How do you make a bad idea worse? Add Kevin Smith, apparently.
This is the guy who added rape to Black Cat, gave us Masters Of The Universe: Revelations, is obsessed with his take on Batman, and seems to be locked into his particular brand of humor. I was never really a fan of his, but he was mostly harmless until recently, Black Cat aside. Putting someone who admits to not liking He-Man on a He-Man series was Mattel’s fault.
I’m not even sure whey they felt we needed a crossover between the Marvel superheroes and the Star Wars galaxy, but it doesn’t have to be a rulebreaker. While it sounds like something out of Super-Team Family, Star TREK crossed over with X-Men, and so has Doctor Who. Then above preview came up for Star Wars/Marvel: Hope Assembles from the X-Twitter feed of Discussing Film and…nobody’s complaining about David Marquez’s art. It’s quite good. It’s a preview so there’s a lot we don’t know about the story. The dialog, however…
Oh, we’re in for a bad time.
We can’t learn much from the four pages when it comes to this crossover, at least not in story. The preview starts by recreating the opening scene from the first movie, which C-3PO complaining to R2-D2 about the ship being attacked and the princess being out of luck this time. If you remotely care about this crossover you already know the scene by heart. This is NOT a comic for casual fans of either franchise. Disney, Marvel, and LucasFilm are betting you already know these characters from comics or movies, or maybe both. The scene changes with Iron Man there showing up asking to see a princess, specifically noting a Disney princess. Out of fear the disguised Rebels start shooting at him until Johnny Storm uses his flame powers to chase them off. Their blasters weren’t doing anything to Iron Man so he could have just as easily chased them off with his repulsors, but we wouldn’t get Johnny questioning Tony’s comment about being the good guys, or Tony referring to “Star Wars gatekeepers”.
If you don’t see the problem there, try the next two panels. The Star Destroyer is leaving Earth and taking the ambassadorial ship in, again, like in the movie only with Earth taking Tatooine’s place for…some reason. The stormtroopers are actually talking among themselves about this being an act of war, something you’d expect out of Clerks, and I’ll be surprised if this comic doesn’t reference the Death Star discussion from that movie.
Heck, that’s probably how Kevin Smith got the writing assignment.
The conversation is stopped with Captain America throwing his mighty shield and knocking out every stormtrooper by the door, making their armor even more useless than it was against blaster fire. “They got a name for these canned hams in the Star Wars movie?”, he asks, followed by the Thing telling him they’re called Stormtroopers. We know Steve’s history with stormtroopers. They’re joined by the Invisible Woman, Black Panther, Black Widow, and Thor.
So what’s wrong with this dialog? The bit about “gatekeepers” is confusing. It sounds like Smith just wanted to use the insult the entertainment industry and certain parties loves throwing at fanbases who want what they’re fans of to remain that thing that made them fans rather than the everything for meeeeeeeeeeeeeeee crowd changing everything popular to be about them. Typical high school mean girl bully mentalities. The blasters are literally going “pew pew”, lest you think we’ve run out of witty…which it did before the preview started, apparently. For some reason Johnny has time to question Tony’s comment about being one of the good guys, because Smith is all in on the “Marvel Humor ™”. These are all really, stupid but it’s not the worst part.
What, you thought I made all that up?
Why are they treating Star Wars like a work of fiction….WHEN THEY’RE IN THE WORLD OF STAR WARS!!!!!!!! This is real life right now. Are they trapped in the movie world? Can’t be, the Star Destroyer is leaving Earth for some reason. Did something bring the movie to life? Is the Impossible Man messing with the Galaxy’s Edge ride or the failed Galactic Starcruiser hotel came to life and everyone thinks they’re the movie characters but the Avengers and Fantastic Four? (No sign of Reed, by the way.) The first one is the dumbest idea, but they’re all pretty stupid…and well within Kevin Smith’s style.
Or, and this is how such a story should have gone, did the Imperials come to Earth for some reason and our heroes has to fight them? In which case the Star Wars references make no sense. If Star Wars is fiction on our planet and real in their dimension…we have had stories where one reality’s fiction is another’s reality and writers are just mentally capable of “seeing” into those dimensions for their story ideas…fine. If this takes place in some shared continuity outside of both franchise’s normal continuities, then having Star Wars exist on this Earth is highly unlikely, unless George Lucas visited or came from that galaxy somehow. Even then, it’s a recreation of the first Star Wars scene ever to a degree that the coincidence is a strain on any credibility.
So Iron Man knows Princess Leia is technically a Disney princess. Does he also know so is Llandra, princess of the Shi’Ar? Does he know he’s owned by Disney? Does the fourth wall exist? Is Smith making a parody, because then Marquez’s art is too good for this story. If the art were more cartoonish we’d know he’s trying to pull a Sergio Aragones, except his writer, Mark Evanier, just shares Smith’s penchant for political nonsense. (Again, the “gatekeeper” line, while Evanier took his own shot at Republicans in the Aragones comedies where he ended up in the worlds of Marvel and Star Wars separately as well as DC.) Maybe the Danger Room went crazy and this is not a true crossover any more than Star Trek: The Next Generation crossed over with Dixon Hill. The Hill novels only exist as fiction in Star Trek’s fictional world, and these “jokes” only make sense (because they’ll never work) if that’s what’s happening with the Marvel heroes and this Star Wars scenario, a fiction somehow brought to life in their real world.
Not surprisingly, this is getting a roasting on X-Twitter, and for good reason. As a crossover this already looks bad because the references make no sense unless it’s not a true crossover. Star Wars shouldn’t exist as a work of fiction, and there are a number of Star Wars knockoffs that could take it’s place somehow. Do a Battle Beyond The Stars reference, maybe even a crack about Jon Boy Walton in space for the handful of readers who know what The Waltons is. Take a pop shot at Star Trek, now part of both Disney and Marvel’s rivals with the Paramount/Warner Brothers merger. Make up a fictional movie if you need to reference something. Or make this a fake team-up where the actors and theme park ships somehow came to life and our heroes have to restore the memories of the guests and staff who now think they’re part of the story. That last one could almost work, if not a cop out of a crossover. It wouldn’t help the lame dialog (and it would mean Cap just concussed a bunch of innocent 501st cosplayers), but at least this stupidity would make sense.
Not that Kevin Smith knows or cares about how to make sense anymore.
Wait, after all this time NOBODY has shown a Star Wars movie to Steve Rogers? The hell kind of friends does he have? Somehow the Marvel/NFL crossover coming up sounds LESS lame.
