The marvel constitution is obvious very different from the US one, because everything I've heard about the registration act makes it out to be so nakedly, facially un-American, that James madison would just have an aneurysm and die on the spot if he were even in the same room with it.

On the other hand, the Bill of Rights is not a suicide pact, as the saying goes...

None whatsoever.

Based on what I've seen in scans_daily of The Initiative (and anyone who's seen Buffy knows how well that'll turn out), it's been "you got powers - you get drafted." Said draft means you go to a training facility built in the ruins of Stamford (ick) where you get Super Hero Training, and may even die in a Danger Room Training Exercise. And if you screw up, they'll surgically remove your powers.

TO quote our old Champions hero team battle cry "we're not heroes, we're @$$holes."

Wow, Rick, that's um, that's the complete triumph of supervillainy.

Dear Tom Brevoort: Please try to explain that away; you are not allowed to use non-textual material.

All in all, my statement here:

The Initiative looks a hell of a lot like pre-positioning loyal troops for an authoritarian, for-your-own-good Stark takeover.

looks more and more accurate.

Maybe that's the whole point and it'll turn out that Stark really is insane or is not really stark but the Mandarin in a clone Stark body or whatever.

Gosh wow, these are some fun comics.

It's also pretty clear that in the Marvel U the Posse Comitatus Act has been repealed or at least extremely modified by the Initiative Act. I think it tells us more about the current writers at Marvel than about the characters that they believe this is the cause and effect you would get.

Twenty years ago at DC they told the same story, pretty much, in the Legends cross-over but it ended with the observation that people believe in their heroes too much and need and want heroes too much to forsake them for very long.

In this fictional setting in the past there have been much worse and more lethal results from super villain and super hero activity and people still in the end had faith in the heroes. Entire cities and countries have been destroyed in the past in fact. Why now all of a sudden? Because they want to make some sort of political statement? They need to step back. Read the constitution and look at the real world first.

We've seen innocents killed by ill conceived police action (Ruby Ridge, Waco), we've seen more victims of terrorist activity than this fictional Stamford innocent, including
babies (Oklahoma, 9/11). However, while we've increased security and detained known and suspected hostiles, we haven't turned our country into a police state.

As usual at Marvel, the premise of their story relies on their characters being brutal and inside the box thinkers.
You know how you fight registration and protect your identity? You encourage everyone you know to register even if they aren't a superhero. If the entire population of the US registers the system is so overwhelmed with data that it becomes useless. You have dozens or even hundreds of people register with the same code name. Then down the line you have one of your tech types attack the database with a worm that quietly deletes the 100 or so actual heroes from the system.

Oh well. Much like the majority of plot-lines from the 80's and 90's, eventually Civil War and the Initiative will be wiped away, hopefully by a set of writers that believe in heroes and face the world with optimism and pride in what they are working on instead of cynicism and
hatred for the very idea of stories about super heroes.

My theory / hope is that World War Hulk has Hulk punching Iron Man so hard that it breaks reality causing Cap and the real Tony Stark to reappear in this reality.

Okay, I really think that World War Hulk will be payback on Tony Stark for all the bad stuff he's caused. (Though I'm not sure how. Really, I'd think the Hulk going on a rampage as never seen before would lock in Tony as President for Life.)

Brilliant ideas on how to sabotage the registration, Lewis, and I agree wholeheartedly with your sentiment there at the end. It would also be nice if this hypothetical set of writers brought a little more originality and imagination to the table (sorry fellas, this whole dystopic superhero Ragnarok has been a dozen times before since the 80's -- in RPGs, comics, and fanfic).

Actually, I like the idea of the SHRA, done in a non-jackbooted fashion. I think most folks (in Marvel and as the intellectual exercise) would agree that masked vigilantes are a bad idea and that having some sort of required training would be a good idea. Heck, I'd even be behind having a prison in the Negative Zone if it was used for super-VILLAINS (especially all-powerful ones or ones who keep escaping). But the SHRA became shorthand for "Iron Man and his Brownshirt Avengers get to act like authoritarian scum and get away with it." And why is Stark spending so much time going after the "New Avengers" instead of actual villains? (Because hero vs hero sells, I guess.)

