In 2006, ten years before the MCU would pit Iron Man against Captain America, Marvel released one of their greatest comic book events. Civil War tore the entire superhero community apart in a debate on superhuman registration, and the fallout was truly spectacular. Millar worked hard to make the main comic as neutral as possible, but tie-in writers took sides just as much as the heroes. Unfortunately, that meant some of them went rather too far.
The Civil War era was not a good time to be an Iron Man fan. Quite a few tie-ins treated him as an outright fascist during Civil War, and even in the immediate aftermath; perhaps the worst was a New Warriors run that revealed he was destined to become a tyrant. But even in the main book, Iron Man was still responsible for escalating the conflict; he tricked Captain America’s “Secret Avengers” to the Stark-owned Geffen-Meyer plant, ambushing them with a Thor clone that went badly wrong.
Marvel’s Civil War: Unmasked miniseries, by Christos Gage, Morry Hollowell, and Edgar Salazar, is a 20th-anniversary celebration of the comic book event. The first issue is set one week after the Super-Human Registration Act (or SHRA) has become law, with Tony Stark trying to recruit the X-Men. The mutants, who had been “decimated” by the Scarlet Witch, refused; the few remaining mutants had been automatically registered, and the X-Mansion was already being policed by Sentinels. They had no skin in the game.
Except, that is, for the time-travelling mutant named Bishop. He was the only X-Man willing to work with Stark, and his motives were never really explored; a former “police officer” of his time, Millar seemed to just assume he’d be an easy fit for the pro-registration side. Gage picks up on this gap, revealing that Bishop’s own dystopian future was one in which registration failed. He believed working with Stark would prevent his own horrific timeline ever coming to be.
But Bishop operates by a principle of “show, not tell.” Rather than simply tell Iron Man about his future, he gets Tony Stark to repair his time travel tech, and he then takes him to the future. On Bishop’s Earth, the failure of registration led to the activation of “Project Wideawake,” the mass-production of Sentinels to police general superhumans rather than just mutants. The Sentinels ultimately became the world’s true rulers, not the mutants.
Returned to his own time, Stark quickly learned that Project Wideawake had been prioritized in case registration failed. This, then, is the reason he became such a “true believer” in superhuman registration; he genuinely thought it was the only way to prevent Bishop’s future. In the chronology of Civil War, there’s a straight pivot from Stark’s recruiting Bishop to the Geffen-Meyer ambush. Now, that narrative throughline makes perfect sense.
And here’s the beauty between this retcon: it’s actually seeded in the comics of the time. The Civil War: Casualties of War one-shot sees Iron Man and Captain America meet shortly after the Geffen-Meyer fight, and Stark literally name-drops Project Wideawake as one of the alternatives to registration that he’s trying to prevent. He doesn’t mention time travel, but Tony is a secretive person who doesn’t disclose much, so the retcon folds neatly into the timeline.
All in all, this really is one of the smartest retcons Marvel has made in a long time. It neatly explains why Stark went so far during the Civil War era, betraying friendships and often crossing lines he swore he’d never even come close to. He genuinely believed the stakes were apocalyptic, and that he was fighting against a dystopian future. This presumably explains why he went on to become director of SHIELD; from that position, Stark was able to redirect funding away from Project Wideawake.
Even better, this Iron Man retcon fixes a few Bishop storylines from Civil War and beyond. Bishop went rogue shortly after this, desperately attempting to avert his timeline using his repaired time travel tech. Presumably becoming desperate by the potential failure of registration, he went to the extreme lengths of trying to kill Hope Summers, chasing her guardian Cable through the timeline. Now, the seeds of Bishop’s fall have been carefully sown all the way back in Civil War. It’s fantastic work by Marvel, and the creators deserve enormous credit for pulling it off.
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