if she’s even seen Minority Report and she asks if he saw the giant space god that stepped on Shake Shack the other day.
The next day Iron Man’s still feeling pretty good about the whole fighting off a Celestial thing until literally everything goes wrong.
“Like to Shake Shack? That got destroyed last week.”
Tony Stark, shocked over his friend’s death (because being in a crossover comic doesn’t make you a complete sociopath only a partial one), flies to the infirmary where all the heroes are getting healed up. He asks for Captain Marvel and finds her. With She-Hulk.
It turns out that Ulysses had another vision, this time about Thanos attacking. Captain Marvel rallies up some heroes to go fight him before he kills some people. Unfortunately, murder isn’t one of those things that you can stop Thanos from doing and he punches through War Machine like a child impatiently getting candy out of a piñata. Then he knocks She-Hulk into a coma, possibly paralyzing her in the process. Then Thanos twists off Gambit’s head and crushes his skull so he could lap up the brain fluids like orange juice. No one really cared about that last one.
Iron Man gets really upset because his friend died. Captain Marvel’s more upset because her best friend is dying in a hospital bed in front of her and she was dating Rhodey who, as you might have heard, kicked the bucket. Carol tries to explain this to Tony but he won’t stop complaining about how Rhodey’s skintight leotard was a rental and now he’ll never get that deposit back.
Iron Man leaves to go get his Civil War kit from the last time he had to kick his friends’ asses, leaving Captain Marvel with She-Hulk, who’s in pretty stable condition. Sheeven gets to say a few words about how Carol has to keep fighti- HAHAH WHOOPS!
That’s how “Civil War II” #1 ends. With an emotional torture porn tableau of Captain Marvel weeping uncontrollably as she watches a loved one die a horrible death in front of her for the second time that day. It would’ve been perfect if Tony just popped his head back in and said “Drinks are on you this time, baby!!”
It’s still pretty early to say, but “Civil War II” is already a perfect successor to “Civil War I” in that it embodies the same dread that “Civil War I” brought to mainstream superheroes with absolutely none of the political context that made “Civil War I” at least kind of acceptable. As much as I am all for bashing “Civil War”, it at least existed as a reaction to The Patriot Act, so I get why it exists to some extent. Here, there’s no real political divide, as of yet, that’s pitting hero against hero which would be pretty easy to establish in a post-Snowden world with that one hero (Ulysses) who could spy on everyone’s future.
Instead, we’re just watching broken characters get driven even further to the breaking point by horrific events that happen mostly off-screen and probably won’t be revisited any time soon. We just zoom in on the utter misery that is Carol’s one working weeping eye as it watches her best friend bite the dust. The original “Civil War” started with an actual school bus of children being killed in a freak accident and “Civil War II” #1 is somehow the more miserable comic. I hope a parent buys this for their kid after taking them to see Captain America: Civil War, reads it, and tells their child they can never read comics ever again. See you in a few weeks for “Civil War II” #2.
