Civil War #6 - Marvel

It's the wrong cover over here, but, whatever. Great story by Mark Millar. He's fantastic with these multi-faceted stories. Maintains control and direction at all times, while keeping a smooth flow. Now easy to do. Dexter Vines is also great on the pencils. I hadn't really seen a lot of his work before this series, but what I've noticed here is that he gets better every issue, and he really seems to be putting his all into it. The final product really shows fantastic talent and determination. Now, the problem I have with this series, and it's neither Mark's or Dexter's fault, but Marvel's, or the Editor's, I believe, is that they're using this series to make the broad brush strokes, and the individual series to fill in all the details. Now, in theory, that should work just fine. But, especially with this series, we're dealing with almost every title in the Marvel universe. They we're very smart to leave the X-men out of it. The problem comes in, I'm sure, that with this many titles contributing to the overall story, you're dealing with a lot of coordination of effort and time. And while that should be possible, this is the real world. People run behind, get sick, have personal issues, holidays, whatever. So, it seems to me, that as we get farther along in this series, we wait longer and longer between issues. The stories have to be told in all the individual titles before this title can paint the next step. And, what I'm seeing at least, is that the titles that run on time, all the time, are doing a lot of fill in issues, while the other titles are playing catch up. Maybe I'm looking at this all wrong, but as a reader, that's what I'm seeing. I would like to be more positive about it, because I really do like the story, but it's frustrating to us, as I'm sure it is to all the individual creative teams. The other problem I have is, I don't really see how they're going to be able to write their way out of this. There's going to have to be a lot of changes, which is good, but Marvel has a history of changing things, and then, a year or two later, changing them back. Some of the changes here are not going to be able to be undone. And they shouldn't be. But, if the fans don't like it, Marvel will change it back. And, when that's done, this whole series loses it's purpose. I hope that's not the outcome, but, it's more than probable that it will be. I invite you to prove me wrong. But, time will tell. In my future blogs, I'm sure this will come up more than once.