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alt title(s): Marvel Civil War The 2006 /2007 Marvel Crisis Crossover.
A meta-human registration act is passed in Congress, in the wake of an accident where the New Warriors unthinkingly start a fight with several fugitive supervillains (including Nitro) in the middle of a suburban housing development while filming a Reality TV program. Demonstrating power well in excess of any he's ever shown before (due to secret drug treatments provided by a Corrupt Corporate Executive) Nitro explodes, killing all of the New Warriors (except Speedball) and 612 civilians, including the entire population of an elementary school next to the fight.
This sparks a fury of anti-super feelings in civilians. In the wake of House Of M (the previous Crisis Crossover) and Secret War, Congress decides they have to act to control the supers. The Superhuman Registration Act (SHRA) is passed. Although different individual comics in the crossover treated the act in slightly different (and occasionally inconsistent) fashions, the most commonly used presentation of the SHRA included these features:
- mandatory registration of all superpowered individuals (whether active as superheroes or not)
- mandatory registration of all costumed crimefighters (whether superpowered or not)
- all crimefighting and lifesaving activity by non-registered superheroes was illegal
- all registered heroes had to attend, and pass, mandatory government training (apparent waivers were issued by Tony Stark for himself and his pro-reg Avengers comrades)
- all registered heroes were potentially liable to being called up into active government service, at the discretion of the government, without the option of refusing
Captain America refuses to sign the act and hunt renegade heroes, and forms the Secret Avengers, an underground organisation that resists the act. The X-Men declare the whole mess Somebody Elses Problem, and Tony Stark, aka Iron Man, leads a SHIELD force to help capture the renegade heroes. The US government, with Tony Stark's concurrence, also puts together a task force of supervillains, the New Thunderbolts, for the purpose of hunting down unregistered heroes. Some of the most psychopathic and violent villains imaginable (including notables like Bullseye and Venom) are, against all sense, released back onto the streets for the government-sanctioned hunting down of and crippling of unregistered heroes; Deadpool is also hired for similar duties.
The crossover was similar to, but far more extreme than, previous Super Registration Act plots in comics. It is also notable for big changes in the status quo, including the death of Captain America and the unmasking of Spider-Man and several other heroes. (Despite Joe Quesada, editor-in-chief of Marvel promising that it would not be undone via a "magic retcon", those being his exact words, Spidey's unmasking was retconned as a part of his wildly unpopular pet storyline One More Day... by literal magic.)
Most of the Marvel Universe was involved in this, including The Avengers, the Fantastic Four, the Runaways, and many other heroes. Note that the X-Men comics were, by and large, uninvolved in the crossover because they were still dealing with the decimation of mutant population that happened at the end of House of M. However, two of them did join, with the time traveler Cable siding with Captain America, and Bishop joining forces with Iron Man.
In Summer 2007, Dan Slott teased reader with retconning the whole thing away in the GLX/Deadpool crossover, when Squirrel Girl tried to go back and prevent the Stamford explosion. She ended up in the future instead.
In December 2007, a "What If" special was released, involving a stranger who reveals two alternate versions of Civil War to Iron Man, who is visiting Captain America's symbolic grave at Arlington at the time. The first is "What If Captain America led all the heroes against the Registration Act?" and the second is "What if Iron Man lost the Civil War?"
The event's plot is used as the story in the video game Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2. Initially.
The series provides examples of:
- Adaptation Distillation: Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2. Fans cringed when they heard it would be based on Civil War, but the results were notably better received than the series it was based on.
- Affectionate Parody: Mightygodking's I Don't Need Your Civil War
 .
- Anvilicious
- Cape Busters: Shield creates a new unit to capture heroes that don't register, in defiance of the SHRA. In an amazing display of subtlety, they are named the "Cape Killers."
- Cardboard Prison
- Character Derailment: Let's be honest here...everybody. Iron Man, Hank Pym, and arguably, Mr. Fantastic seem to have gotten the worst of it.
- Captain America's motivations and personality stayed the same, but they made him lug around a giant Idiot Ball and the story ended when he suddenly surrendered for no apparent reason.
- In the case of Pym and several others, this was later explained (or asspulled, depending on one's opinion of the writers) that they were on the list of people who'd been replaced by shapeshifting aliens, in some cases since before arcs that had happened two years previously. However, Iron Man, Mr. Fantastic, and Captain America hadn't, which means their derailment was still intact.
- Even the X-Men staying out of it was wrong. First of all, it was the writers not wanting them involved in another registration storyline, when in that universe, the X-Men would have the most experience on something like that. Furthermore, their stance of just going with the winning side, which basically was ignoring what they thought about right and wrong, was also just the writers making them say that.
- Moreover, why did the X-Men just ignore a conflict that is so incredibly vital to mutants? Even if the pro-reg side decides not to piss against the wind and does not attempt to draft them in the government's service while the war still goes on, nothing can protect any mutant from such treatment if pro-regs win, and, being mutants, they generally just can't discard their costumes to pass for normals.
