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I have very mixed feelings about this.
Millar clearly has his welder's mittens on for much of it, particularly those awful two pages with Johnny Storm getting beaten up by a woefully cliched mob of one-dimensionals. The dialogue in general is pretty bad, actually - lots of putting certain points that Millar feels need to get an airing into the mouths of anybody who's handy, so that it all feels a little too arbitrary. And he OVERDOES the EMPHASIS thing to such an EXTENT that everyone starts to sound like VON MISES.
Other problems: predictably Millar doesn't even bother to emulate the admirable task of making Tony Stark and his position sympathetic that Bendis did in the Illuminati special, instead in the last panel Iron Man looks like he's just itching to try out his pulsar blasters on his good buddy Cap. The "burger and fries" thing would have been good if we'd actually seen it, but instead it's another example of Millar going "Hey, here's an amazing thing that might happen, but I don't know how to write the scene itself so I'll just have someone casually mention it." And the 'checklist' at the end is head-shakingly irritating.
Things I'm ambivalent about: I haven't decided yet whether the Watcher, the 'Things Turn Ugly' caption and the "watch that pottymouth!" line are just goofy enough or plain stupid (I suspect the last one is definitely in the latter category, and it makes me pine for some Brubaker or Bendis script-doctoring).
Then there's: who is in the Daredevil costume? Why is he holding a coin up and looking sinister? Is it just bad writing that makes his dialogue sound so un-Murdochy ("our business"?), or something else? Why does nobody point out that he might help ease tensions between civilians and masks by going back to jail? These may end up being interesting questions or they may not. The last one I suppose could be added to "If Wolverine recently threatened to kill the President then why is he not already a fugitive or under arrest when this story begins?"
I have to admit though, I do dig the central concept and am keen to see some of the fighty fighty fighting go down, especially if it involves the destruction of lots of vehicles with the S.H.I.E.L.D. logo on them. The central action sequence, whilst not as clear or dynamic as a couple of obvious artists could have made it, does demonstrate that one of Millar's strengths is that like Brubaker, he knows how to make Steve Rogers throw that shield. And that scene is a great pay-off to all the stuff that's been building about how S.H.I.E.L.D. is corrupt and the new director doesn't like superheroes and doesn't get on with Captain America in particular - fairly well-worn tropes, but executed nicely here. While lots of Marvel writers and editors have been at pains to stress how reasonable the pro-registration argument is, it's pretty clear that Maria Hill makes a good villain, and that's a relief in a way.
I'm going to stick with this for now, if only to see whether there's a "we must band together again to stop Hulk/Doom/Hate-Monger/Superboy!" cop-out or whether the characters are actually forced to answer for their wack decisions, but as soon as it starts to smell like 'Ultimate War', I'm out. |
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