War Is Over (If You Want It)

Spoilers aplenty follow!

So Civil War # 7 came out today (only a month and a bit later than originally planned) and it provided a rousing fight scene in the big climax. It was Captain America's Avengers versus Iron Man's version, initially off in the Negative Zone but then transported to the heart of (where else?) New York City! Cap played his ace-in-the-hole, that being his old World War II buddy Namor, the Sub-Mariner, along with a bunch of deep-sea-hardened, blue-skinned Atlanteans, to which Shellhead countered with his own impressive reserve force, consisting of a robotic Thor and a recently-revived Captain Marvel, among others. Those two groups joined the dozens of heroes and villains already locked in battle, wreaking carnage left and right within Manhattan.

In the end, Cap realized that his group was doing more harm than good, and made like France: he surrendered, allowing himself to be taken away in handcuffs. The rest of his group stood down at his order, and a temporary amnesty was granted while the authorities sorted it all out (and Cap cooled his heels in jail).

Now it looks like the new status quo - for awhile, anyway - will be that superpowered heroes need to register with the government in order to be allowed to operate in the Marvel Universe (in the U.S.A., at least), and some heroes are still refusing to. That certainly creates some fertile soil for a year or two of interesting stories, especially for characters like Captain America and Spider-Man, both of whom oppose the registration. Will we eventually end up back in where we started, with the Marvel U looking more like the real world? Or does Marvel editorial think this storyline is reflective of the real world, given Bush's Patriot Act and the other civil liberties they've suspended in the name of fighting terrorism? I guess only time will tell, as I like to say.