by OL » Sun Jul 15, 2018 11:25 pm
For me personally, Civil War was exactly what turned me off completely from Marvel comics back in the day, and I haven't bothered reading any since (it all sounds pretty shitty nowadays anyway). Just such an obvious shock-value ploy all around, from making Tony Stark the "bad guy" so to speak (because the side most readers will fall into is pretty obvious), to Captain America being killed and so on. After everything the Marvel universe had been through up to that point in the comics, from the 60s onward, a political issue was not going to be the thing that brings everyone to such drastic blows as all that. It stood, for me, as the final proof that Marvel just couldn't help trying to be as embarrassingly "edgy" as they could anymore. A lot had been adding up to that previously, but Civil War was the final nail in the coffin for me.
So feeling that way about the comics, I was pretty pleasantly surprised by the movie. This Marvel universe is much, much younger, and its heroes aren't as thoroughly acquainted with each other as they were in the comics; therefore, yeah, a political issue would divide them much more easily. Same goes for the actual reasoning behind the politics; all the grand disasters that have happened in the movies (which are the actual reasons for the regulation, not just the destruction of one floor of a building) have happened within a single decade, in a much more believable setting, in a world that still isn't used to the presence of super-powered beings. Maybe it isn't as "big," but it's a movie, not a publisher-wide crossover featuring 50 years worth of characters. In-context with the movies, it's just a much more solid, entertaining, and appropriate story than it ever was in the comics.