Recently got a couple more requests to repost the Sally Floyd/Captain America remix I did years ago, and the truth is that I don’t have both pages any more; I’ve only got the second page, courtesy of Edward Saul.
For those who never saw the first page: basically Sally Floyd says that Captain America is irrelevant because he doesn’t have a Myspace and doesn’t watch American Idol. (No, really, she makes those exact references. Three years later, Myspace is a backwater zombie site and American Idol doesn’t have Simon any more, which just makes her point even stupider.)
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58 users responded in this post
Thank you for this.
It’s weird that he’s in his Cap jammies, but he’s not wearing that Cap hat.
And yet, still no “Cap was right” T-Shirts.
I hate the Red Hulk.
Yet he would be 100% redeemable to me if he sat on Sally Floyd.
So now I really want a ‘Cap was Right’ t-shirt.
To the custom t-shirt shop!
I can send you the first page.
I’m so glad you reposted this!
Well, has anybody *seen* Sally Floyd in the years since then? I guess with the Sentry now *also* dead, Marvel got the message that Paul Jenkins self-fellatio characters suck.
Maybe she’s still hiding in a subway – course, being a complete imbecile, the fact that the Siege went down in OKLAHOMA probably didn’t stop her
This gets posted all the time on that site where people upload images at each other. You know the one.
@Zenrage: I can send you the first page.
Please do so Christopher can post it. I’d love to see the whole sequence.
Here’s that first page, MGK: http://i47.tinypic.com/b8jxuq.jpg
We don’t need to vote for our superheroes. We need to vote for our writers and editors so that our superhero stories won’t get crappy under the likes of Quesada and DiDio.
And I formally vote MGK to write all Marvel from now on.
I’m sure this got pointed out the first time around, but you don’t vote for the Army. They are answerable to civilians who get voted in, sure, but no one elected anyone to be General or what have you.
Good God, five years later and Jenkins’ bullshit still burns with the stupid of ten-thousand exploding Fox News presenters.
God, I hate Paul Jenkins SO FUCKING MUCH.
The most recent mention of Sally was Ben Urich getting a text message from her reading “I’m Fine” in Siege Embedded.
Ben didn’t write back.
Marvel’s output nowadays is ‘crappy’?
Man, I never get my fellow comic book nerds.
I enjoyed Civil War a lot and the way it shook up the status quo of the Marvel Universe. But yeah, this was stupid. The fact is that they could have come up with some very valid arguments for superhero registration, if the writer had any experience with debate.
Mark Millar pretty much made the pro-registration guys the villains when they did stupid shit like clone Thor and recruit psychos like Venom and Bulleye. But that was at least some “ends justify the means” stuff. This “Captain America, who was made to fight for human rights, is out of touch because he doesn’t have this week’s social network page” is just fucking retarded. That’s like saying the president of the USA is unqualified because he isn’t listening to Lady Gaga’s shitty music.
Also, am I the only one who would think that Steve Rogers would know who won the last world series? I don’t think he would dig the NFL or NBA (since neither football or basketball were that big pre WWII (well, college football was)) but he definitely would have followed baseball.
Well, it’s been long established tht Steve Rogers likes baseball, but I don’t know if he’s followed it closely since he woke up one day and learned the Dodgers had moved to LA. That’s something most people his age never got over.
Good point.
Sage Freehaven: Here’s that first page
Thanks!
Now, anyone got the original text from MGK’s first 30 “I Should Write the Legion”s from his Livejournal days?
I always thought caps reply should just have been “Miss Floyd, I punched hitler. I punched him right in the face. I think you’ll find that pretty much gives me carte blanche for the rest of my life.”
@ Simon: If I ever get to write Captain America, can I use that?
Christ, Sally freaking’ Floyd. What grinds my gears about her is that she takes a valid idea and valid point and turns it into PURE SHIT.
Pro-registration? There’s an AWESOME case to be made for it. Just off the top of my head, you can point out in response to Cap’s tirade up there that HE totally volunteered to become a superhero, and after the serum worked he joined the ARMY. Captain was a RANK. He went through boot and learned the UCMJ and took orders from Colonels and Generals, and that calling an involuntary initiative ‘slavery’ is roughly akin to calling police slaves because we’ve decided that if you want to right wrongs, you gotta maybe be trained and accountable instead of grabbing a shotgun or a magic amulet and dishing out your own brand of justice.
