Civil War - A Retrospective

Okay, it's been a couple of years, and there are two critical flaws in Civil War that ought to be discussed.

1. When you mix real-world issues such as security vs. freedom, you're bound to screw it up.

Super-heroes don't make a tremendous amount of sense in the real world. I mean, how exicited would you really be to see some anonymous guy dressed up as a spider taking the law into his own hands? People wouldn't stand for it, I mean, there's already a big problem with the blue wall of silence, imagine how people would feel about the spandex wall of silence. For that matter, pretty much every super-hero would have hundreds of civil suits against them at all times.

But none of that matters, because there are certain conventions that are unrealistic but accepted in this particular format.

Once these rules are questioned, which was essentially the point of Civil War, things start to break down. Millar was right when he had the people of New York side with Iron Man, because that's what real people would have done. Or at least, that's what I think real people would have done. Which leads me to the bigger problem.

2. The politics of Civil War were so bad as to render the entire story meaningless.

First off, there is a controversy in American society that mirrors the dilemma in Civil War, but it's about gun control, not civil liberties.

In the story people aren't giving up their freedoms, because the law does not apply to the vast majority of them. The Super-Hero Registration Act compels only people with superpowers to register with the government. To put the comparison more bluntly, people with abilities that could potentially allow them to harm others must register those abilities with the government. Replace "abilities" with "gun" and there we go. Now, it's not a perfect analogy, because superpowers are not often gained voluntarily, but forcing people to register does not impair any civil liberty that the vast majority of people enjoy. So, no, people are not choosing between liberty and security, because people can have both.

Second, in order to make the anti-registration forces seem at least somewhat reasonable, Mark Millar decided to make Iron Man and his cronies out to be fascists, building Guantanamo-like prisons in the Negative Zone and creating evil clones of Thor. Now, what this defamation served to do was to ensure that Captain America was the hero of this story. At this point, no other writer was too keen to support the pro-Registration side in their own titles, and so the vast majority of Civil War tie-ins dealt with the protagonist fighting against the evils of registration, even in books where the main character was on Iron Man's side (i.e. Ms. Marvel).

So, Civil War, though it did sell well, was not a good story.

Oh, yeah, after coming up with a list of DC titles that deserve to be cancelled, I would also add that the new version of New Warriors is a pretty bad book too, because the main antagonist appears to be the Initiative, which is headed up by Iron Man, and I don't think it's sustainable to have a character with two on-going titles to be one of the main villains in another book.