daredevilkink | Discussion/Off-Topic Post #1

Can somebody explain the Civil War storyline to a non-comics fan? (I read x-men which isn't really helpful here)

As it stands I can't see what the fight is about. Tony Stark thinks anybody running around in a costume should be registered, why does everybody have a problem with that? Currently anybody running around in a costume will be arrested and jailed if they're caught. Why is expecting to be registered so bad?

How would you even prove somebody is a superhero. You don't have to be a superhero, it doesn't show up in your DNA. Why didn't Spiderman go, oh since rampant viglantism is having a dreadful effect on law & order and general morality, I'll burn the costume and stop, and if anyone fleeing the police runs past me I'll just stick my foot out and trip them up.

Is there some issue or deeper problem here? I don't get it and I'd really like to because angst-filled fighting over points of principle where no one is exactly right and no one is exactly wrong makes my heart pitter-patter - but as it stands I'm mostly just confused.

Soooo... the thing about Civil War is that it doesn't necessarily make a whole lot of sense. Here it is explained by me though - this will likely be a loooong post.

First off, the 616 universe does not work like our world. Vigilantes are basically never arrested or jailed. The cops most often look the other way, even towards ones like Punisher who kill people, because... well a super-powered villain is not usually something a regular beat cop is gonna be able to handle, basically. Also, the vigilantes are not the only ones with secret identities - by the time Civil War rolls around, there are a few Avengers being sanctioned by higher authorities whose identities are unknown including Spider-Man.

It starts with Tony realizing that there is growing public sentiment against superheroes. People are starting to get bored of having them around and actually be bothered by them - they don't have a lot of accountability, there's not transparency with them and in the case of the ones whose identities are secret there's no way to, for example, hold them responsible or sue them for damages if they're causing problems. The public also starts to get annoyed that supervillains increasingly can't be held in prisons, the heroes refuse to kill them, and often the supervillains only exist and cause mayhem because of a beef with a hero to begin with. So things are tense.

In response to this, Tony and a secret cabal of higher-up heroes who don't normally work together (Reed Richards, Dr. Strange, Professor X, Black Bolt and Black Panther) all agree that actions need to be taken behind the scenes. They start working with the government to ensure that any legislation winds up in their favour and protects the community, and also jettison the Hulk into space. Because he basically represents everything the public hates about the heroes and they know they can't contain him.

Then, a group of young superheroes filming a reality TV show called The New Warriors stupidly chase a supervillain they think they can take into a school zone. It turns out the supervillain is super-juiced up on a new Mutant Growth Hormone that's emerging, and he explodes himself, taking almost all of the New Warriors except one member AND approximately 700 or so schoolchildren with him.

Tinder meet match, basically.

Tony has no choice but to immediately put the best possible government plan into action to register all heroes and disallow secret identities. The difference being that now, not only will vigilantes or local heroes potentially be arrested because law enforcement will be a must, there will also be government teams specifically put together to arrest and capture non-registered heroes.

Tony does this because he knows from his government contacts that the plans prior to his group's negotiations were very extreme - banning certain technologies altogether, chipping and tracking heroes, de-powering them or imprisoning them, etc. So to him registration is the best option and if they don't all go along with it, worse things are inevitable.

Steve, having not been let in on Tony's secret group or knowing this and not probably being willing to go along with it anyway which is why they didn't invite him, basically says "fuck you" to the government when they ask him to work with them to get heroes registered. He teams up with a bunch of the street heroes and heroes who object to go underground and fight the law.

So you then have a situation where Tony is backed into more and more of a corner by public sentiment calling for hero's heads and government legislation to be tougher and tougher, eventually building armor for the government and imprisoning his own friends who he can't make understand that he's trying to help them. And Steve can't back down either because registration represents everything he's against as a strong libertarian who believes that you shouldn't disincentivize people from doing the right thing and helping people if you can.

They nearly kill each other. Tony kind of wins, but then it's revealed that the Skrulls were secretly manipulating the whole thing the whole time and everyone in the 616 pretty much forgets any of it ever happened. (In fact, Tony gets his mind straight-up wiped so he literally forgets it all). The end?

It could have potentially been a really great "Who watches the Watchmen?" type of thing. Instead it was super-angsty whump if you're into that kind of thing and kind of a mess after the fact.

Also, Spider-Man first sides with Tony, reveals his identify, changes his mind and sides with Cap, and then realizes "Why am I even paying attention to this bullshit? Aunt May died during all of this..." and makes a weird deal with Mephisto that also resets everything he did during Civil War.

And Thor was dead before any of this even happened, so Tony at one point uses a Thor clone to create a bunch of lightning and scare everyone. Thor is super-pissed about that when he comes back from the dead.

Hawkeye is also pissed when he comes back from the dead in the middle of all this, but that's a whoooooole other story.

Guys... comics are fucking weird. :S

SA - And now I feel like I'll get some crap from people because my explanation was actually somewhat pro-Tony.

I need to clarify Steve's side. Why don't the heroes want to register? Well, because it means trusting the government with their real name. Which means it could leak. Which, for the ones like Peter who has Mary Jane and Aunt May to think about would put them in immense danger. Because every supervillain who has a beef with them will immediately know just who to attack.

