The second installment of Captain America, (Steve Rogers, as
opposed to Sam Wilson or anyone else), has made an appearance. Basically, Cap
is still Cap; he is just hailing Hydra because of a certain sentient cosmic
cube. And the Red Skull. And Maria Hill. And God knows whom/what else. Yay.
Well, no, but only because Marvel has done another rotation
on a spot and returned from where it has come. This sort of thing isn’t
happening only in Marvel; in the Archie-related comics too, but-
However, the Archies have something that Marvel does not
have – oodles of comics that are not
interconnected with each other, for example. Archies do not care about continuity at least some of the time – they just
publish comics with a brief punchline, and that is it. Marvel does not really
do that – it goes for continuity, even in newspaper comics (spider-man?). As
such, when it does about-face and returns to its roots, it…really returns to
its’ roots, without having gone anywhere else at all. The entire Marvel
universe just stands in one spot lately, without going anywhere.
Yes, things were different in the past: there was the death
of captain America (well, a death, anyhow), a Skrull invasion, a dark age when
Norman Osborn and his cronies were in charge, and then it was over, and MCU
appeared for real, and suddenly a Marvel interconnected universe was…not real,
but more three-dimensional than how it was in the comics because it was live,
on screen, yeah? Therefore, now the comics are trying to imitate MCU, and so far,
it involves a Marvel Civil War. Civil War II. Seriously? Yes, when you ‘borrow’
from yourself, it is not exactly copyright infringement; it is (just/still)
unimaginative. The comics just do not know where to go, and Agents of
S.H.I.E.L.D. are a good example of that.
Yes, we’re talking about the characters from the TV show, only
now they have been adapted into the comics…precisely as they were seen on the
TV: there’s Phil and Mel, the FitzSimmons, Daisy, who got her own thing but
lately is hanging around with ‘team Coulson’, as is Deathlok (who didn’t appear
in AoS S3 at all, BTW). Grant has finally made his appearance, and yes, he has
still betrayed S.H.I.E.L.D. for Hydra, but if on TV it took him the better part
of S1, here it is more along the lines of a couple of issues, so it doesn’t
have the same impact, plus the readers usually know that Grant is ‘a bad guy’
so there’s no surprise either. Basically, the Marvel comics are running with
the old material, just presented in a new package, rather than creating
anything original, whether it is S.H.I.E.L.D. or captain America. Right now,
cosmic cubes seem to be the order of the day…aside from Civil War, revisited.
Sigh.
End
