A Philosopher Reads...Marvel Comics' Civil War

Introduction

After a tragedy involving tremendous loss of life, the United States government quickly passes a law that favors security over liberty, and then engages in secretive and questionable methods of detention, with both aimed at preventing a similar tragedy in the future.

Sound familiar? If you were old enough to realize what was happening on September 11, 2001, or have learned about it since, it should. The tragic events of 9/11, as that day has come to be known, made Americans all too aware of a growing threat of terrorism that, until then, seemed to be confined to the rest of the world. Afterwards, the US government scrambled to ensure a similar catastrophe could never happen again, and in the process took actions that ignited a new debate over liberty and security that continues to this day.

But if you’re a comic book fan, my description of events also brings forward images of a group of young inexperienced heroes triggering an accident that caused the deaths of hundreds of innocent people (including dozens of schoolchildren), after which the US government passed a law required masked superhumans to register and reveal their identities, culminating in a lengthy battle between heroes—in particular, one with a red, white, and blue shield fighting against another wearing golden armor.

Marvel Comics’ Civil War was a self-conscious allegory to the events of September 11 and its aftermath (even though the actual events of 9/11 occurred in the world of the Marvel superheroes as well). It cast two of the premier Marvel superheroes as figureheads of the two ideas being debated, with Captain America fighting to preserve liberty and Iron Man struggling to ensure security. Nearly every other hero took sides—the promotional materials for the storyline asked readers, "Whose Side Are You On?"—and the most popular Marvel superhero of them all, Spider-Man, was caught in the middle.

In this book, we’ll follow the paths of these three heroes through Marvel’s Civil War, which took place in 2006 and 2007 in the seven-issue Civil War comic book and in about 100 tie-in comics in other titles such as Captain America, Iron Man, and The Amazing Spider-Man. We’ll look at the actions and motivations of Cap, Iron Man, and Spidey, in terms of the personal ethics behind their decisions as well as the broader principles of liberty and security at the heart of the Civil War—the same principles that still motivate debates in the real world over controversial issues such as surveillance, detention, and torture.

In the decade since the original series, Marvel Comics has revisited the Civil War several times, in several issues of What If? in 2008 and 2009 as well as a new Civil War miniseries in 2015, all exploring different ways the conflict could have gone and ended—or, in the case of the miniseries, if it never ended at all. There was also a novelization of the storyline in 2012 and a Civil War II miniseries in 2016, the latter coming out around the same time as the feature film Captain America: Civil War, which portrays the ideological battle between Captain America and Iron Man on the big screen. The Civil War storyline never seems to go out of style, largely due to the issue at its core: conflicts between important principles, whether the broad societal principles of liberty, privacy, and security, or the more personal principles of duty, loyalty, and care. The way we balance these principles in our personal, public, and political lives is a topic that this philosopher loves to write about, and Civil War gives him the perfect opportunity to discuss them with you.

Whose side are you on? Let’s see…

Chapter 1: Setting the Stage

In everyone’s life, Peter, there’s an ‘it’… your wife leaves you, or you get cancer. There’s your life before ‘it’ and your life after ‘it.’ 9/11 was an ‘it’ of national magnitude. And Stamford… is going to be another one.—Iron Man to Spider-Man¹

The world of Marvel Comics, known to fans as the Marvel Universe, has always been more of a mirror of our real world than the world of DC Comics is. While DC has Metropolis (home to Superman), Gotham City (Batman), and Central City (the Flash), the architects of the early Marvel Universe chose to put most of its heroes in or around New York City.² This enables readers to connect more closely to the locales in the comics: they see Spider-Man swinging from the Chrysler Building, Daredevil chasing a criminal through the alleys of Hell’s Kitchen, and the X-Men training in Professor X’s Westchester mansion, all real places they can live in, visit, or see on the news.

