Novak and I were talking about the difficulties of due process in super hero worlds the other day. I’d imagine if you were a defense attorney in a comic book world, you’d have a pretty cushy job. You see Batman working with Commissioner Gordon from time to time, but it’s not like he gets warrants before breaking into someone’s house and hanging them from the ceiling by a bat-rope. In the Powers world there’s a whole group of detectives who specifically focus on supercrimes, so one would imagine their justice system has some laws about how vigilante justice is dealt with.
The more I think about Civil War, the more I end up on the pro-registration side of it, despite my rooting for Cap as it went along. Part of the reason for this is how unevenly the concept itself was presented during the course of the story. Basically it falls into to possibilities:
Superhuman draft. All heroes must register their secret identities with the government, must be trained and certified, and will take orders from SHIELD like soldiers.
Gun legislation analogue: all heroes must register their secret identities with the government, must be trained and certified, and will be expected to only use their powers responsibly, like a police officer would.
If the registration act were more in line with number one, I’d see a very big reason for Cap and friends to fight it. Most people with superpowers come across them by accident, and they have secret identities because they want to be able to live normal lives. Mutants are just born with them and some of them have to go to a special school just to learn how to handle them without killing people. If the act is a forced draft for those people, requiring them to become specialized soldiers and take orders, while no other citizens in the US are subject to an active draft, that’s pretty damn unjust. Many civil war tie-in issues suggest this is exactly how the registration act is going to work.
Marvel Editor-in-Chief Joe Quesada has said numerous times that the Marvel Universe is mostly like the real world. George Bush is president, real world events like the September 11 attacks happened in the Marvel Universe, and so on. That being true, you have to assume that citizens of the Marvel 616 have the same civil liberties we do, chief among those being habeas corpus, protections against unlawful search and seizure, Miranda rights, and so forth. In the real world most arrests are made by police officers, but in a comic book world you’ve got lots of superheroes bringing people in, and you’d have to think that their rights are being violated all over the place. Imagine a police officer in court saying, “well, he had a note on him saying ‘drug pusher, courtesy your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man’, so we figured we’d arrest him for selling drugs.” One of the most important foundations of our society is that people who are accused of crimes are allowed to have the evidence against them presented and questioned in court. If you have vigilantes running around nabbing lots of people, there’s no way to make sure that they’re not trampling all over that foundation. Granted, in comic book worlds there’s a strong “ends justify the means” mentality, and when you have very, very bad villains out there maybe you want someone who can bring them in and not have to follow the rules to do it, but that’s a dangerous road. With SHIELD able to look over the heroes’ shoulders, they can make sure that the alleged criminals’ rights aren’t being violated even though it’s She-Hulk making the arrest instead of a cop (though being a lawyer I’d imagine She-Hulk knows all of this, anyway). Now, I’m not arguing that everyone X-Men story begin with Cyclops filling out paperwork for a search warrant to check if a guy has been keeping mutant slaves in his basement, but it’d be good to know that when they do apprehend him it won’t just get thrown out of court.
The question, then, is what the ramifications for registering are. If it means you get drafted or thrown in jail, and at times Iron Man specifically says that’s the case, then the anti-reg heroes had every reason to protest it. But if it’s there just to ensure due process, then not having someone looking out for the rights of the accused is wholly irresponsible. It makes the protest into one on grounds of tradition alone. “We always used to be able to beat up anyone we wanted, why should that stop?”
In this fan Q&A, Civil War editor Tom Brevoort provides the answer:
[The Superhuman Registration Act] requires anybody possessing superhuman abilities to register themselves and those abilities with duly-appointed agents of the government. Additionally, if an individual intends to use those super-normal abilities as an independent peace officer, they must qualify on a training evaluation, be licensed and submit to some level of oversight in terms of their activities. The closest equivalent, although it’s not quite the same thing, is gun legislation. If you want to own a firearm in this country, you need to register that weapon. If you want to use that weapon and carry it, as a private detective or a bodyguard or in any other legal way, you need to be licensed and cleared on a firing range, demonstrating that you have the necessary knowledge, skill and responsibility to use that firearm responsibly. And if you discharge that weapon outside of an authorized firing range, or in the course of one of those jobs, there’s going to be paperwork that needs to be filled out.
Sounds very reasonable, doesn’t it? You’d think if someone had just spelled that out from the beginning, there wouldn’t have been a need for a whole lot of fighting and death. In fact, the text of the bill itself would say all that, though it’s possible it’s way too nebulous like the Patriot Act and gives the government lots of powers it may or may not use. The point being, it’s sloppy storytelling. The main conflict only holds up if the registration act has bite to it, if you the reader believes it to be a real danger to heroes being able to protect people and from the government not being able to use heroes as political tools. But as soon as the story ends, it turns out to be something very sensible that lets heroes keep doing their jobs but protects the American public from a Marvel equivalent of the Santa robot on Futurama who puts everyone on the naughty list and then maims them.