Adding a sane SHRA to the MU adds stories. Heroes get to angst about registering. Peter Parker worries that some goon at SHIELD is going to post his secret ID on myspace. What does it mean for mutants? Adding the insane SHRA actually takes away stories, because it forces heroes into idiot boxes. There could even be levels of registration, so that if you join SHIELD you get all sorts of perks and maybe some street-level hero thinks that might solve all is problems. Or you get the hardcore super-SHIELD agents vs the ragtag (but registered) heroes in some sort of rivalry. (The Snobs vs the Slobs, as it were.)

And I too love the "everyone registers" idea. There have been numerous Avengers who didn't have a single super-power (Hawkeye & Mockingbird, for instance). So I say that everyone puts on a Zorro mask and demands that they be registered. If they have to register Hawkingbird (or whatever they're calling the girl in Young Avengers using Hawkeye and Mockingbird's gear), then I have to register too.

I can't say that I've seen any safeguards, but then I haven't really been looking for any even among those few Civil War related comics that I've bothered to purchase.

Running off on a tangent that will hopefully loop back around to the main question: I think that there are two levels at which the Superhuman Registration Act can be discussed.

The first is the interior-to-the-fictional-world level that discusses the setting and tries to make sense of potentially conflicting discrepancies. I don't think make any sensible comments about this of my own, for the simple reason that my legal and constitutional knowledge is minimal. That said, I will direct the attention of anyone who isn't aware of it to Loren Collin's 'Suspension of Disbelief' webpage, which *does* try to make sense of it (and finds it wanting). The pertinent entries are 'Civil War' and 'I Just Can't Take The SRA Seriously'.

I mention these because they directly relate back to Greg's initial question: "In post-Civil War comics, have we seen any procedural safeguards of any kind?" But if Loren's thesis is correct (and admittedly, it can be quibbled) then the writers were never going to have safeguards of any sort, because that would be a step towards making the SRA reasonable rather than a straw man designed to get readers' hackles up.

(The quibble, by the way, is that Loren was thinking too short term in her assertion that the SRA had to be seen as a Bad Thing so that the Anti-Registration forces could be seen as a victory when they win. In retrospect it was wrong, but to be fair it was a possibility. But an equally valid prediction would have been that in the current Event age is that things happen that shake up the status quo until the next big Event. At the moment that next Event looks like it might be World War Hulk. But then again, the SRA may be like the Mutant Registration Act, which has been kept in the background as a bogeyman for decades real-life-time and only brought out on those few occasions when it's needed for a story, but is otherwise pretty much ignored as far as affecting the daily lives of Marvel's mutants.)

But in any case, discussing the writers' motives rather than the interior logic of the setting brings us to the second way that SRA can be viewed. This is the meta level of what Marvel are trying to do, the answer to which is: Strategically, sell comic books in a marketplace that is in known long-term decline; by Tactically, creating a dramatic and presumably engrossing comic book Event which will shake up the status quo. Well, going by the sales figures they've certainly succeeded; check out Paul O'Brien's analysis of the Feb 2007 figures at The Beat.

However, as I've ranted before (and will probably continue to rant into the foreseeable future) the Civil War is predicated on an Idiot Plot. The storyline needed something dramatic to happen to ramp up tension, and has been willing to forgo not just things like previous continuity and characterisation (*really* cynical voice: because these days continuity is something to be cherrypicked when needed and otherwise be used to wipe your backside with) but also things like sensible cause-and-effect and current characterisation of those involved. It's pretty clear at this point that there is no consistency in the way the prosecution of the SRA has handled so far, and I honestly do not expect anything sensible like consistent, comprehensive, or comprehensible safeguards. Although it goes without saying that explaining such items in detail would almost certainly make for bad storytelling, I am in fact coming down on the side of the argument that doubts whether such details even exist as background notes.

