Civil War (Marvel)
The Civil War is a war that features in Marvel Comics.
Contents |
History
Origin
The Superhuman Civil War was a planetary conflict that erupted on Earth amongst its superhuman community.
Villains Nitro, Cobalt Man, Speedfreek, and Coldheart had been holed up in a house in Stamford when the New Warriors located them. The Warriors were at the time the focus of a reality TV show, and although a number of them felt that the villains were out of their league, the network and others in the group thought it would be great for ratings. When Namorita attempted to capture Nitro, he used his explosive powers and destroyed several city blocks, including the elementary school at the epicenter. All of the New Warriors, the three villains accompanying Nitro, and over 600 civilians, among them 60 school children, were killed. Numerous members of the superhero community arrived on the scene to search for survivors. (Civil War v1 #1) Public sentiment towards superheroes plummeted. The inactive New Warriors were widely regarded as "baby killers" by association. Hindsight, desperate to distance himself from them, began releasing their secret identities, and almost as many were killed by lynching as by the explosion in Stamford. The Human Torch Johnny Storm was beaten into a coma outside a Manhattan nightclub. Public opinion had been lukewarm for the Superhuman Registration Act before; now it passed the tipping point. Although nominally a UN agency, S.H.I.E.L.D. seemed to have assumed the brunt of enforcing the act under acting director Maria Hill. (Civil War v1 #2)
Civil War
Captain America Steve Rogers balked at leading a force to apprehend rogue heroes. He felt that heroes needed to be above direct government control, because when politicians could control the heroes, they could decide who the villains were. When Cap refused to support the Superhuman Registration Act aboard the S.H.I.E.L.D. Helicarrier, Hill attempted to arrest him. Yet, she had no right to do so, for the Act had not been passed yet, so Captain America was not yet a superhuman illegal combatant. So, Cap's actions in that case were in self-defense. After his escape, Cap began organizing other anti-registration heroes into a group the press dubbed the Secret Avengers. Most of his core group (Captain America, Hercules, Bill Foster, Luke Cage, Daredevil Daniel Rand, Falcon, and Cable) had to take on a series of identities to avoid capture, literally becoming outlaws. The Secret Avengers apprehended a number of criminals while evading the opposing heroes and the new S.H.I.E.L.D. 'cape-killer units'. Other heroes joined them or were liberated after their arrests. The Young Avengers, Cloak, and Dagger were some of these later heroes to join the group. (Civil War v1 #2)
The psychological and tactical toll of the conflict deepened significantly following the tragedy in Ohio, causing Peter Parker to completely break ties with Tony Stark's pro-registration coalition. After discovering the unconstitutional conditions inside the Negative Zone prison, Parker attempted to flee the superhero headquarters, resulting in a brutal physical confrontation where he was severely beaten by government-sanctioned villains. He was narrowly rescued by the anti-hero Punisher, who transported the injured hero to Captain America's secret underground base, cementing Parker's alignment with the anti-registration rebels. In response to the growing resistance, Stark's administration took the highly controversial step of legally deputizing convicted supervillains, including the Thunderbolts, to track down and violently apprehend the remaining rogue heroes. This reliance on criminal elements permanently poisoned the public perception of the registration act, turning the urban streets into a paranoid surveillance state where unregistered heroes were systematically hunted down by their former adversaries. (Civil War v1 #5)
The legal enforcement of the Superhuman Registration Act expanded exponentially through the formal activation of the Fifty-State Initiative, a federal program designed to establish a government-trained, licensed superhero team in every individual American state. To facilitate this unprecedented mobilization of superhuman assets, Tony Stark and Hank Pym established Camp Hammond, a massive, high-tech military training facility built directly over the scarred ruins of the Stamford, Connecticut disaster site. Young, unregistered recruits and seasoned veterans alike were subjected to rigorous military drills, psychological evaluations, and ethical conditioning programs overseen by the strict drill instructor Gauntlet. However, the federal initiative faced immediate operational strain when a deeply traumatized recruit named Trauma accidentally triggered a severe psychological panic among his peers during a live-fire combat simulation, exposing the volatile mental state of the untrained teenagers. Despite these internal administrative vulnerabilities, the federal government continued to aggressively process hundreds of new superhumans, effectively turning the country’s superhero culture into a heavily bureaucratized extension of the United States armed forces. (Avengers: The Initiative v1 #1)
The internal stability of the Superhuman Registration Act reached a dangerous, irreversible breaking point when a rogue, hyper-powerful clone recruit named MVP was accidentally killed during a live-fire training drill at Camp Hammond, prompting a massive administrative cover-up by the facility's highest directors. Hank Pym and the strict government scientist Baron Von Blitzschlag covertly utilized the deceased recruit’s genetic material to manufacture a secret vanguard of three highly unstable, brainwashed clone operatives designated as the Scarlet Spiders. Equipped with customized, high-tech Iron Spider armor suites, these clandestine clone strike teams were deployed into the dark sectors of the city to execute deniable black-ops missions and violently suppress underground resistance factions. However, the internal security of the facility collapsed entirely when a secondary, genetically mutated clone of MVP went completely rogue, slaughtering several base guards and exposing the illegal, unconstitutional human experimentation programs to the remaining student body, permanently poisoning the morale of the young heroes. (Avengers: The Initiative v1 #4)
