Last Wednesday Marvel Comics’ much trumpeted 14,000-part political allegory/superhero slugfest finally reached it’s oft-delayed conclusion.

And it wasn’t very good.

But if writer Mark Millar and Marvel Comics failed to reward readers’ investment of their hard-earned money and patience with a good story, it’s not like reading the series was a complete waste. After all, if you didn’t read it, you might not get all of the jokes the Internet has told at Civil War’s expense this past week.

Take Christopher Bird’s re-dubbed version of the series, which has all that great Steve McNiven art, with the added bonus of a plot that makes sense, strong, consistent characterization and lots of swear words. Bird started with #5, and worked his way in both directions until he’d improved the whole darn thing. If Marvel were smart, they’d cut him a big fat check and release this as a trade paperback. In the mean time, you can check them all out online:

#1

#2

#3

#4

#5

#6

and #7

(Bird has similarly skewered Greg Land art and a Jeph Loeb and Rob Liefeld collaboration. Sure, they’re easy targets, but it’s still pleasurable to see Bird beat on them).

Then there’s Chris Sim’s crayon and stickfigure Civil War In 30 Seconds, which proves you can do at least 22-pages of awesome original art a month (as long as you don’t commit yourself to drawing every single hair in Hercules’ beard).

Kevin Church of Beaucoupkevin.com gave two of the sillier panels of Civil War #7 the Bird treatment.

And Sleestak has been trying to find Hercules a slightly less dated catchphrase to shout in the heat of battle.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 26th, 2007 at 8:58 pm and is filed under Comics, J. Caleb Mozzocco. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. Your comments will be moderated but will appear as soon as humanly possible.