Reality filters into Marvel's 'Civil War II' event
It’s Iron Man vs. his star-spangled Avenger superfriend in the movie Captain America: Civil War, but in the latest Marvel Comics summer event series, Tony Stark isn't seeing eye to eye with another captain: Captain Marvel.
While the current movie focuses on good guys divided on government oversight, the seven-issue Civil War II comic puts its greatest superheroes on opposite sides of another moral debate with themes of personal accountability and profiling.
“You can’t help but look at the world and how it’s affecting you,” says writer Brian Michael Bendis, one half of the creative team with artist David Marquez. “I haven’t had a talk with a writer in a year where the word 'Trump' hasn’t come up.”
The 2006 and 2007 Civil War series, which inspired aspects of the blockbuster Marvel film, showed passionate sides disagreeing about a superhuman registration act, and Bendis poses a different moral dilemma in the follow-up: An Inhuman named Ulysses has the ability to see visions of the future, and the heroes have to decide if they should use him as a predictive device for where danger might strike next.
In Civil War II No. 1, out Wednesday, getting early intel about a massive Celestial invading Earth works out for the best. Yet tragedy strikes when Captain Marvel leads a group to solve another problem before it arises, causing Iron Man to take matters into his own hands.
Tony and Cap, at least at first, are on the same side in this one, though Iron Man’s decision takes some of his friends by surprise. “He’s changed, he’s learned, he’s different,” says Bendis.
Cosmic heroine Carol Danvers — who's getting her own Marvel movie in 2019 — has been on a quest to proactively take care of stuff before it happens in the Captain Marvel comic, and her point of view presents a relatable conundrum, Bendis says.
“So much of what superheroes go through is what firefighters or policemen go through, which is they’re always on the defensive. They’re always rushing into something that’s already happened,” the writer says. “(But) how can you point at someone and blame them for something before they’ve done it?”
At the same time, both are seminal characters these days, Bendis adds. “To the audience, Iron Man is the gold standard of the Disney empire but Carol is of equal interest and value as a person and power, and with that diversity comes battlelines drawn.”
Civil War II marks the first major all-hands-on-deck affair for newer players such as Kamala Khan and Miles Morales. Plus, Ulysses has a hero’s journey for himself as he’s thrust into a complicated situation amid the rock stars of Marvel, Bendis says, “like a musician who puts out an album and then four months later he’s at the Grammys four rows from Beyoncé.”
As Bendis continues to work, reality regularly creeps into the fiction.
“Things will happen in the real world that make you go, ‘I’m on the right track. This is worth telling.’ Every single day, something happens where someone did not perceive their personal accountability for their actions or their words,” Bendis says. “If anything, it inspires me to keep going.”