NOTE: SPOILERS CONTAINED WITHIN!!!!

I know it’s not right to speak ill of the dead. . . but Captain America was an asshole.

Okay. At this point, I’ve already pissed off thousands of Cap fans, and I’m not sure where to begin on my assessment, so I think the start of Civil War is a good place to start.

And Civil War began with the deaths of 612 ordinary, non-superpowered American citizens in the town of Stamford Connecticut.

And suddenly, all the inner dramas, all the nit-picky little soap-operas between all the super-heros, super-villains, and all the kinda-sorta half-way between-the-two sociopaths like Wolverine and The Punisher, who would be considered serial killers if they weren’t just so darn sexy, NONE OF IT MATTERED!!!

What mattered was that regular people like you and me died so that a group of amateur living weapons could get publicity.

These man-made Gods on Earth began at the dawn of the second World War, and the oldest one to persist to this day was a government-funded, government-produced Super-Soldier project performed on a flawlessly devout American patriot who commited himself to the service of the American Dream ever since.

But the American Dream never planned for mutants, radio-active animal-human hybrids, cyborgs, telepaths, alien symbiotes, et al. And if I had to choose between the safety of maybe 250 million non-powered American citizens and the rights of a few hundred walking WMDs to wear masks and fight/commit crimes at their own discretion, then there really is no choice.

Super-heroes are constantly asked to make sacrifices to protect the “mortals” around them. Now, that sacrifice is revealing themselves to, and working for the U.S. Government. Apparently for some, that was too much to ask.

Captain America (who led the anti-Super-Human-Registration resistance) has always had the problem of living in the past. When the only Super-human was a stalwart, loyal soldier fighting against the greatest evil of the 20th century. Even then, super-humans were a Government Sanctioned Project

Now, in the 21st century Marvel Universe, With so many super-powered beings all across the globe, regulation has become a necessity. And there are no two people I would trust to manage that task then the two greatest minds of the Marvel Universe: Tony Stark (Iron Man) and Reed Richards (Mr. Fantastic.)

Noted, Stark and Richards had their share of mistakes, the biggest of which was the absolute hubris of cloning Thor. That was unforgivable. Otherwise, I felt most of Tony’s decisions were if not right, then at least justified

Cap may be the Ultimate Soldier and Patriot, but he’s no genius. He’s simple. He thinks with his gut, and in this case, his gut-instinct may have been pure, but it was wrong. And at the end of Civil War, he finally realized it at the hands of the heros of the real world: Firefighters, Police officers, and EMTs finally made Cap realize the pointlessness of his stand.

And without Cap, there was no real resistance. Luke Cage and Daredevil are the paranoid brute thugs of the superhero universe who will always thumb their noses at authority. They can’t help themselves.

The Young Avengers are a bunch of amateur punks who would jump on to any bandwagon lead by the Living Legend of WWII, and the rest of the resistance (aka The Secret Avengers) were just sucked in by their guilty consciences. (Spider-Man’s decision to change sides halfways through Civil War are the most tragic and regretable example of Cap’s charisma leading to others making bad choices.)

I could rant forever about this, but instead, lets discuss it at the first PANELGEEK discussion group, TBA for early May.

In the meantime, for the more human side of the Civil War saga, I reccomend you pick up Civil War: Frontline

Which explores

A. the mission of two journalists to explore the details of each side of the war and

B. the story of Robbie Baldwin aka Speedball, one of the “heroes” “responsible” for the Stamford tragedy, and his transformation through guilt into a much darker, much more haunted anti-hero.

Written more intelligently than most of the other battle-driven comics, and concludes each chapter with a vignette alluding to a different war. One linking Spider-man’s internal conflict to the Japanese internment of WWII, and Iron Man’s consolidation of power to the rise of Julius Ceasar at the Rubicon in 59 B.C..

Smart stuff.