Civil War: Events Refined

There isn’t much to say about Civil War that hasn’t already been said before. It was a groundbreaking series that refined how Marvel did huge events forever more. Not only was there a mainline limited series, there were countless crossover issues, limited series, and one-shots that fleshed out the event so it covered nearly every title in the publishing line. The last time we saw this much cross-penetration with an event was Secret Wars II. Onslaught was close, but really that was just a massive X-Men event and the rest of Marvel’s heroes were collateral damage in its wake. Mostly, Marvel was more satisfied lumping the major events either in the yearly annuals or just having big events take place between the pages of their regular monthly books. But there was a compartmentalization. A Spider-Man related event rarely interfered with anyone outside of Spidey’s sphere for a while, ditto for the X-Men, or the Avengers. No, it wasn’t until Civil War became a thing did Marvel get into a regular grind of massive events that would span and reshape the universe for their characters.

Lots of interesting stuff happened in Civil War, such as the unmasking of Peter Parker, not just in the pages of the limited series, but also in the crossover issues, such as the death of Captain America.

Still, at the end of the day, anything of substance that happened in this event — while really important for a number of years afterwards — are no longer relevant because, one-by-one, all the massive changes made by this event have mostly been pruned back in the 14 odd years since. Still, there was no denying its popularity, and it would go on to inspire a video game, a MCU film, and the concept would be revived in different ways as seen in House of M: Civil War, the Civil War limited series that was part of the 2015 Secret Wars event, and more recently, Civil War II, an official sequel to that event.

Below my chosen reading order (yours might be different, but I don’t care, there is no one right way to read this event). Given the scope of the event and the way my index is organized, a lot of these issues are spread out over various sections. So I have provided this reading order to hopefully navigate it a little better. As I write this in October, 2024, I haven’t added every crossover issue of Civil War to the Index, but the lion share of it is here now.