REVIEW: Civil War II: The Oath

In the aftermath of the overlong Civil War II series, Marvel has put out a capstone on it, Civil War II: The Oath. I find it amazing that five artists worked on it. Not because the art is bad, but because there is so little room for the art to peek out from behind the giant word bubbles. It is almost like the heads at Marvel told Nick Spencer, no matter what you do, there can only be one punch in the entire book.

And Spencer (Morning Glories, Action Comics, Secret Avengers) took that to heart.

Out of the 32 pages of the book, evil Captain America spends 18 of them monologuing over the comatose body of Tony Stark. Evil Captain America spends an additional three pages mansplaining to Captain Marvel where she went wrong in the Civil War.

But if you think you are going to miss some cool action in the remaining eleven pages, don’t sweat it. They are just a couple of other conversations.

I wish that Marvel would upload a video to You Tube of them explaining to Rod Reis (Green Lanterns, Mortal Combat X) and the other artists that they want 24 pages worth of panels with just Steve Rogers from chest up. Did any of them ask why Marvel wanted to charge people for the most boring comic book in their entire history?

There is the old saw about showing and not telling, but this is some weird meta-reversal of that because there is a whole lot of speaking going on but, Steve Rogers isn’t telling us anything that we don’t already know. He’s evil. He’s going to used his position as Director of S.H.I.E.L.D. to do evil things. When he’s done, evil will happen.

Anybody whose read even just a summary of what is going on in the Captain America books already knows this.

Did I just misread the whole book? Was it a joke that I just didn’t get?

I understand that they want to get a jump-start on Secret Empire, but did anyone really think this was the way to do it?

[yasr_overall_rating]

Writer: Nick Spencer
Artists: Rod Reis, Phil Noto, Raffaele Ienco, Szymon Kudranski and Dono SÃ¡nches-Almara
Publisher: Marvel

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Andy Hall

Sent from the future by our Robot Ape overlords to preserve the timeline. Reading and writing about comics until the revolution comes. All hail the Orangutan Android Solar King!