This aspect of realism in Marvel Comics also allows the creators to portray real-world events in their stories. Because most Marvel stories are set in New York City, celebrities and political figures often show up, from mayors to talk show hosts like David Letterman. When the president of the United States is shown, he (or, someday, she) is usually the real-world president at the time (although often depicted in shadow to preserve some degree of timelessness in the story). And when something cataclysmic happens, especially in New York City, the comics show that too, as they did with the events of September 11, 2001. A very moving issue of Amazing Spider-Man showed various heroes (and a few villains) mourning the death and destruction from that day, and a story arc in Captain America modeled the ideal reaction to the tragedy, perfectly balancing sensitivity to Americans of Middle Eastern descent while focusing the military response on the individuals responsible.³

While we can assume that the US government in the Marvel Universe reacted in the same way to 9/11 as ours did—they passed the PATRIOT Act, for example—readers had to wait until 2006 to see the Marvel superheroes react to their own tragedy.⁴ Even though, unlike 9/11, the incident that launched the Civil War was caused by a handful of inexperienced heroes, following a series of catastrophes involving other heroes, it prompted a similar public outcry and legislative response as occurred in response to 9/11 in the real world. Unique to the comics, however, the tragedy in the Marvel Universe resulted in a wholescale war that posed hero against hero.

If we peel away the superhero façade, under the capes and masks we see the same debates in the Marvel Universe as we do in the real world. These include conflicts between liberty and security in the political realm as well as between defending the right and advancing the good in the personal realm. For these reasons, I call the Marvel Comics Civil War a war of principle: on the surface, it’s an exciting battle between superheroes, but dig a little deeper, and you find a battle of ideals. And this isn’t your ordinary good-versus-evil battle, such as when Captain America protects freedom against the Red Skull’s dreams of tyranny. Instead, this battle of principle is amongst the forces of good, where each principle is valid and admirable on its own, such as liberty and security. Yet, as we’ve seen numerous times since 9/11, these principles are not compatible, and we have to decide which one to favor over the other at any particular time. Rather than choose one principle to favor over others, we must find a way to balance them, and the proper balance will not always be the same—nor will anyone likely agree with anyone else on what the proper balance should be.

The general point I want to make in this book is that these conflicts of principle occur all the time, in both our political and personal lives, and even though we have to prioritize certain principles in particular cases, all of the principles remain important and valuable. Even though we may decide to privilege security or liberty at some point, both of them must still be valued and promoted; we wouldn’t choose one and dismiss the other entirely. In terms of personal decision-making, even though some people try to do what’s right, according to rules and duties, while others try to promote what’s good, in terms of welfare or well-being, they are all advancing important principles of morality. With all due respect to Iron Man, the choices here are not stark ones—they’re not about right answers and wrong answers, but about finding the right balance between equally valid principles for a particular situation, and recognizing that different situations require different solutions with their own unique balancing of principles.

In this chapter, we’ll summarize the main points of the story and the aspects of it that we’ll focus on throughout this book. If you haven’t read Civil War yet, I highly encourage you to do so now. As they say in the biz, there will be spoilers! There is much, much more in the over one hundred issues of comics in the Civil War storyline than I can include here (although I do try to cram in as much as I can), so this book is no substitute for the real thing. Here, I want to draw out some topics of philosophical interests from Civil War; if you haven’t read the original, I’ll give you enough information to get the points I’m making, but to enjoy this book to the fullest, it would help to read at least the main Civil War series first. (Wait, don’t put this book back! Buy this and Civil War. Whew, that was close.)

A Snapshot of the Marvel Universe Before the Civil War

The Civil War did not start out of the blue; events had been leading to it for quite a while. What did the Marvel Universe look like heading into the Civil War? Let’s set the stage and see what embers were smoldering before the final match was lit, and also introduce the main characters involved.

One of the most common sights in superhero comics (and blockbuster action movies of any type) is wide-scale destruction, especially in the middle of a major metropolitan area such as New York City. Occasionally comics creators will make note of the damage caused by battles between superheroes and supervillains, and sometimes attention is paid to the clean-up efforts (as in Marvel Comics’ Damage Control series), but less often to the human costs. We may like to think that no one is seriously hurt when Iron Man fights the Wrecking Crew in the middle of Times Square, and that the resulting harm is merely property damage for which victims can be compensated (usually out of Tony Stark’s deep pockets). But this stretches even the generous disbelief that readers may engage in to believe that people can fly, shoot energy beams from their eyes, and return from the dead more easily than you return from the dentist.

