Tom Brevoort discusses Civil War 7
Matt Brady - newsarama.com

    NRAMA: Was the ending seen in #7 always the final ending, from the pitch stage to now? Any insight on some of the other ideas that were shot down early on?

    TB: Yes, pretty much. At the very outset, in the initial discussions (back when Mark was thinking of Civil War as 12 issues, rather than the 7 it became) there was a whole other plot thread that got dropped along the way. But in the Civil War planning sheet that got sent to the other editorial offices and to the writers, dated 12/2/05, this is what it said:

    CIVIL WAR #7
    -- SPECTACULAR fight. One by one, the guys go down until we’re left with just Cap and Tony

    -- Cap, exhausted, finally puts Tony down in the cleverest way possible. It’s over.

    -- He looks around at the crowds assembled on the edge of town and he sees something he’s never seen before: Fear. Cap inspires hope and yet here he is terrifying the locals. They start to yell at him, voicing everything we’ve seen in the background throughout the series about how they WANT a register and need to be protected from lunatics in masks doing whatever they want; completely unaccountable vigilantes.

    -- Cap realizes he was wrong. He realizes he’s been fighting for masks when he should have been fighting for America

    -- Cap concedes that the people do want superheroes to go legit. His big problem is liberties being taken away by people he doesn’t know and can’t trust and so he says to Tony that he and his guys will ACCEPT the registration on one simple condition: That it isn’t the government that holds all the secrets. Sure, the person in charge can be accountable to the government, but he wants a super hero to be in charge of this. The person he wants, the person he trusts most, is Tony.

    -- Cut to a series of epilogues where we get the new Marvel Universe being constructed here. Tony Stark now heads up HAMMER as well as supervising the new hero teams.


SNIP

    NRAMA: So - take us inside Cap's head then - why was he fighting? As we saw at the end, even he seemed to have lost the reason, saying they were "just fighting" to fight, apparently. In your view, when did he lose sight of the reason for the fight?

    TB: Cap was fighting for a principle, for a belief in the sanctity of the personal freedoms of his fellow super heroes. And he was fighting in what amounted to a large act of civil disobedience, in the manner of the founding fathers, or of the civil rights activists of the 1960s. Cap’s goal wasn’t the struggle—it was in being able to continue to do the job despite the increased difficulty and the additional restrictions in doing so. I think that, if he lost sight of his true goals, it was in getting caught up in the escalation of hostilities with Iron Man and his guys—that it became more personal after the battle that cost the life of Bill Foster, and that caused Cap to perhaps put less of his energies into upholding the public good, and more thought and effort into taking down Iron Man.

    NRAMA: Could you say, or could it be said that Cap made a mistake in all of this? Was there a better way for his side to fight Registration rather than fighting?

    TB: Some have argued that Cap’s first mistake was made in the first issue, by choosing to go on the run in defiance of the Registration Act, rather than conducting his efforts within the court of public opinion, either through the media or through his connections in government. In fairness to Cap, though, I don’t think he expected this to go on for so long, nor for tempers to get so heated along the way.



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