But you know what, I read basically all of Civil War (and some of the tie-ins were DEEPLY shitty) and non of the pro-reg people made those arguments. It was nothing but appeals to emotion, authority, and deriding the guys on the other side as stupid, naive, evil, or some combination of all three. That’s cool if we’re meant to think they’re the bad guys, but apparently Millar and Jenkins (among others) thought that we were maybe SUPPOSED to think the pro-reg forces were at least nominally on the side of angels?
I felt like my intelligence was insulted.
I felt like my intelligence was insulted
You have doubts?
I don’t think Captain America was actually in the military hierarchy even in WW II–more like a special agent of some sort.
My problem with his role in Civil War is that if he’d gone public that he wasn’t going to register and done the passive resistance bit, that would have done a lot more for the anti-registration cause than leading a covert team or whatever it was (“Symbol of America Says Registration Act Anti-American”—New York Times).
But Murc, it’s not just about training, it’s about requiring every mutant, superhuman etc. to register with the government, even if they just want to sit at home and drink beer. That’s not slavery, but I wouldn’t like it either.
But that leads to what I really hated about Civil War–like every other laws-against-superheroes story (LEGENDS, etc.) it seems to assume that “superhero” means the same thing it does in our world. Why is Cap required to register? He has no super-powers, his shield is government property, so he’s not “super” by most standards. And if the super-soldier treatment qualifies him, what about someone who takes steroids to enhance their muscles?
If Iron Man is super, what about a guy with night vision? That was all Dr. Mid-Nite had.
Heck, I think HEROES FOR HIRE said Shang-Chi had to register and he has no super-powers. None. Whatsoever.
This may be a nitpicky technicality but since they were touting Civil War as asking Serious Questions about super-heroics, I figure I’m entitled to better answers.
There’s just so many ways to express how stupid CIVIL WAR was. This is a particularly good one.
@fsherman
I’m actually pretty sure that Cap WAS in the military during WWII. He might have been the equivalent of special forces but he was signed up.
If you’re right about the registration act (I would need to go back and re-read the trades, which I really don’t feel like doing) then that makes Civil War even MORE stupid, and not only stupid, a re-hash of, oh, I don’t know, every X-Men storyline EVER. My impression always was that the initiative/registration act was ‘If you want to sit at home and drink beer, that’s fine, you’ll never hear from us. If you want to fight crime as a masked vigilante (which is, itself, a crime) we expect you to sign on the dotted line. No more half-trained idiots doing this as a hobby, you guys are basically cops now.’
And you know what? That would have been an INTERESTING STORYLINE. The great tragedy of Civil War, IMO, is not that it was a bad idea, but that it was a very, very GOOD idea that was badly executed. I would have liked to see the President tell Cap ‘All we’re asking for is that your friends who want to serve sign up to do so. Just like you did once upon a time. Have we done so poorly by you that this is unacceptable, son?’
(Yes, I know, coming from GWB that would have made me throw up a little in my mouth too. But work with me here.)
And then Cap genuinely agonizes over how to balance that with Peter Parker telling him ‘Cap, the second I take off this mask my family is DEAD, and even if my name just goes on some SHIELD hard drive somewhere, Hydra penetrates you guys every other week. But you can’t tell me not to help people with my powers either, that’s just wrong.’
Instead we got Clone-Thor and lots of really stupid, spurious fights, and the pro-reg people came off as idiot fascists because that’s how they act. Waste of a great idea and great setup. That’s the real sadness.
I will say, in an effort not to be RELENTLESSLY negative, that for me, Civil War has kinda/sorta redeemed itself a LITTLE over time. If you read it as ‘Tony Stark and to a lesser extent Reed Richards go absolutely batshit insane with power, mishandling and alienating potential allies at every turn and digging themselves in deeper and deeper, setting the stage for the destruction of everything they believe in and the rise of Norman Osborne’ then it actually WORKS to a certain extent. Still lots of bad scenes and bad writing but it does work.
But it wasn’t written that way at the time, and it wasn’t really intended to be that I don’t think. So yeah.
Also, wall of nerdery FTW.
