This cover and the last ASM cover are a nice pair, Spidey Vs. the 2 leaders. This is the issue where the pro-reg side gets firmly characterized as absolutely insane fascists, as I recall, the extent of the insanity behind their policy revealed. Registration, as a concept, makes sense and is the only reasonable path forward. So, to make sure you don’t see it that way, everything that happens AFTER registration that’s bonkers. We already saw that everyone who registers is forced to become a cop, but that’s the tip of the iceberg. Well, anyway. MJ wakes up at 2:34am to find Peter not in bed, and he’s watching TV because he can’t sleep, on account of slowly realizing he’s made a mistake.
So, then, Peter goes to see Tony, and demands to see this prison facility he’s making $2 billion off of. Tony tries to blow him off until cornered, then relents.
So… yeah. I suppose you could see them thinking this when the New Avengers started with a massive supervillain prison break, but the implications from them doing this for captured heroes when they never did it for villains are, uh, something.
Tony is clearly holding a 2nd right hand glove in his right hand glove. Oops.Tony takes him through the facility, talking up how it’s impregnable, showing some inmates, the first of whom happens to be Prodigy, one of his Slingers aliases, who begs for help. He’s shown that low risk inmates get a virtual reality program so they’re not just looking at 4 cell walls all day, but whoever that lady is, too, is begging for help.
And in this moment, we see JMS’s Tony is irredeemably evil. But the thing is… that’s just JMS’s Tony. One of the absolute most awkward parts of this stupid event is the relative good intentions of any participant fluctuate WILDLY based on who’s writing them. Ostensibly, neither side are “the bad guys” in this event, but Mark Millar’s Captain America has devolved into a monosyllabic psychopath by Civil War #4, and Iron Man is 100% the bad guy in Amazing Spider-Man. And every comic Straczynski writes him into, for years, for that matter. Marvel couldn’t very well keep publishing Iron Man and Captain America comics if one of them was definitively evil, it’d be a disaster, but that’s exactly what Civil War is, and the various writers giving you conflicting versions of the characters is a big part of it. Ugh, well, the boys return from the Negative Zone, and Peter stops to ask Reed “Why?” That’s it, one word. And Reed tells this long story about his wacky eccentric uncle whose life and career were ruined by not cooperating with the McCarthy hearings. He tells Peter the point of that story is his uncle was wrong, that you have to conform, because the law is the law, and the law is the only thing that keeps us from being “up to our necks in blood,” which is an astoundingly stupid thing for an alleged genius to say. Peter then shames him for his opinion and leaves. We have fun.
If only he could twirl his mustache without taking off the helmet. So, then, Peter sneaks through Avengers Tower to gather MJ & May without security seeing them, tells them he’s made a grave mistake and they have to get out of here, because he’s on the wrong side, and then, obviously…
Unusually, this one continues right into Civil War 5. The tie-ins give you context and color there’s no room for in the main title (Theoretically), but this is the beginning of a scene that picks up in progress in Civil War.