The Civil War was born out of the realization amongst the ordinary citizens of the Marvel Universe that enough is enough, that they could no longer bear the increasingly frequent, costly, and sometimes deadly catastrophes that resulted from their superheroes mixing it up with their arch-nemeses (or even their fellow heroes). In fact, leading up to the disaster in Stamford, Connecticut, that directly led to the Civil War, a number of lesser disasters had occurred in the Marvel Universe.⁵

Genosha: After an abhorrent history of mutant apartheid, the island nation of Genosha was designated by the United Nations as a mutant sanctuary to be ruled by Magneto, master of magnetism and former head of the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants. Its population numbered over 16 million—about half the mutants on Earth—when the villain Cassandra Nova and her mutant-hunting robot Sentinels destroyed all life on Genosha.⁶ The world of the Marvel Universe, already plagued by anti-mutant prejudice, was now faced with a 21st-century holocaust (directly analogous, of course, to the Jewish Holocaust during World War II).

Avengers Disassembled/House of M: The Scarlet Witch, a longtime Avenger and mutant, suffered a mental breakdown which led to the deaths of several Avengers, including Hawkeye and her ex-husband the Vision, the destruction of the Avengers Mansion, and the (temporary) dissolution of the Avengers.⁷ But that wasn’t all: even under the care of her father Magneto, now returned to Genosha, the Scarlet Witch’s condition continued to deteriorate until she lost control over her reality-warping powers, reforming the world into a mutant paradise in which her father Magneto was ruler and the two children she had lost years ago were still alive.⁸ When reality reverted to normal, only the heroes involved remembered the incident—but the three simple words the Scarlet Witch uttered had enormous ramifications for the Marvel Universe going forward: No more mutants. With these words, the Scarlet Witch robbed nearly all remaining mutants on Earth of their powers, leaving only 198 mutants (give or take) left with their powers.⁹

Nick Fury’s Secret War: When Nick Fury, longtime director of SHIELD, uncovered a plot by the prime minister of Latveria, Lucia Von Bardas, to carry out terror attacks in the United States by arming minor villains with advanced technology, the US government refuses to act due to its new diplomatic ties with the country now that Doctor Doom is no longer ruler.¹⁰ Fury then assembles a clandestine group of superheroes, including Captain America and Spider-Man, to attack Latveria; they destroy the seat of government (Doom’s castle), only to be brainwashed by Fury afterwards so they retain no memory of the incident. But the heroes start to remember as they’re attacked by Von Bardas’ villains, and together they (and Von Bardas) strike back on American soil, detonating a massive antimatter bomb in New York City. Fury blames the State Department for what he sees as a repeat of 9/11, and the heroes blame Fury for the extreme measures taken in Latveria and for brainwashing them. As a result, Fury goes underground, and Maria Hill—who will play a significant role in the Civil War—takes over as director of SHIELD.

Philadelphia: The City of Brotherly Love was rocked by a terrorist bombing masterminded by Captain America’s arch-foe the Red Skull, who framed Jack Monroe (one-time sidekick to Cap as well as to the 1950s Captain America, William Burnside). To make matters worse, the bombing was carried out by the Winter Soldier, who turned out to be another person associated with Captain America.¹¹ Regardless of the truth, the public came to associate the deadly bombing with a former superhero.

Las Vegas: Near the jewel of the desert, the Incredible Hulk finds a HYDRA installation with a gamma bomb, which explodes and makes the Hulk even larger, stronger, and more uncontrollable than usual. Two members of the Fantastic Four, the Human Torch and the Thing, fly to Las Vegas and, for three issues, mix it up with the Hulk in Las Vegas, ending only when the Torch uses one of his nova blasts to put a halt to the Hulk’s rampage, but not until after 26 people were killed.¹²

And following these disasters, where were the main players in the Marvel Universe at the time?

Iron Man (Tony Stark): After going public with his identity as Iron Man, Tony Stark was serving as the United States Secretary of Defense when the Scarlet Witch, in the midst of her breakdown, made him appear drunk and dangerous in front of the United Nations General Assembly.¹³ After the destruction of Avengers Mansion and the dissolution of the Avengers, Tony put together a new Avengers team with Captain America, including, for the first time as a regular member, a certain friendly neighborhood Spider-Man.¹⁴ At the same time, he also took the Extremis techno-virus to recover from a fatal beating, which enabled him to reengineer his mind and body to more closely interface with his armor on a cellular level.¹⁵ However, this also subjected his armor to mind-control through him, causing hundreds of deaths and making him realize the danger his armor posed to the general public.¹⁶

