Trivia / Civil War (2006)

• Flip-Flop of God: Marvel's editorial staff refused to give any straight answers to exactly what the actual wording of the Superhuman Registration Act was, claiming that it would be "too complicated" to understand. As a result, many of the details on how the law worked were effectively left up to the individual writers' interpretation. In addition, the lack of communication between said writers, made a mess of things in the different story-threads around the event, where there are often widely contradictory statements on what the Superhero Registration Act is actually supposed to do or say between almost every book.
• Follow the Leader: The scene where Sally Floyd breaks Captain America by asking him about American pop culture has been compared with a similar scene from the Green Lantern / Green Arrow comic book of The '70s.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Mark Millar and Brian Hitch were working on a story for The Ultimates called Civil War. Then Millar got the chance to write Marvel's crisis crossover of the year, so he declined that project, and adapted some of his ideas to the main comic book we have read. This pretty much explains the common criticism for the storyline that accused Millar of writing Ultimate Cap instead of 616 Cap.
  • The original outline for Civil War would have originally included what would become World War Hulk (in drastically different form as Hulk, his new wife, and their children invading Earth) and involved a plot device "Power Stealing Electric Chair" that would have stripped Speedball and Captain America of their powers.
  • Also, in the original outline for Civil War, one of the victims of the Stamford explosion was the son of Pepper Potts and Happy Hogan, which would explain Iron Man's motivation for supporting the SHRA (Super Hero Registration Act).
  • According to Word of God, the story was originally going to end with the civilians that tackled Cap to give both sides a What the Hell, Hero? talk. Realizing the conflict was pointless, both sides would enter a temporary truce to clean up the mess and the new status quo would've likely had Cap still at large leading the Secret Avengers. The plan was changed to what we got due to the apparent intervention of Joss Whedon, who suggested that one side had to win after everything that had happened.
• Word of God:
  • Annotations on the book's script states that Namor came to Cap's aid out of nostalgia for their old partnership back in World War II. This conflicts with tie-ins explaining that Namor only had interest in the conflict due to his cousin Namorita's death.
  • In what was possibly an attempt to counter the criticisms explained in What Could Have Been, Marvel claimed the difference between Ultimate Cap and 616 Cap was that Ultimate would've gone along with Registration.

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