Putting your vanquished political opponents like Hillary Clinton and Bill Richardson in your cabinet, and keeping a token Republican like Defense Secretary Robert Gates is one thing.
But making Norman "The Green Goblin" Osborn the Boss of All Superheroes? That really doesn't seem like a very good idea.
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Whats most annoying about this (to me any way)? I've been avoiding the very well-written Thunderbolts book BECAUSE of the Norman "Cop-killer" Osborn as the federal government's favorite son. But now this crap is going to probably creep all over the ONE regular Marvel Earth book I read in "Avengers: The Initiative"...
Well, this just further proves what I've thought for a long time:
Everybody in the Marvel U is a complete and total idiot.
We all know that there are an array of conspicuously logical reasons that the Green Goblin could never gain a degree of public favor greater than that achievable by, at best, a reformed Charles Manson, and at any rate could really never be celebrated as a national hero, no matter how many smelly Skrulls he shot through the eyeballs.
However.
If you can suspend your disbelief on this one point, the premise of 'Dark Reign' is actually the most validating and thematically compelling of any 'event' betwixt the big 2 in the past decade.
Think about it. Generally, event books are based on entirely flimsy and arbitrary occurrences. Comic fans have been conditioned to accept these on the basis that we all know they need SOME excuse get Wolverine in the same book as Superman as Batman as a legion of C-listers who need sales boosts, and anyway, the whole thing will be a good fun romp on the same mindless but endearing adult-sci-fi-gradient we've come to expect from postmodern aughts-era superliterature.
But, for the first time, an event is being grounded in a dramatically satisfying way. It's even retroactively validating the totally blase/underwhelming Secret Invasion AND Civil War arcs. Those amounted to excuses for cool fight scenes against unusual opponents (except the fight scenes were kind of weak and we've seen superheroes fighting each other since the '70s and super-skrulls didn't really make any sense whatsoever, and verged painfully on the cusp of grade 7 math class doodles). Oh, and Marvel squeezed some free mainstream publicity out of it which I'm sure amounted to at least another 200 issues sold, so props for that.
Anyway. That's the impressive part, I think. Finally, we're getting an event that couldn't actually have been done (not satisfyingly, anyway), without contemporary shared-world buildup. It actually feels like the stories have a point; god forbid, I think I might even sense legitimate dramatic stakes beginning to emerge in a superheroverse. Someone check my google calendar, I could have sworn Christmas wasn't for another couple weeks...
By the comic's logic, Wolverine should be vice head of Thunderbolts because he was a millisecond away from killing the Queen
I'd like to say Diamondrock is a DC-zealot and wrong, but really, the panels speak for themselves...
I'll be in Marvel space with the talking animals and ex-Micronauts where stuff makes sense...
You know what I still don't get? Doesn't Obama reads Spider-Man comics? Wouldn't he KNOW that Osborn is the Green goblin?
If there's a president that wouldn't make this kind of mistake would be him, right?
The plus side? It provides a nice mechanism to make Capes stay hidden, stay unregistered, have secret identities. & it gives Spidey a reason to be persecuted, which he really needs-- a not LAME reason. Shame I'm not going to read Spider-man comics till they fix OMD.
See, this sort of thing wouldn't happen if Colbert had been elected.
I have to say, that I'm completely in agreement with Diamondrock on this one. Everyone in the Marvel Universe just keeps getting stupider and stupider.
See, I thought all the stupud SHRA stuff happened in Civil War because we had a neocon dunce as a president who would actually allow such a thing, so there was a modicum of credibility in that decision, no matter how stupid.
But this doesn't make sense in the context of an Obama presidency. Maybe Quesada and Bendis were banking on McCain winning?
I assume there's no such thing as a background check or psychological evaluation for executive level jobs in Marvel Universe BUT S.H.I.E.L.D IS NOT A U.S. AGENCY, GODDAMMIT. Why can't Bendis ever keep that straight? Don't they have editors?
But this doesn't make sense in the context of an Obama presidency.
Let's not give Obama credit for things that he doesn't done yet. He's already made some compromises and changed his positions during the campaign when a better political reality presented itself. He's not a pure ideologue. Who is to say that "616 Obama" wouldn't do something like this if he thought it was politically expedient or something that would work out in the long term?
Let me put it this way: I'm not even sure Bush would be dumb enough to promote Norman Osborne.
(okay, he probably would be, but I think you see where I'm going with this)
Let me put it this way: I'm not even sure Bush would be dumb enough to promote Norman Osborne.
Yeah, good point. This is just an absurd plot twist, no matter how you look at it.
I think, and could be wrong on this, that Marvel may have missed an opportunity: Norman's secret identity is public knowledge, right? Wasn't there a biography published, Legacy of Evil, written by Phil Urich?
Well, what if when Mephisto reset Spidey's secret ID, he also reset Norman's? Everyone remembers there was a Green Goblin, but is vague on who he was. (With the probable exception of Spidey.) That would've been a great way for Mephisto to shaft Spidey, and set up Norman's rise to power nicely; since as it stands, he's a known murderer who somehow became a national hero. (And Harry's resurrection would be the cherry on top of Mephisto's evil sundae, since you know he's gonna go nuts.)
And Diamondrock: that's probably true, but everyone in the MU seems to have forgotten Iron Man's secret identity, multiple times. (Sometimes with reason, but usually not!)
The "New Ways To Die" storyline in Amazing Spider-Man established that Osborn had been "cleared" of being the Goblin, that the public believed he had been "framed," and the DB was presenting him to cheering crowds as a public hero for his leadership of the Thunderbolts. Whether any of this was part of the Mephisto Retcon, I couldn't say.
Hmmm, The Mephisto Retcon...sounds like a Ludlum title...
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