(This is somewhat validated by the fact that at one point the government actually ENTRUSTS NORMAN OSBORN to be the guy in charge of that list! Seriously.)

Also, for a lot of them they just don't need the hassle but hate that it would mean not helping people. Like, if Luke Cage doesn't want to work for the government and deal with bureaucracy (and potentially preclude himself from having another job because he's officially a hero), he then has to stand around while a guy robs a bank and not step in? For a lot of them, that's the opposite of who they are. They just want to help people without all the bullshit. And they don't want to be penalized for that.

Which is kind of fair when you think about it. It's why we have good samaritan laws in place in our real world to protect people who try to step in and help someone.

So it's really an issue of not trusting big government and bureaucracy and wanting to protect your family and the people you love. Which hits a nerve for a ton of the heroes.

NA honestly for a more in depth perspective on this opinion you only need to read Daredevil:Born Again, Nocenti's 'Typhoid Mary' arc, Bendis and Brubaker's runs, and/or Mark Waid's run. Matt's life gets dismantled over and over because people know his secret identity and use it to get really really personal. Like, destroy his livelihood, sanity, relationships, and kill all his loved ones type personal. Heroes, especially ones that aren't top-tier government protected Avengers, have real and serious reasons to not want to go public. And those reasons are exemplified by Matt's life lmao

In theory Civil War should have been great because both sides have a point but IRL I like to think of 2006-2010 as Marvel's melodramatic emo period.

SA as before - So emo. And I say this as a person who has the final panel of Civil War: Confessions where Tony sits over Steve's dead body all depressed hanging on my wall. I like emo, but yeah... talk about overwrought angst.

I think 2006-2010 is best exemplified by the cheerful happy Speedball becoming the brooding Penance. And like how suddenly his powers can only be triggered by the 600 painful spikes on the inside of his metal costume when before his powers were like yellow light that could bounce. I gotta say tho there is a special place in my heart for the idiotic Dark Reign storyline where Osborn takes over the government. Dark Avengers and New Avengers with Hank Pym at the lead are awful and the best at the same time and New Avengers: The Reunion I unabashedly love and it is one of the few comics that has ever made me cry.

NA

One of the big problems with the Civil War is that it's simply poorly written. You can tell that some of the authors either didn't agree with or didn't know about certain aspects of the plot.

Something that I didn't see AIRT mention is that in at least SOME of the books, all powered individuals are REQUIRED to work for the government. Like, there's a teenage girl who stops a robbery and she's suddenly drafted to work the government, despite being a freaking teenager and completely untrained. And in these books, it's said (multiple times) that anyone powered at all, regardless of whether or not they ever want to try to stop crime, has to work for the government. But other books ignore this plot point. It's really frustrating.

Personally what really annoys me is that this could have been an amazing storyline, and instead, you have the Pro-Reg side doing cartoonishly villainous things (like putting their friends and fellow heroes in a prison that's driving people literally crazy, all without a trial or any legal consultation, or cloning a dead friend and then doing brain surgery on him when he doesn't work right) and the Anti-Reg side focusing way too much on personal loyalty towards Cap instead of any sort of actual protest against the law. Most of them just... stop protesting when Cap dies, which doesn't make much sense. There was also a lot of detective work going on about who was really responsible for the initial massacre, and it never really led anywhere or had any impact on the future storyline - I think it was all ignored in favor of Skrulls.

I haaaate Civil War, and can rant about it for a long time. It (combined w/DC's Infinite Crisis event a few months before) got me to stop reading comics for like 8 years. I only recently got back in to them.

I don't envy people who were actively reading while Civil War was ongoing. For me I just started reading comics six months ago and I have been avidly backread and just skipping over shit I don't care for but when an event is going on it is hard to ignore.

I think it also comes down to the fact that Civil War covers 100+ issues and they're all supposed to be interconnected. So different writers cared about different things and wrote characters in different ways. That's ALWAYS a problem in comic books (seriously, did Steve Rogers recently get depowered and become a tiny old man or a buff powered guy who just looks old?) but in an event like that it becomes particularly acute.

Secret Wars was great because the whole "hey every writer explore a weird alt-verse and somehow those are all Secret War related but leave Jonathan Hickman mostly alone to do what he's doing" worked fairly well and set it up to be fun and not painful.

Civil War did produce some amazing particular stories by particular writers that are worth reading. For example:

The Illuminati stuff with Stark in the lead-up and Brian Michael Bendis' New Avengers stuff was solid. Tony and Reed are basically my BROTP during this era.

Cap and Tony's own comics at the time (which had the advantage of being run by Warren freakin' Ellis and Ed Brubaker) really were great - Tony was struggling with losing Happy, having Extremis and having to take on the burden of being the guy in charge and Cap had only just finally found Bucky when everything kicked off so that (as it most definitely will in the movie version) definitely plays a role in how hardcore he is about things.