- The main reason they stayed out of the whole mess was because it didn't matter to them who won. They were all already registered after M-Day, so no matter what, they didn't have a choice in the matter.
- Slapstick, hands down. Compare and contrast.
- Civil War
- C List Fodder: Goliath and the New Warriors.
- Cloning Blues
- Completely Missing The Point: The New Warriors, and by extension superheroes in general, are blamed for the death and destruction in Stamford and the general chaos that results from super-battles...even though it's Nitro and other villains like him that are the ones who actually start the trouble to begin with.
- And they had no way of knowing Nitro could suddenly cause so much destruction, so their level of training had nothing to do with it.
- Conflict Ball: Was there any real reason for them to be fighting like that? Just one act people don't agree with, and they are at each others' throats? Even small wars do not work that way. There had to have been some underlying tension that the act finally set off (like many political hot button issues). Considering the directly clashing sections of each side did not have that, it was clear they were fighting just because the writers wanted them to.
- Concepts Are Cheap: Which side are you on? It won't matter. We'll just have heroes take sides as though it was picking teams for sports.
- Crisis Crossover
- Darker And Edgier: Formerly Fun Personified Speedball gets new, pain-based powers, takes up an outfit lined with spikes on the inside (one for each person who died in the explosion) and dubs himself Penance. The Internet explodes with laughter, disgust, and the Fan Nickname "Bleedball".
- Depending On The Writer: Up to and including whether holding American citizens in a concentration camp without trial after intentionally setting mass-murdering supervillains on them was a bad thing.
- Designated Hero and Designated Villain: Captain America and Iron Man. Even now, in any given comic, which was which depends completely on who's writing.
- Since one became a stereotypical fascist, and the other is friggin' Captain America (who punched out Hitler on his first cover), this can lead to some serious values dissonance in stories backing Iron Man.
- In looking over the Iron Man Movie special features, the writers likened Tony Stark to Abraham Lincoln, in he's pursuing a cause, and being destroyed from the inside from it, casting him in a more sympathetic light.
- In fact, Dr. Strange near the end of the story even mentioned that he couldn't step in because there really WASN'T a clear good and evil team.
- There was even one Iron Man comic during the civil war that had the two talk with each other, and neither of them could really decide who was right, because they both had valid points.
- Evil Costume Switch: On the covers, and a few of the supers who switched sides.
- Fan Nickname: This is the storyline that led many fans to call Tony Stark 'Der Eisenfuhrer'.
- Fetish Retardent: Maria Hill looked like some sort of nightmare in the first issue.
- Godwins Law: Take a drink everytime someone compares the registration act to Nazi Germany, the USSR, China, the Roman Empire, or any other oppressive/totalitarian regime you can think of and you could potentially be wasted after a single issue of any given tie-in.
- Of course, depending on who wrote that particular issue it might be a valid comparison.
- Heel Face Turn: Former villains becoming hunters alongside Stark and SHIELD. Mind you, they are still, by and large, unrepentantly evil, and really, really love their work (that is, hunting down unregistered heroes), which they do with a certain zeal... and legal sanction.
- It should be noted that by the end of the war, the Anti-register team also had super villains working for them.
- Idiot Ball: Captain America first and worst, but he was far from the only one.
- Idiot Plot
- One of the What Ifs? averted this by having the situation resolved relatively peacefully.
- Issue Drift
- Jumping Off The Slippery Slope: Marvel attempted to play the "war" as one where both sides had valid points, rationalizing the pro-reg side of the debate, and the tagline for the event was "Which side are you on?", implying that either side was valid. It soon became all-too-Anviliciously clear that the pro-reg fighters were the villains, though.
- Mark Millar himself insists that this is a case of Misaimed Fandom, that he intended the pro-reg side to be seen in the right, and that he didn't understand why people would think differently. ...of course, when you read the series, you see them do things like make a robot clone of one of their dead friends, who kills one of the anti-reg heroes. As well, most fans found the anti-regs' reasons for being "wrong" unsatisfying.
- Anti-regs motives may have been inferior to the Pro-regs (summed up as "It's wrong"), but the fact the Pro-regs are complete bastards is slightly more villain-like than vague philosophical wrongness.
- This might also be a case of Writer On Board for various titles. Check out the differences between the Iron Man title and, say, She Hulk.
- Killed Off For Real: Probably the New Warriors (well the ones involved in the Stamford incident, the group has now reformed),
probably not definitively not Captain America despite Marvel's claims that Cap was definitely dead for ever and ever no matter what.
- Memetic Mutation: During the initial promotion for the crossover, Marvel released a pair of message board signature images reading either "I'm with Captain America" or "I'm with Iron Man". Within days, fans were creating their own versions by the dozens, and similar images are still being created for both Marvel and DC's Crisis Crossovers.
- This troper saw this one on the Superdickery forums: "In Soviet Russian, Crimson Dynamo is with YOU!"
- They've made a resurgence in the early 2010 Leno/O'Brien controversy; "I'm with Coco!"
