When Civil War was taking place the landscape of comics was different than it is now. Heroes had fought before, but rarely anything on that scale, especially not recently. So the event was extremely hyped, with a lot of people interested in it. I won't say that I was one of them, but I did want to see how it played out. In my mind, when you're taking 2 heroes and having them fight over something what is more important than anything else is ensuring that both characters are treated with respect, based off of their long and distinguished careers. Not only for fans of both characters, but because that's how heroes should be treated. Therefore, it's best for the story to be written in such a way that whether you agree with one character over the other you can understand the argument the character is making, agree with parts of the argument and the logic behind them, and still see the decisions being made as being in line with the character's history. Civil War started out doing that, with Steve choosing not to go with the Registration Act and Tony choosing to support it, but very quickly went off the rails. I've said it before, by the very end of it there is just no way you can stand by everything Tony's done. It nearly destroyed his character, did destroy his character for many. And on some level, Captain America was just as bad, but at least he realizes it at the very end. Even then though the entire argument really just becomes insanely tipped in favor of the side that's against Registration, which I think was a disservice to the fans and a genuinely interesting debate topic. The numerous different writers involved really just made the entire thing worse, because so many wanted to push their own agendas instead of just telling a good story. Perhaps the lowest point in the series was when a character, wanna say her name was Sally Finn? Floyd? Something with an F, talked down to Captain America about how he didn't understand modern America, using crap like American Idol and MySpace
That's representative of the entire event for me though. That could've been an interesting and powerful moment, really hitting on something important, but it was ruined by bad writing.
And what's worse is the Registration Act itself. It was very clear that the writers didn't collaborate and create a detailed layout for what the actual rules and regulations of the Registration Act was going to be before getting started, and that hurt the story terribly. In some books the Act was required for a person with powers to fight crime at all. These people could then choose to either use their powers, not use them, or get trained to properly use them so that they wouldn't hurt anyone. The training was required, but if they didn't want to use them afterwards that was perfectly fine. There was nothing to imply they were going to be locked up or forced to join an army or anything. Many people then chose to fight crime, because superheroes. Then you had other books, where people were forcibly being captured if they had powers, regardless of what they wanted to do with them, and the "heroes" on the side of Registration were ok with this. Hell, Luke Cage made it clear he had no intention of using his powers from then on and was attacked in his home the second the Act was signed into law.
I remember there was a point where a bunch of teens were told they could either fight for the Initiative, have their powers stripped away, or get thrown into jail
It was just all over the place, with some actions coming off as being done to specifically make people supporting Registration look like monsters that barely resembled who they'd been before the event. There's a reason that Dr. Strange told Tony come Secret Invasion that a number of people feared he'd been replaced by a Skrull.
In light of how Civil War turned out I actually think that it looks even more ridiculous, because at the exact same time it's going on you have Annihilation taking place in the far reaches of space, the event where an army is being led to destroy every living thing in the galaxy. It involved pretty much every cosmic character in Marvel that was relevant at the time, including freaking Galactus and in general is just a much larger, more important event, in terms of threat, than Civil War is. So everyone fighting each other on Earth ends up looking like an idiot.
Best part of the Civil War aftermath was an issue with...Nova(?) speaking to Iron Man and Cap and basically calling them out for wasting time when something more important was going on
This doesn't even begin to take into account how the entire Act was made into a farce when Maria Hill (Who is probably one of the biggest **** ups in Marvel comics) attempted to arrest Cap before the Act was even passed
Could honestly sit down for an afternoon and spend it reading.
