Comics: Civil War Returns!

Among yesterday’s comics was a “Secret Wars” spin-off set in the world Marvel Comics readers first saw in 2006-07’s “Civil War” mini-series, with artwork by Leinil Francis Yu and very solid writing by Charles Soule, the first two issues made for some snappy comics – just like most of the original “Civil War” stories did, ten years ago.

The basic premise of those stories is summarized quite well by one of the characters in this new spin-off series:

Six hundred people died when some inexperienced heroes took on a group of bad guys who were out of their league. Six hundred dead. Sixty were children. Who was responsible? Whose fault was it? That’s where it started. It almost seems quaint now – even to me. The new law – the S.H.R.A. – drew a line in the sand. You want to operated as a super-powered person? You register. You take off your mask. You get trained. And then, but only then, can you fight.

Tony Stark spearheaded the whole thing, and I can see why it appealed to him. The order. The safety. But not everyone agreed with Stark. Steve Rogers, for one. He saw the S. H. R. A. as a violation of the inherent principles of liberty upon which the nation was founded. Iron Man’s people called it registration. Captain America called it enlistment. No, conscription. He called it wrong. And so the battle began.

And as should be immediately obvious from such a summary, this is one of those “big” Marvel stories from which there should realistically come no happy ending (fan favorite writer Warren Ellis is especially good at thinking up these kinds of storylines, playing with them until he gets bored, and then dropping the whole steaming mess in some other writer’s lap). The US government would require super-powered vigilantes to be legally accountable for what they do; the US government would regulate the activities of individuals who can blow up whole city blocks without breaking a sweat; and, more to the point, registration and training would make the world a safer place – one of the key and overlooked points of the original “Civil War” stories was the fact that the government wasn’t just offering training and a weekly stipend to anybody, hero or villain, who signed up, it was also doing the heroes’ job more effectively than the heroes ever had: rounding up the super-powered bad guys and keeping them rounded up.

And the thing that would prevent a neat little happy ending is that once the US government started up things like Super Hero Registration and high-tech enforcers to capture super-powered dissenters, it wouldn’t just stop simply because Captain America and Iron Man somehow worked out their differences, shook hands, and went back to beating up super-villains. In this excellent spin-off series, Soule imagines a world extending onward from the original “Civil War” series, a world in which the two sides have hardened into two armed mini-kingdoms locked in a perpetual Cold War, and the world he’s come up with here is bleaker but a whole lot more plausible than the back-to-normal wrap-up the original series eventually got.

It’ll all become much more front-and-center relevant for comics fans in 2016 when Captain America: Civil War (the follow-up to Captain America: Winter Soldier, which has so far grossed about eleventy-billion dollars) brings a version of the story to the movie screen. I’ll be watching for the happy ending – and hoping I don’t get one.