On The Internet, Nobody Knows You're Captain America.

More on that in a minute.


Labor Day weekend for my clan of course involved church attendance Sunday morning, our last Bethany single service. Monday everybody got to sleep in, something that my wife Martha especially welcomes as on her Trinity workdays during the week she has to be in by seven a.m.! Only time we went out was when I went to Marketplace to pick up some bacon to fry up because Jeffrey had mentioned a BLT -- though I'm the only one in our house who likes tomatoes -- and I'd been craving one along with him since then! And the girls got to share, of course they did. When Martha had to go in to Burger King last night, Sarah, Jeffrey, and I went to the playground at Longfellow for a while, and last night Sarah got caught up on her clarinet practice too.


Henry Peter Gyrich. Absorbing Man. Modred The Mystic. Chthon. Elements of Doom. Deathbird.


Ok, so the first one isn't technically a villain, but to the Avengers in the real-world late 70s Gyrich as the liaison between the National Security Agency and the Avengers ... was a pain. BUT one can't argue that having some government control over what costumed heroes can and cannot do and maintaining some oversight on them kept the average non-superpowered man and woman feeling somewhat safe at the prospect of their heroes turning on them. And make no mistake, despite Gyrich's charm -- even for a government man -- the Avengers in issues 180 to 189 of their original Marvel Comics title (reprinted in Avengers: Nights of Wundagore, ISBN 0785107657) still have plenty of action! And not just fighting the bad guys, trust me!


My name is Peter Parker, and I've been Spider-Man since I was fifteen years old.


Flash forward twenty-eight years in our world, and in terms of Marvel Comics' sliding timescale ... I have no clue, and not only government regulation but also superhuman registration becomes the main concern in Civil War. Not the third Captain America movie, but rather the original comic book series written by Mark Millar and penciled by Steve McNiven (bound ISBN 9780785121794) which was awesome reading that it is based on! I believed myself Team Cap (re: anti-registration and exposure of everyone's secret identities) until I read it. I've got to admit, in light of a school with nine hundred people being blown up during a "casual" hero-villain fight, what side would I be on? Would I go as far as Team Iron Man (re: pro-registration for public safety) or did they just get carried away?


Oh, God. Please let us be doing the right thing here ...


Wasn't it Abraham Lincoln who said he did not claim to have controlled events, but rather than events controlled him? Tony Stark might be able to say the same thing. Anyway, seven issues of a fight between liberty and security as well as any heroes who want to participate doesn't seem to drag so much as, say, a constitutional debate. (Note: Why has no law ever been called "undeclarational"?) But I suppose the debate, at least counting down to this year's elections -- not just the national one -- is more important. Essentially, what do we really want? Taking into account Benjamin Franklin's maxim that those who give up liberty for security deserve neither ... my people, this is NOT the America we grew up in.


Or even the neighborhood, David