On the side, Tony had been meeting in secret with Reed Richards (Mr. Fantastic of the Fantastic Four), Dr. Stephen Strange (Sorcerer Supreme), Black Bolt (king of the Inhumans), Professor Charles Xavier (mentor to the X-Men), and sometimes Namor (the Sub-Mariner, Prince of Atlantis), a covert brain-trust known to readers as the Illuminati. In a bit of revisionist comics history, the Iluminati were revealed to have been operating behind the scenes of the Marvel Universe to steer the course of history since the days of the Kree/Skrull War, and would play a role in the upcoming Civil War as well.¹⁷

Captain America (Steve Rogers): Around the same time that he reassembled a new Avengers team with Iron Man, Steve Rogers also discovered that his teenaged partner during World War II, James Bucky Barnes, did not die when the rocket he was trapped on exploded, as Cap long thought.¹⁸ Instead, his body was recovered by the Soviets, who replaced his missing arm with a robotic prosthetic, brainwashed him, and retrained him to be the lethal assassin known as the Winter Soldier (who later set the bomb in Philadelphia, mentioned above). Once Cap became aware of the Winter Soldier’s identity, he tracked Bucky and managed to break through his retraining, after which Bucky went into hiding.¹⁹ Meanwhile, Cap also reconnected with his longtime love, Sharon Carter, also known as SHIELD Agent 13, as well as his longtime crimefighting partner in the modern world, the Falcon (Sam Wilson).

Spider-Man (Peter Parker): Shortly after being invited into the Avengers by Captain America, a young man with a grudge against Peter Parker burned down the apartment he shared with his wife Mary Jane as well as the home of his devoted Aunt May.²⁰ The three of them then move into Avengers Tower, where Aunt May is charmed by Captain America (who asked to see pictures of her late husband Ben) and wooed by the Avengers’ butler Jarvis.²¹ Peter also finds himself working closely with Tony Stark, a fellow scientific mind, who builds Peter a new costume—the technologically advanced Iron Spidey suit—and asks him to be his right-hand man as the political climate surround the superhero community begins to deteriorate.

We’ll spend a lot more time with these three heroes throughout the rest of this book. Before we forget, however, let’s talk about two important Marvel heroes who were conspicuously absent during the Civil War…

The Hulk (Bruce Banner): Last we saw the Hulk, he had killed 26 people in Las Vegas. The members of the Illuminati, frustrated at their inability to either cure, restrain, or control the Hulk, decide to trick him into a space capsule and launch him into deep space.²² He landed on a savage planet on which he was enslaved, turned into a gladiator, and fought his way to becoming ruler and marrying, only to have his world inadvertently destroyed—by the Illuminati.²³ The Hulk managed to get back to Earth with some of his new friends, after the Civil War ended, to confront his old chums. If you think the Hulk caused some destruction before, just read the story that could only be titled… World War Hulk.²⁴

Thor (just… Thor): Just before the Avengers were disassembled, the gods of Asgard experienced Ragnarok, the End of Days, in which they all died.²⁵ They would eventually return after the Civil War ended, but for the time being, all that was seen of the Odinson was his hammer, which mysteriously fell to Earth near Broxton, Oklahoma.²⁶ But in his stead, another wouldst rise, one who wouldst have deadly consequences and turn the tide of the Civil War. (Verily!)

It All Began in Stamford

The incident that started off the Civil War takes all of seven pages in the first issue of the series.²⁷ The team of young heroes known as the New Warriors were traveling the country filming a reality show when they became aware of four escaped supervillains—and I’m using the term supervillain very generously—holed up in a house in Stamford, Connecticut. Hoping for their breakthrough episode, the New Warriors engage the villains, more concerned about mugging for the camera than quickly and safely apprehending them. As Namorita (cousin of Namor) attacks the villain Nitro, he mocks her, claiming to be much more of a threat than they’re used to handling, and triggers an explosion, killing over 600 people, sixty of them children playing outside at a nearby school.

