Civil War Frontline Book 1

If this book had been but a little shorter I'd have put up a review sooner! As I complained before, Marvel's Civil War event used very-broad strokes of the brush to tell a story that had consequences across the Marvel world's landscape. And that means there will always been new facets to explore (possibly for years to come). One way to tackle this is to simply publish a whole bunch of side-stories together.

Frontline was an anthology title (published in 11 parts and collected in 2 volumes) that serialized several story-lines. The first dealt with reporters Ben Ulrich (of Daredevil fame) and Sally Floyd (of lesser X-Men fame) as they struggle to cover the events for their respective newspapers. While Ulrich must deal with his publisher Jameson who is losing his mind in the wake of Spider-Man revealing his true identity, Floyd finds herself digging deeper into the anti-registration faction but fails rather spectacularly as actually finding Captain America (who had become a fugitive).

The second major story follows Speedball - the last surviving New Warrior who was at the scene when the school was blown away. He is thrown in prison and given a choice: rot, or sign-up and be a poster-boy. Speedball refuses, believing that signing for registration will mean he admits guilt to the incident that left 60 children dead. What he doesn't know until AFTER meeting with Jennifer Walters (She-Hulk) is that while he's been in a coma and in prison, the outside world has vilified him as a scapegoat.

Interspersed with these chapters are bits of sequential art (each one about 3 pages each). They explore the concept of war in historical parallels including Caesar's crossing of the Rubicon, the American Civil War, stories of World War 1, etc.

And finally, we also get a glimpse at what life is like on the inside. In the third serialized story, Wonder Man gladly signed up for Registration in the beginning but slowly starts to notice little hints of fascism creeping up around him as he's ordered to track a suspected terrorist.

On a side note, I'd like to point out the irony that while Civil War is as shallow as the Spider-Man 3 movie I just saw this week, Marvel made a conscious editorial decision to tell a large-scale story using multiple publications. A movie does not have this luxury... put that way, while it doesn't cross-over directly into the events occurring the main arc, I still highly recommend the Frontline series because as far as tie-ins go, this one is probably one of the more important ones.