Why I scoffed at Civil War

As I observed a couple of weeks back, writing realism into comic books is trickier than proponents frequently claim. As witness Marvel’s “big event” of two or three years back, Civil War.
The basic concept of Civil War was actually not bad: One super-hero team screws up big time, resulting in the exploding super-villain Nitro blowing up and taking out an entire school. In the outrage that follows, the government requires all superhumans to register and operate under government direction. Super-heroes who don’t want to register then go rogue and resist the system, including fighting their friends who side with the government.
I’ve seen several people point out that in the real world, government almost certainly would register beings with the powers super-heroes (and villains) have. But as I noted in my previous post, what looks like realistic treatment frequently isn’t.
The big problem (which also bedevilled previous government-cracks-down-on-super-heroes stories, such as DC’s eighties series Legends) is that everyone writing this seems to think it’s easy to identify super-heroes: They’re the characters appearing in our world in Marvel Comics, right?
No. Not even close.
Take Captain America, for example. Quite aside from the fact he’s already a government operative, what about him is super-human? The super-soldier treatment made him a peak human being, but only human (he did have super-strength for a while in the seventies, but that’s long gone).
Okay, true, it was a super-scientific treatment——but if that’s good enough to require he register, what about Barry Bonds? If treatment to boost your physical ability requires registration, well steroid use would seem to fit.
It’s true Bonds doesn’t work as a costumed crimefighter, but Civil War was explicitly stated that super-heroes couldn’t get out of registering by retiring: Even if you sit at home, if you have “powers,” you register.
Or look at technology: Sure, Iron Man’s suit could be considered superhuman, but what about Misty Knight, who had to register her bionic arm? Her arm is stronger than an ordinary human, but that’s true of a lot of artificial limbs these days——is everybody with a bionic part going to register?
And what about guys with night goggles? Seeing in the dark was the only power Dr. Midnight had back in the 1930s.
Is it the costumes? If Batman and Robin had defied the government’s super-hero ban in Legends, but done it out of costume, would they have been legal? If they’d still be outlawed, what about the Guardian Angels, New York’s vigilante street patrols of the era (I don’t know if they’re still around)? Did they all have to stay home?
What about magic? Magic isn’t a power as much as a skill, so do magicians have to register? If Dr. Strange and Jennifer Kale do have to register, what about wiccans? Is a priest performing transubstantiation required to sign?
What about ETs such as J’Onn J’Onzz or the Impossible Man? From their perspective they don’t have powers——what they do is as natural as opposable thumbs are for us.
It’s not even remotely realistic to imagine a law that doesn’t work out these details——lawmakers work them out precisely to minimize legal challenges (even a simple sign ordinance may come with a couple of pages of definitions). In a really realistic story, the rush job the government apparently passed in Civil War would be bogged down in court for years.
I actually think you could get a fun story out of that; Walter Simonson managed to make Congressional hearings on super-hero registration solidly entertaining (Fantastic Four 335 and 336) and fairly plausible.
Civil War? A lot of sound and fury, but more posturing than plausibility.