Regarding the original “I should write the Legion” posts, any text that accompanied a few of those posts is still available in the Internet Archive:
http://web.archive.org/web/20070615035658/http://mightygodking.livejournal.com/305099.html
or
http://web.archive.org/web/20070715211528/http://mightygodking.livejournal.com/tag/i+should+write+the+legion
Unfortunately, there are no images there. However, some kind soul reposted all of the images here:
http://www.thecomicboard.com/forum/showthread.php?11745-Why-I-Should-Write-The-Legion-(Warning-Swearing)&s=0ced522c5e53d0b443f8845155f7143d
For what it’s worth, there’s a metric crapload of MGK’s old LJ posts still available in the Internet Archive:
http://web.archive.org/*/http://mightygodking.livejournal.com/*
Just no or few images, there’s no search, and most of the LJ meta-pages (like the list of all posts tagged “comics”) weren’t archived, so it’s a bear of a task to dig through it all to find the creme de la creme. (But, of course, it’s *all* good, so the digging itself is entertaining–just very, very time-consuming.)
Oh, and duh, I’m slow; as it’s apparently all here, too: http://mightygodking.com/index.php/i-should-write-the-legion/
But Peter Parker’s name has been in SHIELD databases his entire life.
One problem I have with Civil War is the idea that every hero had to work for the same Federal agency. That’s not how we do things in the US. It would make more political sense for the Initiative to be 50 completely seperate State agencies, rather than a Federal organisation with a team assigned to each state. Then there would also be a few national teams, probably administered by different departments– Defence, Justice, Homeland Security. And many low-level heroes would simple be attatched to local police departments.
That’s the American way. (And it wouldn’t have led to Osborn taking so much power.)
One problem I have with Civil War is the idea that every hero had to work for the same Federal agency. That’s not how we do things in the US. It would make more political sense for the Initiative to be 50 completely seperate State agencies, rather than a Federal organisation with a team assigned to each state. Then there would also be a few national teams, probably administered by different departments– Defence, Justice, Homeland Security. And many low-level heroes would simply be attatched to local police departments.
That’s the American way. (And it wouldn’t have led to Osborn taking so much power.)
Sorry. After I pressed ‘submit’, there was a glitch and a blank screen that said ‘the page you’re looking for cannot be found’. So I backtracked and submitted it again (after correcting a typo).
See, the thing is, you pretty much can’t have Registration be a good thing, because you know, it is and if you let it be you can’t go back from it. It changes the status quo forever. Because if registration is objectively a good thing, it doesn’t stop being a good thing if you have someone who is not very good at their job at the helm – like Norman Osborn. Having a police force and a set of laws does not get thrown out every time you get a corrupt cop and you don’t throw out democracy every time you get an elected official using government funds to pay for ladyboys. But that’s the kind of logic you get in comics – one bad thing, one flaw, and you throw everything out.
Authority has to be evil. It was when the Avengers worked the US government, or for the UN. It was when X-Factor was backed by the government. It was when Captain America had a general tell him that he had to answer to the Army and Cap said “I’m loyal to nothing, general, except the dream.” It was evil when Thor decided to use his powers to do shit like make the oceans full of the kinds of fish we want to eat that had gone practically extinct because we overfished.
For some reason, people wearing their underwear outside the pants and doing their own thing, answerable to no one, has to be the right way and the status quo.
@mary warner
Absolutely. And that would have been a story I’d have liked to read, except its maybe not what they want the MU to be about. Which is okay I guess. But if you can’t do the job right then don’t do it at all.
As far as Osborne goes, honestly, I lay him right at the door of Fury, Stark, Hill, and SHIELD in general. Nick Fury and his successors basically spent half a century making SHIELD both the only game in town AND a law unto itself. That’s more or less asking for trouble.
As a narrative, I honestly like what they’ve done there; I don’t think it’ll lead to any long-term status quo changes but the fact that SHIELD is only as good as the guy at the top is something that’s being crammed in the face of everyone who ever buddied up to it. Dark Reign is a mixed bag, deeply uneven in places and with some truly baffling tie-ins, but the main thrust of it has been a pretty decent arc IMO.
Sadly I expect the lesson will not be so much ‘maybe SHIELD shouldn’t be so powerful and unaccountable’ but rather ‘gee, we need to put a good guy back in charge! Reed, you want to have a go?’
I would have liked to have seen the Super-Human Registration Act written up, maybe posted up on Marvel’s website.
Also, a few conspiracy theories floated around, like “Big Insurance backed the SHRA because the need for paying for all the damage superhumans caused would be taken off them, and shunted to the federal taxpayer.”
I should point out, by the way, Cap invented social networking. In the 80s.
