Tom Brevoort gives us the first must-read of the day - Mark Millar’s initial proposal for Civil War, complete with commentary from Joe Quesada and Brevoort himself:

The big finale, the last three or four issues, comes on the back of Thor’s return. Like I said, every trick in the book has been established here and the appearance of the mysterious new Thor should set pulses racing, especially as we only get hints to his amazing back-story. He can’t believe what’s happened to the superheroes and wonders what would have happened had he been around. He was always the third point in the Tony-Cap relationship and brought a real balance to the team between the futurist and the traditionalist. But it all comes to a head as the cliff-hanger from Planet Hulk neatly cuts into our own series. We just have to be careful here because we’re hoping for 300K on this thing and Hulk will probably do around 100K so we really have to seem quite self-contained. Another thing I’d like to suggest is completely rethinking the alien attacks thing discussed at the summit. We’ve seen aliens attack many times and varied types of aliens will only be confusing and a turn-off for the end of a big superhero series. For a summer event, the kids want Marvel characters and the conclusion to this should be the biggest Marvel character of all. I’d really like to see the Hulk attack Earth and bring with him small, five foot versions of the Hulk called Hulk Babies who are just as powerful and dangerous, but the spawn of the Hulk after he’s bedded a hundred thousand alien chicks. They should all look the same and do enormous amounts of damage when they show up with Dad. This keeps it simple, looks more visually interesting and stops us falling into Star Trek or whatever. It also seems more like a superhero comic than a sci-fi thing and I think the fans would be more into it.

[JQ - Mark, I agree and disagree. I’m not crazy about the amoeba style aliens and I think we need to keep this clean and simple. I do believe that the sight of a giant Hulk in the middle of a double page spread wearing Roman Gladiator or Centurion armour surrounded by a legion of weird aliens in similar armour that are bigger than the Hulk is a pretty moment! I would avoid making the threat too complex, keep it to simple aliens that are designed to kick our heroes asses. The fan boy moments come in watching how our heroes get back together. SOME SPECIFIC COMMENTS ABOUT UPCOMING ELEMENTS OF WORLD WAR HULK DELETED HERE

So, basically, I see no problem with a simple alien invasion, remember, what makes this one cool is that it has the Hulk at its front line, leading it. It’s just the incident that unites the heroes. It’s that unification that needs to make the fanmen pee themselves.

By the way, I would save Captain Marvel for the Hulk War. We could use him on one of two ways. Most likely word will leak that Thor will be making his appearance in MCW, and we surprise people with the last page being a very Christ like Captain Marvel. Then an issue later Thor appears. Or we can have Thor appear first and then no one will expect Captain marvel in the following issue.]

[TB - Let me say the obvious thing here: The Hulk War doesn’t belong in this story, and it’s only our own greed that keeps trying to force it in. I do think that the Hulk should play a role in this story, but right now this is the point where everything disintegrates into chaos, into two big summer crossover stories smooshed together. It’s not going to be accessable, it’s not even going to make sense, and I don’t think we should do it. Let PLANET HULK be PLANET HULK, and let CIVIL WAR be CIVIL WAR. Let’s not chase the DC dollar on this. It’s a sucker’s bet.]

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 17th, 2007 at 11:11 am and is filed under Comic Books, Creators, Marvel, News & Views. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.