Kicked off when a team of teenaged superheroes inadvertently cause the death of 300 people (most of them elementary school students) in Stamford, Connecticut

The U.S. government announces the Superhuman Registration Act, where every person with superpowers or advanced tech has to register with the U.S. government, where they would receive logistical support and training in exchange for potentially being called to military service

This splits the superhero community into two sides, one which argues that registration is the solution to superheroes not being held to any real standards and causing untold amounts of collateral damage and the other which argues that registration infringes on private liberty and puts the friends and family of the registered at risk

Could have been a really interesting story with some actual stakes and deep introspection on superheroes

Instead it boiled down to writers picking their own sides and immediately representing the other as an existential threat, which just ended up making the entire thing a jumbled mess

Anti-Registration got represented as a bunch of naive idealists who end up carrying out terror attacks after teaming up with supervillains and having one of Marvel's first Puerto Rican supers (Bantam, he's a super-boxer!) kill a guy for talking sass to him

Pro-Registration got saddled with kids being sent to military school and getting killed by secret experiments, also Nazi clone of Thor

This of course all comes to a head when the Pro and Anti sides come to a direct clash in the heart of Manhattan and a crowd of cops, firefighters and EMTs tackle Captain America to keep him from killing Iron Man and Cap just surrenders because "It's more important to do what most people want than to do what I think is right, even though my most famous moment from this comic is saying that standing up for what's right is the most important thing ever"

It's honestly the best example of the status quo being more important than everything else

Though, it did set events in motion to have Obama appoint Norman Osborn as the head of national security, which is very funny

[–] Awoo@hexbear.net 22 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

A mad bomber in charge of national security is pretty normal for america

[–] FlakesBongler@hexbear.net 21 points 4 weeks ago

Oh it's fantastic, because he immediately goes and gets himself an Iron Man suit, paints it red, white, and blue, and starts calling himself Iron Patriot

Then he leads of team of supervillains who pretend to be the successors to the Avengers, but secretly begin to extort cities for their aid

This is seen as Norman Osborn being a criminal genius rather than as a complete failure on the part of EVERY SINGLE PERSON IN THE US GOVERNMENT