Remember his BBSes? The Teen Brigade BBSes? Same thing. Hooked up country-wide.
Aardy R. DeVarque Oh, and duh, I’m slow; as it’s apparently all here, too: http://mightygodking.com/index.php/i-should-write-the-legion/
Actually, seems not. MGK has a couple places where he makes “From the original post: …” and “I spoke about the “toybox rule” when I introduced Girl Detective…” comments. Suggesting that there was actually more explanatory text accompanying each image.
As a big fan of his “I Should Write” pieces, I’d really like to see all that he wrote in them, if it’s still available anywhere that someone could point me to.
I think people are overthinking Civil War. When Mark Millar pitched the story it probably wasn’t “I want to introduce a plot element that will sharply divide the Marvel U and shape the next four years of stories.” It was more likely “Let’s have Cap and Tony drag every hero in the Marvel U into a big fight. We’ll use some poorly defined legislation as a macguffin to make it happen because everyone loves an evil government story during a Republican term.”
@Greg Manuel if you ever get to write Cap, I DEMAND you use that line. 😀
@magnus: as a character there was nothing wrong with the sentry. It’s everything after his first mini sans Jeff Parker that started fucking it all up
AWESOME! Thank you for reposting this, MGK. I thought that this entire thing was lost forever when LiveJournal suspended your account.
The silly thing is thinking that registration would protect the public.
Empirically, police have a license to kill civilians with impunity. Even when they are put on trial for, say, shooting a grandma in a SWAT raid based on a wrong address, they only rarely get convicted or see any time.
The real-world version of the Stamford fiasco would probably be something like the Philly police dropping a bomb on the MOVE house in West Philly. Burned down the whole city block.
@Sean — If you want to see all of the actual original texts of the original “I should write the Legion” series, then go to the first two Internet Archive links I posted. Those *are* the original posts, archived for posterity.
They lack the images (though you’ve already seen those), but have _all_ the text (at least of those posts that got archived).
Jon H– You’re exactly right. Organising all the heroes as a government agency would probably make them less accountable rather than more.
“Also, a few conspiracy theories floated around, like “Big Insurance backed the SHRA because the need for paying for all the damage superhumans caused would be taken off them, and shunted to the federal taxpayer.””
@Tullberg: IIRC this was part of the story arc from Wolverine’s book at the time. He found out that the new “profits above all” types who had taken over Damage Control were using M.G.H. to boost the powers of destructive villains like Nitro. So of course Maria Hill arrested him. For only being registered in Canada I guess or something…
Fuck the overplot for the last 8 years has required a lot of supposedly smart characters to be inexplicably stupid…
That’s what they call an Idiot Plot. For the plot to work, most or all of the characters involved need to be or behave like idiots.
No, Wolverine stabbed the Damage Control exec who ordered it in the head in broad daylight in the middle of NYC, and only told Miriam Sharpe the truth about what happened, which she apparently kept to herself.
The executive, Walter Declun, somehow survived that and became a super-villain called the Broker who’s working for Doom in Doomwar.
Aardy R. DeVarque: @Sean — If you want to see all of the actual original texts of the original “I should write the Legion” series, then go to the first two Internet Archive links I posted. Those *are* the original posts, archived for posterity.
Face palm.
Somehow I missed that post and saw only your post right below it. My bad. Thanks!!
Not really. That comment wasn’t there originally. I suspect it was held up for moderation because of the number of links it had.
In any event, it had exactly what I was looking for. Granted, doesn’t add a tremendous amount to what is easily available here, but I enjoyed reading it all (and it makes the Word doc I put together nicely complete now.)
Thanks, Aardy!
Yer welcome!
Very Good site, thank yo mister, it’s help’s me!
I love this post, thank you for making it 🙂
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The flaws of the Superhero Registration Act ran deeper than “it was just run by bad people.” Heck, the first problem was that there were no failsafes for if it DID get taken over by bad people. Which it was.
Checks and balances, people.
Second, it was evil from the get-go. It violated individual rights, states’ rights, posse comitatus, and constituted a bill of attainder (making it a crime to be a certain class of person), involved imprisoning americans without trial for LIFE, conscripted every parahuman into an unconstitutional extra-legal army, and used convicted killers as enforcer squads against anyone who objected.
Objective.
Evil.
It’s popular these days to imagine that putting the government in charge of everything will make the world a better and safer place… history has repeatedly taught us otherwise.