The premise behind Civil War by writer Mark Millar and artist Steve McNiven: after a tragedy in small town America involving some super hero types, an exploding man, and a schoolyard full of kids (here’s a hint: the exploding man was fine afterward), the government wanted to register all the super guys (a big part of which meant revealing secret identities) to try to stop that sort of tragic craziness from happening again. Some super heroes were for this idea, or at least “OK, whatever” about it, and others were dead set against it.
For years, issues of comic books have been devoted to “good guy X meets good guy Y… and fight!” This trope has long since been relegated to the status of cliché, but Civil War was a valiant attempt at re-imagining said cliché with substance behind the in-fighting. The biggest problem from the creator’s standpoint was how to convincingly divide the characters up equally, and then how to keep these various long time allies at each others' throats. Neither problem got a satisfactory answer.
Filling up the ranks of the against side was easy: some fighting for civil liberty/personal freedom and others against “Big Government” seems to appeal to either end of the political spectrum. This is the side of the status quo, as with any long running serial story, the status is always quo.
The “for registration” side was tougher to fill. Despite the fact that Millar wanted both sides to be legitimate options for characters, the “for registration” side invariably came across as the bad guys. The side that creates crazy clones of old friends, takes the dirtiest of shots, and recruits super-villains for their team, as a rule, will be the bad guys.
The characters whose loyalties were the most important for the story were Captain America and Iron Man. If you knew nothing about Civil War and had to guess which side each character was on, I’m pretty sure you’d try Captain America as the for registration/pro-government representative, with Iron Man opposing him on the “good” side. That Captain America, of course he’s a stooge to the man, right?
Well, nope, good guess reader, but that’s not how it went down. You may be surprised to hear that the exact opposite affiliation was the case.
Captain America is, turns out, pretty awesome. Not one to blindly listen to authority, but instead is devoted to the ideals of the mythic America, when Cap is approached to be the figurehead of the “for registration” forces (or else) he busts angrily out of the room and surfs away on a jet fighter. That last part isn’t me trying to sound cool, that’s what happened. The only way it could be better is if the comic could start playing “Free Bird” while Cap soared off into the distance.
What sucks is that the way it all played out, it probably would have been better to make Captain America the “for registration” bad guy, because that would have at least made sense to readers. Instead that role fell to Iron Man, a character who historically subverts authority on all fronts, thinking he knows what’s best despite what he’s told, and does whatever HE wants. A vigilante.
I’m trying to figure out the thought process behind making Iron Man the “for registration” front piece, aka the bad guy, and the best I can come up with is some nebulous idea that because he’s rich, he’s bad? That because he’s a wealthy business man he’d support the government for the sweet contacts and contracts? That ties too much with cynical real world perceptions, forcing Iron Man to fit the mold of a Dick Cheney and Halliburton scenario isn’t fair to the decades of character we’ve been given before. (As a quick aside: sorry, Dick Cheney, but when you shoot a guy in the face and make him apologize for it, the reality becomes Cheney=bad guy. Do I really have to explain this?)
But see, it could have worked. Instead of making it sound like Iron Man was a fan of registration for everyone, like this was a philosophy that he would gladly have agreed to join up himself when he was just starting with the hero thing - let him admit that he’s a big hypocrite. Let him say “listen, I don’t trust you to be able to put on matching socks in the morning, much less go out and try to save the world, but that’s okay. I just need you to go through all these licensing and training programs I’ve deemed sufficient, and then maybe you can be useful. At least you’ll be insured.”
In that scenario, the story could have boiled down to stopping a bad guy, Iron Man, who couldn’t be appealed to using the intellectual argument that you can’t know all the variables and be right all the time, that someone else can know better and help you, who couldn’t be appealed to because he couldn’t get past his innate arrogance and self-righteousness.
The result of that story would have been a reversal: Iron Man would have represented many of the ideals espoused by the anti-registration forces, personal freedom, but hoarded wholly unto himself, while the actual community of anti-registration forces, in joining together against Iron Man, provide the accountability and experience to each other that the common man felt was lacking and started the whole Civil War crisis off in the first place.
This is in contrast to the actual ending: the anti-registration side gives up. Except for the members who don’t. Compelling.
