Civil War II #3 Review: Death As Promised

As Bendis promised, Civil War II #3 features the death of a longtime Marvel hero. It’s a great moment, but the crossover still doesn’t work.

Civil War II #3 (of 7)
Written by Brian Michael Bendis
Art by David Marquez and Olivier Coipel
Colors by Justin Ponsor
Published by Marvel Comics

This review will spoil the major death of the crossover. Consider yourself warned.

Civil War II has already had a body count. By the end of the prologue, She-Hulk and War Machine had suffered injuries leading to coma and death, respectively. But Brian Michael Bendis promised that the major death of the event was slotted for issue 3, with Marvel even going so far as to encourage midnight release parties at local comic stores. This week delivers on that promise in a way that is both intense and detached, representative of the summer crossover as a whole.

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Thus far in Civil War II, Captain Marvel has been using new Inhuman Ulysses’s visions of the future to plan out strategic prevention of crises. At the end of the last issue, Ulysses brought dozens of heroes in on a shared vision of the Hulk standing above a slew of dead Avengers, and Captain Marvel headed to Bruce Banner’s secret base to confront him.

This issue takes place months later, in a courtroom. Matt Murdock is prosecuting Hawkeye for the murder of Bruce Banner. It seems that the scientist had given the archer a special gamma arrow to kill him if he ever Hulked out again, and in the tension of Banner trying to tell Captain Marvel that he’s cured of his savage alter-ego, Barton was sure he saw an eye turn green, and he did what his friend has asked him to do. Testimony from Carol Danvers and Tony Stark fleshes out the arguments about destiny the heroes had around poor Bruce, and Hank McCoy says that he has proof the doctor was experimenting on himself to prevent the return of the Hulk, but that could have failed at some point. Bendis cuts away before the jury reaches a verdict to show that Iron Man’s artificial intelligence assistant has cracked the secret of Ulysses’s powers.

Again, the problem with Civil War II isn’t in the writing or the art. This book has been gorgeous, the dialogue has been taut when it’s needed to be, and the pace has been slow but included at least one major action in each issue. No one is wasting three issues in the Savage Land, like Bendis’s infamous Secret Invasion time-filler. The theme of prediction is still interesting – was Banner turning green? Did his warning to Hawkeye make him more likely to act so impulsively? Were his treatments going to fail? These are great points of discussion for a book club debate. No, the problem is in the premise.

The argument in favor of Carol using Ulysses is indefensible. Almost every tie-in has pointed out the same things that Minority Report did in two hours fourteen years ago – it is unconscionable to prosecute someone for a crime they didn’t commit, no matter how likely it was that they were about to, because people can always change their minds. A vision of the future that you prevent is, by definition, a vision of a possible future and largely worthless. This translates to real-life applications like racial profiling, predictive justice, and self-fulfilling prophecy. What’s more, the tie-ins can’t agree on what Ulysses’s visions are like or how he gets them, with some books saying he’s just really good at statistics and others saying he’s actually in the future, and writers are having trouble finding worthwhile stories that don’t hinge on “hey, I’m wrong sometimes” or a character that Ulysses can’t see. This negates any validity for Carol – she’s using bad intel. It’s fine for moving your troops to get ready for something, but this issue had the inevitable evolution into punishing someone for a crime that will never happen.

But the argument against her is not great, either. Yes, War Machine died during the fight with Thanos. And he would not have been there if Carol’s people weren’t setting a trap for Thanos. But Ulysses’s vision was of Thanos getting away with it. And he didn’t. They stopped him. In the vision, which didn’t come true, Thanos killed a ton of people. In reality, one person died, a person who knew what he was getting into and to which he submitted voluntarily, much like his military career. The argument that Carol uses bad data is obvious. The argument that she can’t use this for individual justice is playing out in this issue’s courtroom. But the argument that she got Rhodey killed is a bunch of people acting out of grief, and the argument that she got Bruce Banner killed suggests that Hawkeye would never have overread a situation with Bruce after getting the kill order.

Great tension is built when a reader can sympathize with either side of an argument, not when both sides come across looking incompetent. Very little about this summer crossover is making either side into a winner we can support.

The Bottom Line: As a book, Civil War II is still really good. As the death of a founding Avenger and the potential incarceration of another longtime hero, it’s thoughtful. As a summer event, it has long since fallen to pieces. Read it, but at your own risk.

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