‘Whose side are you on?’: negotiations between individual liberty and collective responsibility in Millar and McNiven’s Marvel Civil War

Abstract

The Civil War series by Mark Millar and Steve McNiven, published between July 2006 and January 2007, involves superheroes in a battle among themselves as an allegory for political conflicts of the United States, post-Patriot Act. Akin to Alan Moore’s Watchmen and the Uncanny X-Men series, Civil War centers on a political solution to regulate and control superhero vigilante justice. The rhetoric represented by the conflicting factions orbits the concerns of individual liberty vs. collective responsibility, with Captain America (a World War Two and Cold War warrior) siding most adamantly against government supervision and Iron Man fighting in favor of government control. The civil war played out among the superheroes echoes contemporary social and political concerns seen in the Occupy movement, gun control, and the resistant politics of the ‘Tea Party’. The visual representations in the series invoke visual cues from news, reality shows, as well as the flamboyant conflicts one would expect when the superhero pantheon engages in a fratricidal conflict. While the series has the forces of government control triumphing in the end, Captain America’s eventual martyrdom casts the work as a conservative ideological project, characteristic for comics in general, of endorsing the status quo.

Keywords:

• Marvel Civil War
• superhero comics
• social contract
• media
• US politics

Notes

1. ‘Guns are licensed – Why not powers?’ occurs two additional times in this frame, one to the extreme right, and tilted so as to almost be unreadable, in blue, and once toward the left of the frame in black ink.

2. In the one-volume ‘Direct Edition’ of Civil War, there is no pagination. Quotations from within the comics proper is identified by issue number. When discussing the appendix, I have used the page indicators of the script (on the left-hand side) to indicate the ancillary materials (opposite, on the right-hand side).

3. In appearances at the University campuses both during and after his presidential bids, retired Texas congressman Ron Paul packed auditoriums with thousands of students and young people. Early in the Republican presidential primary cycle, he was recognised as the possessor of the ‘youth vote’. See Stephen Richer (2012).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Michael J. Prince

Michael J. Prince is an associate professor of American Literature and Culture at the University of Agder in Kristiansand, Norway. His research interests include comics, film adaptation, popular music, the beat poets, and science fiction.