Much like with the lead-up to Secret Wars and the "destruction" of the Marvel universes, I do appreciate that it really does come down to the personal relationship between Tony and Steve. My favourite part of the whole thing and an amazing moment in their relationship is when Tony confesses to Steve's dead body that Steve would at least be proud that throughout the entire thing, Tony never once took a drink and he now knows that if he can be sober through this, he can be sober through anything. Although, seriously... if the fate of the universe hinges so clearly on two guys' bromance and whether they would risk everyone else to kill each other, I would NOT want to live in that universe. They should not be in charge, obviously.

The Front Line stuff with Ben Urich and a fellow reporter works super well as they investigate the government bureaucracy and implicate Stark in financial misdeeds.

Wolverine has a fantastic story where he wears the Iron Man suit and is the only guy looking to figure out who actually is responsible for the school explosion (he tracks the MGH spread to the company Damage Control).

The question of who the mutants would side with, especially because this was just after House of M when there were so few of them, was actually handled in an interesting way considering your normal assumed answer would be "Why the eff would mutants ever side with Tony?".

The problem is that most of the stuff that really doesn't work is in the main eight event issues. And in a lot of characters' comics, Civil War just detracts from their usual stories in a negative way and completely diverts the reader from other interesting stuff that might have been going on.

AYRT

Ha, I actually hated Frontline with a burning passion. :P But I know part of it is personal taste. I just feel like the whole thing was poorly organized, and it would have been a lot better if it'd been smaller and more coherent. And as I said, it came on the heels of a crappy DC huge event, which was also dark and depressing, and it felt like just more of the same.

Meh. Everyone has different tastes.

I've caught flack on here for enjoying Miller's run on DD and the person above was complaining about Remender and I love him, so clearly YMMV when it comes to different things in comics.

As long as there's room for everyone and everybody's opinions are valid, no worries.

And I think we can all agree that Marvel's recent turn towards the light and funny is better, yeah? Apparently gritty and depressing have fallen out of favour. (And everyone forgot to get that memo to Zack Snyder and the DC Movie verse).

Holy shit, nonnie, are you me? Infinite Crisis and Civil War were the things that got me to stop reading comics for years. And I'm old and have been reading comics since I was a wee thing but those two arcs, UGH NO WHY. Daredevil on Netflix actually got me to pick up comics again (♥ the show), and altho I'm enjoying them again, I'm still wary about some dodgy arcs.

BTW, Charles Soule, the new DD writer, wrote a Civil War AU that just concluded in 5 issues. FIVE. :)

AYRT

I might be you! Because I am also old and started reading comics when I was a tiny little thing! (My older brothers had years and years of X-Men comics that I started reading when I was like 7, and I started buying my own once I had enough money. Looking back on those comics, I am certain I missed like 95% of what was going on, especially anything that involved sex.)

I seriously think if the two events had more time between them, I wouldn't have stopped reading. But DC & Marvel fans went straight from Infinite Crisis to Civil War, and they were both just awful and dark and miserable and poorly written. And a lot of books were cancelled at that time, too, including pretty much all my faves. Ugh! I'm still upset when I think about it!

I actually avoided the Marvel movies for years - despite my old love of the genre, I didn't watch any of them 'til last year, at which point I was still kinda 'eh' about it. But a couple of my favorite fanfic authors had moved over in to the fandom, and I gave it a try. The Hawkeye comic is what actually got me back in to reading comics, and I'm still enjoying a lot of different stuff, but I'm also a lot more critical than I used to be about comics.

And yes, some arcs or even entire comics are still crappy and I dislike them. (Anything by Remender, ugh. Or, frankly, Mark Miller.) But the entire attitude of comics is, imo, different now. Mid-2000's, they were replacing all the humorous books with dark and depressing ones, and there were almost no happy or lighthearted books or moments. I remember being surprised at how humorous Nextwave was, for instance. They also killed or depowered a lot of the lighter characters. But I think comics now are a lot more lighthearted and hopeful. And diverse! Though I still haven't gotten back in to DC - I keep meaning to, but I'm just enjoying the MCU fandom so much right now, I haven't bothered.

I will check out that Civil War AU - that sounds really interesting! I would love to see the idea and its potential handled well.

The recent Civil War miniseries is alright, but not an improvement by much. It's an AU where the fighting in Civil War just continued to even more ludicrous proportions (I'm talking a giant chasm down the middle of America with Iron Man's followers living on one side and Cap's on the other).

Personally, I'm really thinking the movie has the best chance of getting it right. Fewer heroes, a lot of great set-up in their universe showing the threat the public is feeling from the heroes, plus Bucky smack in the middle of all of it. We'll see though.

Reading Civil War was an experience for me as a 15-18 year old. When all was said and done, I felt like I grew up a little. It had never occured to me before that a gigantic company like Marvel would deliberately embark on an endeavour that was totally artistically and morally bankrupt as a pure moneymaking ploy. (And by "morally" I mean the shameless way that the company exploited marketing, like telling people STEVE WILL REALLY STAY DEAD THIS TIME and then not having the gumption to stick to their editorial choices.)

So basically CW was a big fat object lesson in how Marvel is made of lying liars who lie, and that they really don't care about comics. Individual writers and artists are passionate about the work but the whole thing is an exercise in cynicism.

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