Apprently, in comics right now, war's perceived as being good for sales! Both major publishers have just finished, or are about to start up, storylines that revolve around major warfare.
Marvel Comics, of course, wrapped up their Civil War about a month ago. It was the best-selling title each month in which an issue came out. It's changed the Marvel landscape, at least for awhile. And it lead to the unmasking of Spider-Man, and the death of Captain America. Heady stuff that I've written enough about already.
DC Comics just crammed World War III into a week's worth of comics, certainly making it the shortest such event in human history! I wrote yesterday about how 52 has wandered away from its original mission statement, and the decision to include a so-called World War in one of its final weeks seems indicative of its wayward nature. I'll grant that the story had been built up to nicely, in that we'd watched Black Adam's progression from villain to almost-hero and then back to villain-with-a-vengence. But the execution itself seemed rushed, from obvious questions like, "Why didn't the heroes intervene earlier?" going unanswered, to other deeper concerns like, "If a World War just concluded 2 weeks before the One Year Later storylines started up in all of the titles, why weren't there any references to it?" Some have conjectured that DC threw together this idea as a reaction to Marvel's Civil War success. It seems as good an explanation as any for what transpired.
And finally, Marvel's about to launch into World War Hulk. This is another big crossover event, not quite on the scale of Civil War, but close. The basic plot goes like this: before the Civil War among the heroes started, Reed Richards, Tony Stark and others conspired to send Bruce Banner off into space, because they figured the Hulk was too much of a wildcard for them to be able to handle as they pushed the Superhuman Registration Act through. Despite owning some of the brainiest craniums in the Marvel Universe, their plan to send him to an uninhabited planet where he could live out the rest of his days in quiet contemplation - or more likely smashing stuff and wishing he could get his big green hands around their necks - went hopelessly awry and his jailship crashed in a land that was engaged in barbaric savagery and religious fanaticism. No, not the Middle East, but rather an alien planet that provided a backdrop for Greenskin to rise from arena gladiator to freed soldier to warrior king in a few short months! (This tale was known as Planet Hulk and was limited to the regular Hulk title, but ran for over a year, our time.) Around the time Civil War was wrapping up, though, the ship he arrived in started malfunctioning, and then eventually exploded... taking most of the planet's inhabitants with it! And yes, this seems to imply that Reed, et al, are now responsible for the deaths of billions of alien lives, including Hulk's blushing bride-queen! Fortunately - or not, depending on your perspective - Banner survived the catastrophe and now has himself a space-faring ship of his own, and is headed to Earth! And he's not coming to sell Avon! World War Hulk starts any day now!
So why all the emphasis on war stories in comics right now? Is the U.S.'s occupation of Iraq, in addition to their having been engaged in two wars in the past six years, behind this trend? Or is it simply a case of comic writers realizing that the easiest way to pit superpowered adversaries against each other is to start a war and put them on opposite sides? I don't know, but something's up, that's for sure.
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