Public outcry was immediate, especially considering the growing trend of superhero-related catastrophes over the years leading to Stamford. Talking heads on television began debating the wisdom (or foolishness) of unregulated superhero activity. Miriam Sharpe, whose son was one of the hundreds who died that day, became the public face of the Stamford tragedy and the legislative response: the Superhuman Registration Act (HR 421), or SHRA (not the snappiest acronym, admittedly). The SHRA requires that all super-powered heroes, including those who get their abilities through technology (like Iron Man), register with the federal government and SHIELD, revealing their identities (but not making them public), and submitting to training and being held accountable for their actions. In effect, they become members of a specialized unit of federal or state police, military personnel, or SHIELD, and would be assigned to one of the sanctioned superhero teams in every state in the union under the Fifty-State Initiative.²⁸ Heroes who refuse to register, as well as anyone aiding and abetting them, would be in violation of the law and subject to arrest and imprisonment. (Exactly where they would be imprisoned will be a major point of emphasis to come.)²⁹

As we’ll see in chapter 3, self-professed futurist Tony Stark saw this legislation coming and warned his fellow Illuminati about it.³⁰ He tried to defeat it while still in conference in the US Senate, and having failed at that, decided to take charge of its implementation. With Spider-Man at his side and working with other big brains such as Hank Pym and Reed Richards, Iron Man led a select team of registered Avengers to round up unregistered heroes as well as perform the normal duties of Avengers, such as fighting crime and saving lives (roles that risked being forgotten in the process of fighting over registration). He also engaged in such activities in support of the SHRA that some, both in the Marvel Universe and our own, found questionable, including using a prison in the Negative Zone (an antimatter dimension discovered by Reed Richards) to hold heroes who refused to register, enlisting the aid of confirmed villains to help capture said unregistered heroes, and creating a clone of one of his fellow Avengers that ended up creating a tragedy of his own.

Standing in opposition to registration and Iron Man was Captain America, the Sentinel of Liberty. As we’ll see in Part II of this book, Cap argued strongly against the SHRA from the beginning, becoming a fugitive from SHIELD and the US government—not an unfamiliar position for a hero who has always stood for principle over politics.³¹ Quickly going underground with his own band of rebels, including the Falcon, Daredevil, and Luke Cage, Cap focused on trying to protect unregistered heroes and rescue those already captured, at the same time that he debated the finer points of liberty and security with Iron Man. (We’ll enjoy analyzing several of those debates later in this book.)

Finally, Peter Parker was the Spider-Man in the middle, starting out on Iron Man’s side as he tried to prevent and then manage registration, but then gradually coming to agree with Captain America and his arguments against it. More so than for either older hero, registration was personal for Spidey, since he regarded his secret identity as essential to keeping his wife Mary Jane and his beloved Aunt May safe from his many enemies (who had struck out against those close to him in the past). As we’ll see in Part III, this gave his decision-making a more grounded flavor; where and with whom he stood on the balance between liberty and security had enormous and potentially devastating consequences for his family.

As seen through the eyes of these three very different characters, we get to look at the ethical principles and ideals of the Civil War at various levels, from Cap and Iron Man’s differences over political ideology and personal ethical stance that supports each hero’s viewpoint, to Spidey’s more personal take that brings the abstract issues down to earth and into his life.

Comparing the Marvel Comics Civil War to the Real World

As I mentioned in the introduction, Civil War was a loose but unrestrained analogue to the events following the attack on the World Trade Towers on September 11, 2001, in particular the PATRIOT Act and the prison at Guantanamo Bay. These aspects of the story were touched on in most of the related books, but were made explicit in Civil War: Front Line, a series that looked at registration and the Civil War through the eyes of two citizen journalists.³² (We’ll hear much of them in the chapters that follow.) In this section, we’ll briefly discuss the parallels and differences between the world we live in and the one that includes Cap, Iron Man, and the rest of our favorite heroes.³³ (Ah, if only we could choose!)

While there was a tragic inciting event and rushed legislative reaction, as there was in the real world, the issue at the heart of Civil War was not terrorism but rather the irresponsible behavior of unaccountable superheroes. While it raised the same issues of liberty and security that the PATRIOT Act did here, the SHRA was more analogous to calls for gun-control legislation after tragedies like that at Sandy Hook Elementary School in December 2012. This was made explicit shortly before Stamford when Tony Stark became a victim of mind control and the man controlling him used his armor to kill hundreds of innocent civilians.³⁴ When Stark’s friend assured him that he bore no responsibility since he was not in control, he responded, every super hero is a potential gun… and the last time I checked, guns required registration.³⁵

However, there are aspects of terrorism present in the story also, particularly in the fact that the combatants did not represent states or breakaway territories, but rather ideological factions. In a sense, Iron Man and the pro-registration heroes fought on behalf of the United States government and the SHRA, while Captain America and the anti-registration heroes were rebels, considering themselves to be freedom fighters, resisting what they saw as an oppressive law. As