And being either ruthlessly fair or ruthlessly cynical, I doubt if it is possible to promulgate such details even if they had been worked out behind the sceens in advance. It would require the writers writing down a bible of what the details of the SRA is and is not, and then GETTING EVERYBODY TO STICK TO IT. In the past when either DC or Marvel has tried to impose such editorial mandates (and here I'm thinking of things like the tightening up and restricting of how time travel works in the DCU post Crisis On Infinite Earths) they eventually unravelled. And that's with a relatively easy to grasp story driven concept, let alone a complicated fictional legal concept like safeguards in the SRA which is already mucking around with complicated real-life legal concepts.

In summary then: The nature of the changes being made to the status quo of the Marvel Universe with the SRA are made up of finicky legal details that do not make for good reading when examined comprehensively. Combine this with interviews that suggest that event the writers and editors at Marvel who are spearheading the Civil War have not fully worked out how the SRA is supposed to work. Combine this with the attitude of the writers at Marvel which by rumour seem to be split between those who are in favour of the overbearing and unjust nature of the SRA as a source of melodrama for selling their comics, and those who think that it will be getting in the way of the stories they are planning and are treating it as another compulsory crossover burden to be gotten over with as soon as possible and are often doing so by treating it as a piece of over-the-top loony legislation. To me this situation doesn't look contusive to getting a satisfactory answer for whether the SRA has any safeguards, and in the absence of any positive evidence we should assume that dramatic storytelling will mean that there are none.

Actually, I hope Nova kicks Stark's ass before the Hulk does. Actually, it is funny that Annihilation stories set in space did more "superheroic" stuff than the actual superhero books. Nova, who now can cruise the galaxy at will and smote 8x8 sized troubles (take that, SHIELD...er...what does that mean?) will think it is funny if Stark tries to tell him what to do. Anyway, pipe dream aside, I think the real stories will continue to happen in the MU, just in smaller numbers. X-Factor is cruising along nicely, as is Runaways. Sure, they give lip service to the whole "registration" thing but mostly ignore it and act vigilante as usual. The new book, The Loners, also is doing this.

These ragtag kids of wannabe ex-superheroes don't use registration as the reason to stop being superheroes...they want to stop because they think being a superhero is destroying their lives. In the first issue, we see good ol' superhero on badguy action and nary a mention of Iron Man and the agents of SHIELD.

So while I think they have put the cuffs on some of the mainstream lines of comics for a while (until Hulk pounds good sense back into the editorial board), there is still the glimmer of fine comic book storytelling to be had. Good stuff with Annihilation spin-offs, good one-off series like Runaways and Loners, good minis like last year's Westerns and this year's Monsters, cool Max line Punisher, etc. Heck, the "kid friendly" line is garnering more comic book praise than the mainstream line. Maybe if sales of those more throwback books go up (are they good?), maybe the editors will get a clue. But who cares. There are still plenty of good superheroic storytelling going on in the comic shop. And like all things, MU will be back to basics soon enough.

The trouble I had with Avengers: The Initiative #1 was that it read way too much like The Draft.

"I think most folks (in Marvel and as the intellectual exercise) would agree that masked vigilantes are a bad idea and that having some sort of required training would be a good idea."

Oh, Rick, stop trying to spin this registration thing in a positive fashion -- it's a sucky idea, for the Marvel Universe, from start to finish. It's the wrong kind of "realism" and it belongs somewhere else.

"Adding a sane SHRA to the MU adds stories. Heroes get to angst about registering."

Yeah, that's, um, great. WHAT?!? How about good-but-human heroes fighting human-but-evil villains? Can we have more of that instead? Please?

Heroes angsting about registration sounds about as appealing as heroes angsting about filling out their taxes. Put this angsty registration crap in Wild Cards or The Authority or somewhere it will fit and make sense -- not the MU.