Whose side are you on?
A deeper look into the Marvel Civil War Comic Event.
In my studies to discover why the Marvel Civil War comics series matters, I found an excellent peer-reviewed article by Michael J. Prince titled, ‘Whose side are you on?’: negotiations between individual liberty and collective responsibility in Millar and McNiven’s Marvel Civil War. The author takes a look at how the battles in the comic are an allegory for the political conflicts of the United States after the initiation of the Patriot Act.
What I loved about this article was how the author looked at both sides of the conflict and explained how they differ ideologically. On one side we have Captain America, who is not a conservative or liberal, but the American ideal. He represents what America could and should strive to be.
“Captain America’s initial skepticism to the registration act is not so much limiting his own freedom, as forsaking the right to decide, for himself, when, where and to whom his violence shall be focused. In a word, the Superhuman Registration Act strips the individuals of their own individual moral determinations, transforming them into obedient civil servants under a government bureaucracy such as the real-world Homeland Security” (Prince, 2014).
On the opposite side of the conflict we have Tony Stark, a market-savvy media mogul and one-time purveyor of weapons systems to the government, fights in favor of government control, but out of a sense of collective responsibility. He felt guilty after the super-human caused catastrophic explosion killed hundreds of innocent children and thought that supers needed to be put in check.
It is extremely difficult to decide which side of the conflict is “right” seeing as this isn’t a very clear-cut argument. Prince described it best when he said:
“On the levels of their respective pedigrees, Iron Man and the Captain are not really from opposing ends of the libertarian–authoritarian spectrum at all. Rather, old-fashioned Second World War working-class hero is pitted against media-savvy, entrepreneurial, multi-nationalist, making an apparent ideological opposition into one of generational tension, with the ‘son’ besting the ‘father’” (Prince, 2014).
His argument in the article was although the comic incorporates ‘the-real-world’ political topics, the company’s main goal is to make money. Wars sell more newspapers and comic book wars sell more comics. If Marvel were to make too much of a political statement with their publishing then it could backfire tremendously and they could lose out on a lot of profits. By staying in the middle ground and presenting both sides equally, they can sell more books without causing too much animosity between its readers.
This comic series is an example of how this can be done successfully as it is one of their highest selling comics and has had long lasting effects in the Marvel universe.
