The MCU is... Moving On?!
The newest Marvel Cinematic Universe show has premiered, and She-Hulk: Attorney at Law is proving to be a reasonably faithful adaptation of the character while also pissing off the misogynists who claim to read comic books. However, it is but the latest evolution of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, as revealed by She-Hulk’s showrunner, Jessica Gao. You can read the full article here, but we’ll quote the relevant portion.
[We made a] conscious and specific decision [not to explore The Blip.] So many shows and movies in the MCU have already kind of covered that and, you know, it’s been talked about a lot that it just felt like, OK, so many people have already covered that territory that we’ve accepted it... We live in a world where that’s already happened and people have already moved on.
This was reacted to with the expected level of online discourse. Some laughed at how stupid the idea of Marvel’s citizens getting over that 5-year gap and armageddon without flinching onscreen, while others began to obsess with how this affects the MCU as a whole. Many people just shrugged and moved on with their lives.
But what few people realized is something far greater: this makes the Marvel Cinematic Universe into an even closer brother to Marvel Comics as a whole.
For an example of what I’m talking about, we’re gonna rewind back to 1991. Marvel Comics was experimenting with the format of the event comic once again. Massive events had been essentially beta-tested in the mid-80s with both Secret Wars and Secret Wars II, resulting in two different ways to tell a massive story with ongoing repercussions. After the weird and derailing mess that was Secret Wars II, however, Marvel went on to place more crossover stories in the annual specials each comic had at the time. Stories like The Kings of Pain would bring together X-Force and the New Warriors, while The Subterranean Wars drew the Avengers, Namor the Sub-Mariner, and the Hulk together for an adventure. They would be self-contained to just the annuals, and the cast of the overall story made fans feel like they were getting both a complete story and something special.
This time, however, Marvel would try something akin to their first Secret Wars: an event comic that was mostly stand-alone but would feature massive repercussions for the universe at hand. Thanos would obtain the six Soul Gems, which he himself would rename into the Infinity Gems out of respect for the infinite power they contained.
To keep the confusion, the MCU would call them the Infinity Stones and change the colors to which each gem was assigned. Thanks!
With his power, and with all six Infinity Gems in his power, Thanos snaps his fingers and eliminates half of all life as proof that he is dedicated in his romantic pursuit of the personification of Death in the Marvel Universe. Unlike in the movies, where Thanos believes that eliminating half of all life will help keep life thriving, this Thanos just wants to make Death his girlfriend.
Comics are wild, y’all.
The first issue of what is known as The Infinity Gauntlet would be half setup for this moment and half reacting to the moment itself. Heroes vanish, civilians die, and everyone is traumatized for life. A few issues later, the character known as Adam Warlock obtains the Infinity Gauntlet and restores the universe back to normal. This also means that everyone is restored, and life is back to normal.
And literally no one comments on it ever again.
Sure, we have a few off-hand remarks about how impressively powerful the Infinity Gauntlet is, and we even have two follow-up crossovers in The Infinity War and The Infinity Crusade, but those are less about the Gauntlet and more about weird cosmic events that were similarly equal in scope. Certainly, the average joe on the street doesn’t remark about it again at all, and even civilians with inroads to superheroes like Pepper Potts and Mary Jane Parker don’t even ask about what happened on page.
While it wasn’t the five-year “blip” that happened for the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the fact that everyone is somehow able to move on fits perfectly with the MO of the comics they draw inspiration and stories from. There are several more examples of Marvel’s civilian populations just moving on unless specifically needed for a story.
2000 would bring us the month gimmick event of Maximum Security, where the various space empires and aliens made a group decision that the Earth could now be used as a prison planet for all the various villains and ne'er-do-wells, but kinda forgot to ask Earth if that was ok. Not only did alien villains and monsters menace the civilians of the Earth, but Ego the Living Planet was even plunked down onto the Earth and began to take over.
Next week, the Avengers would have brunch and laugh about how “unstoppable” he was.
At the end of the month, it was like it had never happened. And no one bothered to remember this arc ever again. Not even the Fantastic Four or Avengers, who were integral to the plot.
A long-beloved storyline was brought to a finale with World War Hulk, a 2007 event where the Hulk returned after being banished to space and brought his revenge against those who had banished him. Using invading alien armadas and his brothers in the Warbound, Hulk would take over the entirety of New York City and even transform Maddison Square Garden into a gladiatorial arena where he would force heroes like Mr. Fantastic and Doctor Strange to fight to the death.
The seat prices were to die for, though.
The event would end after about six months of stories with the Hulk “defeated” and the world in shock. Aside from a few issues of the replacement comic The Incredible Herc, the entire aftermath of World War Hulk was brushed aside. There was a mini-series called Damage Control that covered some of the repair work but ultimately was a light-hearted comedic series that was meant to lighten things up after such a blisteringly long and dour event.
And again, not one of the civilians remembers the time the Hulk showed up with an alien armada and threatened to have Reed Richards beat Tony Stark to death with a mace.
The following year? Skrulls would reveal to have infiltrated our entire world at every single level, a literal Secret Invasion. Not a single character made it out of the event without either having been replaced by a Skrull or knowing someone who was. Indeed, alien warships even hovered over most major cities, with a weird focus on New York because everything has to happen there in Marvel for reasons known only to God.
Ultimately, the aliens were all defeated, and Norman “Green Goblin” Osborn was the poster child of the alien slaughtering rebellion. While this invasion derailed most comics for a few months and installed Norman as head of SHIELD’s replacement organization, HAMMER… the average joe on the street forgot about the Skrulls pretty damned quickly. While the comic has, in retrospect, become a really weird look at post-9/11 paranoia and jingoism through a filter of really stupid comic events and writer Brian Michael Bendis’s lack of tact when it comes to big comic stories… ask the average civilian in Marvel what happened a few years ago.
Maybe they’ll tell you the Mets won the World Series.
This complete lack of historical memory in the Marvel Universe stretches back to 1966 (in the real world) when Galactus towered over the cityscape of New York and intended to devour the Earth. The sky was filled with nightmares few had seen before, and the skyscraper-sized man in purple was hard to miss… but even the hot dog vendor at the Baxter Building just shrugged and went about his daily business once the danger passed.
Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, the creative team behind The Fantastic Four at the time, chose to give us a possible explanation as to why everyone went back to normal so fast, however.
“I bet this so-called Galactus was hired by Spider-Man to destroy us all!”
The news cycle. While it ran much slower back in the 1960s, we still had the rumor-mongers and liars popping up to spout their own ideas versus what actually happened. In today’s modern world of social media and publicly paranoid people getting television time, it makes a disturbing amount of sense that people would just want to ignore the horror that happened and get back to normal.
I mean, look at COVID. Not only have people continually denied there was an issue while the pandemic was at its peak, we still have people trying to deny COVID was ever a major issue despite the six million deaths from the virus and millions more suffering from long-term COVID symptoms.
Don’t forget Monkeypox, which is potentially going to be just as big of a problem thanks to misinformation as to how the virus itself is spread. With the way it’s spreading, it’s like we’re looking at an event comic pileup with one disconnected event leading right into the next.
Maybe it’s reality itself that needs to take a moment and react to what happens, not our silly comic book movies and TV shows.