The psychological and geopolitical fallout of the superhero conflict reached a tragic, definitive turning point when Steve Rogers was escorted to the federal courthouse in Lower Manhattan to stand trial for his anti-registration activities. As a massive, polarized crowd of civilian protestors and media crews swarmed the courthouse steps, a highly coordinated assassination plot was executed by hidden operatives working under the command of the Red Skull. A brainwashed Sharon Carter, acting under deep psychological conditioning, fired multiple point-blank shots into Rogers' abdomen amidst the chaotic crowd, resulting in the immediate, fatal collapse of the legendary icon. The sudden, public death of Captain America sent an immense shockwave across the global superhero community, instantly paralyzing Tony Stark’s administrative infrastructure with profound grief and immense public backlash. The tragedy permanently altered the political landscape, transforming Rogers into a powerful martyr for the anti-registration movement and deepening the bitter resentment felt by the underground resistance toward Stark’s authoritarian regime. (Captain America v5 #25)
The historical era of the superhero civil war entered its final, dark transitional phase when the underground, unregistered Secret Avengers faction led by Luke Cage orchestrated a daring, high-stakes operational infiltration into a secure S.H.I.E.L.D. data fortress to salvage the true, unredacted databases of the registration network. Cage’s team utilized highly specialized, anti-surveillance electronic arrays to bypass the fortress's biometric scanner checkpoints, engaging in a short, brutal hand-to-hand melee against a localized garrison of government-sanctioned villains. During the chaotic technological heist, the heroes successfully extracted heavily encrypted data files that definitively proved the Skrull Empire had successfully infiltrated the highest echelons of Tony Stark’s administrative infrastructure months prior to the Stamford disaster. This devastating intelligence revelation completely shattered the legal and moral legitimacy of the entire registration regime, turning the fading embers of the superhero civil war into a desperate, multi-front struggle for basic biological survival as the invisible webs of the impending Secret Invasion began to openly tighten across the globe. (New Avengers v1 #38)
Legacy
Overview
Participants
- Iron Man :
- Captain America :
- Mister Fantastic :
- Maria Hill :
- Bill Foster :
- Nitro :
- Ragnarok :
Notes
- The Civil War was created by Mark Millar and Steve McNiven where it made its first appearance in Civil War v1 #1 (May, 2006).
Alternate Versions
- In Secret Wars: Battleworld v1 #1 (2015), an alternate version of the Civil War appeared in the Battleworld domain of Warzone that was designated as part of Earth-15513 in the Multiverse. The Warzone is one of the numerous domains of Battleworld. It's composed of what was once a version of the United States of America, it was for years divided into two zones, the Iron and the Blue, due to the escalation of the Superhuman Civil War which never ended in this universe. Six years into the past, the Civil War reached its point of highest tension, when the Pro-Registration and Anti-Registration side fought on the Prison 42 in the Negative Zone. When Black Panther hacked into the prison's systems, he discovered a self-destruct system had been activated by Iron Man, who in reality didn't know about its activation. When S.H.I.E.L.D. tried to get to him and the Panther fended them off, Maria Hill claimed the Panther stated he had activated the self-destruct system under Captain America's orders. Cloak managed to teleport everyone away from the Negative Zone into St. Louis, but he was not able to close fast enough, and a portion of the explosion tore through him in the form of a beam of energy that destroyed a portion of the city, causing the death of fifteen million people in total. The tension between both sides only increased, and the fighting never ended. The Skrull invasion only added more mistrust to the situation, and Green Goblin even had a brief rise to power. The conflict between the super human community spread to regular citizens, who started picking sides between Tony Stark and Steve Rogers. The nation split in two on a border called the Divide, which is marked by a chasm that bisected the former site of St. Louis. Everything east of the border is Stark's side, the Iron, and everything west of the border is Roger's side, the Blue. The Iron is regarded as the legitimate government by the rest of Battleworld, and as such, President Stark doubles as the domain's Baron. In the present, Miriam Sharpe convinced both Rogers and Stark to begin peace talks to reunite the nation, after the Iron cut off resources from the Blue to force them grant territory for the ever-growing population of the east region. The meeting between Stark and Rogers escalated quickly and both parties stood up, but was abruptly interrupted when Sharpe, who also stood up, was shot by a sniper from the west. Spider-Man (Peter Parker) found the weapon used for the shot, which would take from six to seven seconds to reach the target, and Rogers concluded the shot was aimed at him and not Sharpe, accusing Stark of trying to assassinate him, even though the latter denied those claims. Using a drone, Stark spied on the Blue to try to find the assassin's trail. Before it could go further into the Blue, it was intercepted and destroyed by Storm, who took it to Steeltown to have its core analysed. The other components of the drone were turn into a lump of metal and thrown to Resilient Alpha as a warning. Back on the Blue, General Rogers and Peter Parker were discussing the next course of action before deciding to see Beast's progress in Project Bellcurve. Stark continued investigating Sharpe's murder when he discovered certain anomalies regarding past events, because many of these were statistically improbable considering the land-space of the conflict, leading him to believe that numerous events like Sharpe's murder were caused by a third party. Meanwhile, Hank McCoy showcased Rogers the results of Project Bellcurve, a procedure capable of depowering superhumans such as Sandman, the Sandman. Numerous resources from the Iron were needed to continue the project, for which Rogers sent a team led by Parker, composed of Elektra, Azari the Black Panther and Venom, to infiltrate Stark's territory. At the same time, Stark was sending She-Hulk (Jen Walters) to infiltrate the Blue, to continue investigating Sharpe's murder.
In other media
Television
Films
Video games
- In Marvels Contest of Champions, the Civil War was referenced in the setting of the mobile video game.
Appearances
- Civil War v1: (2006)
External Links
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