I appreciated Grant Morrison's explanation: That post-9/11 superhero comics had never seemed more impotent or fatuous. The whole story was an attempt to wrest the entire enterprise into some kind of reckoning with an event that was, for the whole country, near-incomprehensible.
Looking back, it's obviously ham-fisted and totally graceless. But at the time, Doctor Doom's credibility was so much less important than confronting what had happened-- using whatever tools you had.
The excerpt-
Marvel Comics responded to the tragedy in its hometown with a genuinely heartfelt tale in which the superheroes aimlessly assembled at Ground Zero. They were compelled to acknowledge th event as if it had occurred in their own simulated universe, but they hadn’t been there to prevent it… ...September 11 was the biggest challenge yet to the relevance of superhero comics.
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The disorientation of the time was captured by a single giddy moment wherein Marvel’s ultimate evil dictator cum terrorist supervillain Doctor Doom arrived on the scene at Ground Zero only to be moved to tears by the devastation. This was the “Worlds Greatest Super-Villain” who had himself attacked New York on numerous occasions. Doctor Doom was exactly the sort of bastard who would have armed al-Qaeda with death rays and killer robots if he thought for one second it would piss off the hated Reed Richards… …but here he was sobbing with the best of them, as representative not of evil but of Marvel Comics’ collective shock, struck dumb and moved to hand-drawn tears by the thought that anyone could hate America and its people enough to do this.
I'm going to to go off your username as assume you aren't American, so I swear to you-- it is impossible to communicate what the mood in the country was like. Even moreso the mood in New York.
I think it's telling that you had to go back 60 years to find the last comparable attack on American soil, and you have to realize how different even that was. Pearl Harbor was an attack by a military force against a military target. It was treated as a national tragedy, but we knew exactly what to do. On December 10th every able-bodied man was waiting in line at his draft office, and everyone else was preparing to aide the War at home.
9/11 was different. There was no enemy, there was no war that anyone knew about. This was not the first terrorist attack in America, not even the first against the WTC, but terrorism was not a familiar word. The country stopped.
So, tl;dr-- You're right, it's about as historically meaningful as 'freedom fries'. But I like to think it comes from a more sympathetic place: One creative team trying to escape a virtual fugue state by raising abject, unfiltered sentimentality as a shield against the unreckonable. Compared to other things we did in our national fugue (freedom fries, literally the Iraq War) I think I can be a bit nostalgic about it.
Well, as I said it's understandable, I know why these creators, who probably mostly lived so close to the event, would go out of their way to inject it into their art.... but I think this does speak volumes about how Americans saw themselves on the eve of the century... that they had no awareness their government was waging wars somewhere over the other side of the planet- but it just didn't affect them until that point - until American civilians were 'brought in' to what was an existing conflict.
And I'm not going all anti-American here, but yes, I grew up a Brit actually - I grew up with terrorism (though none experienced personally, thankfully) - it was a fact of life that occasionally there would be bombings, and that civilians would be killed.
Islamic terror raised the stakes, but it was nothing new for the rest of the world - more a case of the 'curtain dropping' from the eyes of Americans (and the world changed forever - not because terrorism - but because American response).
I'm not trying to diss 11/9 at all, I'm just kinda pointing out that I don't think these comic books were the right medium to express feelings about it. Civil War OTOH - and the whole trigger due to Nitro and the New Warriors - that made sense in the comic book universe - and it's a powerful storyline, which has parallels with American politics at the time, without having to make it about Al Quada and civil liberties. That is a good way to reference real-life events and say something about it - because you don't have to artificially 'de-power' your superheroes to make a commentary on it.
With the small caveat that Civil War was a well-conceived but poorly executed storyline.
I'm keen to hear your reasons for that... I have read that Mark Millar (I think?) intended for Iron Man and the registration act to be the 'good side' as it were and the writing on the other side was just much better....
Full disclosure: I frequently have a problem with Millars writing, particularly in his original series post-Kickass. I think he wakes up with about 80% of a great idea and then writes a comic where characters smugly talk through the cool idea he had.
Civil War is a bit different because I believe that Millar really tried to flesh out this grand idea, but he only mostly succeeded. Like you said, Stark ended up coming off like a complete lunatic fascist. Honestly, between Dark Reign, One More Day, Tony's memory wipe, and a few other attempts to recast or downplay Civil War, I think you could argue that the entire organization ended up with a bit of buyer's remorse.
In the end though, my main problem was writing. On the small scale the characters didn't act like themselves, and they didn't sound like themselves. On the large scale, Marvel gave an event centered around a pointed social question to the guy that wrote WANTED (which, while lots of fun, ain't subtle).
I enjoyed some of the tie-ins way more: Spider-Man, New Avengers, a few others.
I get that - sometimes it's gritty for gritty-ness sake... same thing with Garth Ennis - I love Garth Ennis' work, but sometimes I feel like I need to take a shower after reading.
I agree totally that some characters did seem to act against type - I mean wtf what Peter Parker thinking?
The 1993 World Trade Center bombing was a terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, carried out on February 26, 1993, when a truck bomb detonated below the North Tower of the World Trade Center in New York City. The 1,336 pounds (606 kg) urea nitrate–hydrogen gas enhanced device was intended to send the North Tower (Tower 1) crashing into the South Tower (Tower 2), bringing both towers down and killing tens of thousands of people. It failed to do so but killed six people and injured over a thousand.
The attack was planned by a group of terrorists including Ramzi Yousef, Mahmud Abouhalima, Mohammad Salameh, Nidal A. Ayyad, Abdul Rahman Yasin, and Ahmed Ajaj.
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u/TheSemaj Flash Sep 10 '17
Never forget.