Heroic Age: The Government leash on Super Heroes

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It has been suggested that Maria Hill and Gyrich saw the Civil War as telling the Super Heroes to help, not destroy. The SH's rejected this offer and the SHRA was put in place to strangle the excesses of violence in super hero confrontations. Now we have come to the Heroic Age, and the Government has realized the message they sent has been heeded, because in Siege, the Super Heroes came to help. So this is the end of it. The future before CW was going to head towards this confrontation between the SH's and the government that would have led to Project Wideawake. The CW put a restriction on the activities of Super Heroes, and made PW less likely, now that SH's have realized they have to act more responsibly. So you see, the SH's have had a wake up call given to them by the MU. It isn't as friendly as it used to be anymore. Instead of the roaming packs of wild west vigilantes, we now have a completely supervised and overseen Super Hero community, cooperating with the government so that the foreseen future of wild parties doesn't happen. Sure there will be the Young Masters causing trouble, or the Hellfire Club, but the New Warriors are no more.

A hush has settled over the Super Heroes of the MU. You don't mess with the government, because they are doing the numbers and if the Heroes ever start to look like falling back into old habits, then the screws will come back out and a reckoning will be made. Just like in an NBA team, if the players don't mesh, and people are not getting with the program, the coach is going to make some changes. And sometimes the changes are made from the outside and then even the coach will see himself out on the street. The Heroic Age has become more formalized super Heroing. It's now a Conference of teams playing in the same sector. The officials in charge of running the conference are on constant vigil for any infringements to the rules.

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Brubaker : when Cap was being reborn, he relived all the mistakes he made. He doesn't want that to happen again. He wants to try to take a different tack on the world, and the way he relates to it. He's going super proactive.

Steve Rogers becomes the new Nick Fury - Steve says, "No. You don't want as much as SHIELD. I don't want to run a giant global agency. I can do it with a lot less. Like SHIELD crossed with Avengers". He's in charge of all these Avengers hands, that all coordinate with each other. Brubakers Secret Avengers becomes that team book that Cap was after he died, but this time the team comes together and goes after the one thing. Like Project Pegesus, which was raided by HAMMER. So Steve tracks down these WMD's stolen by Roxxon, and takes them back.

Bendis: the Heroic Age. It's not okay to just have the heroes united and everything's fine. That's not a dramatic way to tell a story. If things are all bright and shiny, the threats to the bright and shiny should be huge - enormous!

How big will the threats be? I think the challenge is to come with the antagonism that defies the Heroic Age, and makes the HA worth protecting. Well here's a giant threat that really threatens them. They're battles of will and need. Someone standing up for something. What's my Kang story gonna be, and how much damage is he gonna do? He is going to do the scariest thing he always threatens. To break the space/time continuum. What about the New Avengers. What happens there? Hellstrom always said that because of what they did, the balance of magic has been upset and a reckoning will be made. Remember the eye of Agomotto? Well Agaomotto wants it back.

From these summations by the writers who framed the Heroic Age, it becomes apparent that the Heroic Age isn't same old same old. The Heroic Age is things went wrong, and now we have to pay and fight to keep the Heroic Age from crumbling. Thus the Eye of Agomotto story, the Kang Story, and Fear Itself Story. Everything in the HA is a threat to the hand hold the Avengers have. It's not like, well we won the fight now let's get back to business as usual. It's, let's fight for what we achieved, because it can be taken away in the next fight or the next fight.

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Ed Brubaker brought in a few elements of interest into his Secret Avengers. The first being the flashback to 1865 during the first real Civil War, and how Alloisius Thorndrake found the portal to Mars in Texas. I liked that connection to a time when the real authorities of the day, the Union and the Confederacy, faced off with one another and decided which was the only authority in the whole USA. At that one time, two authorities existed in the USA and when they came in contact with one another it was butchery. It was a nice reminder of the authority during the super hero Civil War, of what that authority does. Today, that force rides in flying machines, but back then, they rode everywhere on horse back, and that restriction never handicapped the US military in any way. It is a timely reminder of how tactics were used to their utmost success, until law was enforced.

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It doesn't work. It's just another bit of nonsensical writing designed to create a strawman anti-SHRAers can attack. At the end of the day, we're all supposed to love the original status quot of the Marvel Universe and cheer at its inevitable return when they complete the story that essentially hits the reset button.

Inherently, the Anti-Regs are evil, the equivalent of things like Blackwater, redneck militias, and the unregulated corporations that have destroyed our economy. The Anti-Regs are the equivalent of every source of evil rooted in an obsession of destroying regulation in the name of a version of freedom that really only frees the strong.

The thing is, the status quo of comics is rooted in that redneck idea. Comics are basically a redneck fantasy where a strongman shoves aside those silly liberal bureaucrats with their Miranda Laws and search warrants and silly regulations tying cops hands, and gives the baddies awhat theya got acomin' yeeehaaaww!!

Life under vigilantes is trading away freedom for security. Vigilantes routinely beat people up or terrorise them for information. Not just Punisher, Daredevil and Spider-Man do these things, and its usually treated in a very casual way, despite it being Patriot Actish behavior on their part, effectively acting like police given infinite freedom by some act that makes the Patriot Act seem extremely tame by comparison. Vigilantes routinely break into homes looking for evidence. Vigilantes are policemen who have none of the regulation that protects the freedoms of the common man. This is the supreme irony of this entire storyline. At its heart, this genre is a childish redneck fascist fantasy in which the heroes act in a manner very similar to Blackwater and little redneck militias, but it all works out for the best, all works out just the way the redneck types who want to deregulate everything wishes it would in the real world. Registration is not the Patriot Act, Registration is the abolition of the de facto mega Patriot Act the people of the MU having been living under ever since the first vigilante put on his mask. When you side with vigilantes, you should look at the real world equivalents you are really siding with: Blackwater, redneck militias, the massively deregulated to the point of darwinian anarchism banks that caused this financial crisis. Vigilantes are not heroes fighting for freedom. Vigilantes are facists fighting for their own power and calling it freedom.

But since comics can't really acknowledge that they are a redneck fantasy, they have to create strawmans to make their status quo look good.

Now that we have entered the Heroic Age, is it more evident that this maverick town of vigilantes can be seen not as lawless brutes, but, a facet of society that has to operate outside the law, to achieve some sort of justice, and balance? For instance, now that the HA has begun, it is imperative upon the heroes to protect their position from villains who challenge the heroes status of unofficial Sherrifs. You take the standpoint that vigilantes are smiling snarling outlaws, who are breaking the law because they can, instead of the reality that these vigilantes have a vested interest in their own self protection. You make the assumption that vigilantes do this law breaking for the hell of it, instead accepting that vigilante super heroes are being proactive in a climate where if they don't they could be picked off by the villains and driven out. Then the villains would be given free reign to do what they like.