- Moral Dissonance: The pro-reggers do some horrible, horrible things, such as calling for parley, and then moving up a mechanized infantry battalion and opening fire from helicopter gunships in express violation of the Geneva Conventions.
- My God What Have I Done: Iron Man's reaction to the outcome of the alternate scenarios presented to him in the "What If" special.
- Omniscient Morality License: Tony Stark and Reed Richards claim this, due to their status as "futurists". Whether or not people call them on this depends on the writer.
- Given that the non-Cardboard Prison they built in the Negative Zone has since been taken over by the aliens native to that dimension (who the Fantastic Four has fought before) who are planning to invade Earth, their omniscience is rather in question... So Yeah.
- On the anti-reg side, Cable, who takes the opportunity to give the President a lecture on how the Fifty States Initiative will only lead to tyranny while Deadpool is using the White House toilet.
- One Scene Wonder: the crossover generated a big upswing in interest in Hercules (kicking off what would turn out to be a few very good years for him), in a series of moments that amount to about six pages.
- Put On A Bus: Before the bill gets passed, Johnny Storm is assaulted outside a club and left in a coma for the length of the series. Hulk was entrenched in the Planet Hulk series, and trying to get him to pick a side was something both sides combined couldn't handle. Besides...they were all fucked when Hulk got back to Earth.
- Red Skies Crossover
- Screw This Im Outta Here: Ben Grimm decided this was a load of crap he didn't feel like dealing with due to the lack of care over civillians, so he skipped town and spent his time in France.
- Super Hero
- The Alcatraz: The captured superhumans are imprisoned in a large prison in the Negative Zone. Escape is "futile" since it is in a separate dimension composed of antimatter.
- They Wasted A Perfectly Good Plot: Plenty, but perhaps most notably, the inference that Nitro's powers had only been as destructive as they were because of MGH given to him by
Stark Industries Damage Control boss Walter Declun, who gets summarily executed by Wolverine.
- To Catch Heroes Hire Villains: They empowered the Thunderbolts to go after heroes who refused registration. Thunderbolts under the command of Norman Osborn.
- And including Bullseye, a Complete Monster whose personal body count is probably well in excess of those killed in the Stanford explosion.
- Trahison Des Clercs: Pro-reg 'Futurist' Reed Richards.
- Wall Banger: Way too many, but Civil War: Frontline #11 and Sally Floyd's "words of wisdom" is an especially big standout.
- What Do You Mean Its Not Political: When asked about the political undertones of the series, head writer Mark Millar said that Civil War was "accidentally political, because I just cannot help myself" and also that "the political allegory is only for those that are politically aware. Kids are going to read it and just see a big superhero fight."
- Meanwhile, Editor-in-Chief Joe Quesada was saying "Along the way, Marvel will unveil its version of Guantánamo Bay, enemy combatants, embedded reporters and more. The question at the heart of the series is a fundamental one: 'Would you give up your civil liberties to feel safer in the world?'" So, one of these two men is lying about whether or not it was really 'accidental'.
- Considering how badly the whole thing was thought out I could see the political implications as being completely accidental. The people we should be rooting for are limiting civil liberties, running an internment camp, forcing a draft of super humans to work for the government, and sending villains to hunt down dissenters. The fact that we are supposed to root for those people may lead people to believe that not a lot of brain power went into the implications and maybe they should have organized those talking points a little better.
- On the other hand, the other side is uniformly composed of criminals: either they are superpowered vigilantes with, uh, varying degrees of respect for human life or they're supervillains with no respect for human life at all — both of which cause ridiculous amounts of collateral damage. The implications of this are made more clear at the end, when Captain America realizes that the public just doesn't want unregistered superhumans running around and accordingly gives himself up. So the issue isn't quite as clear as "they're limiting civil rights so they're evil." And being a costumed vigilante isn't a civil right anyway.
- Direct analogies to Guantanamo Bay can be invoked "accidentally"? By the chief editor?
- What The Hell Hero: Twice in the above mentioned Civil War: Frontline. The intrepid reporters Ben Urich and Sally Floyd go to interview Captain America and Ms. Floyd proceeds to chastise him for his reckless superheroics. Then they pay a visit to Tony Stark and reveal that they have discovered that he turned Norman Osborn into a Manchurian Agent, and made him attack an Atlantean ambassador in order to create tensions between Atlantis and the United States, so that the US government would be compelled to grant military contracts to Stark, which would boost his corporation's stock value, and the profits from which he could use to fund the Avengers Initiative program. This revelation lead to Tony Stark's hilarious reaction.
- Why Did You Make Me Hit You: Technically, it's "Why did you make me imprison you without trial in an extradimensional concentration camp?", but otherwise, this is pretty much Iron Man throughout the arc.
- Writer On Board: If you have Mark Millar writing your superhero comic...
- And everyone else just soapbox.
- Writer Revolt: The real civil war was between the writers.
Waldorf: Hey, that guy said that Marvel had A-list talent.
Statler: They had a list? I thought they were just making it all up as they went along!
Both: Do-ho-ho-ho-hoh!
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