Battle Builds Character
The subreddit Who Would Win currently has 562,000 members, each of whom comes to debate how fictional characters would stack up against one another. And that’s not the only place the discussion happens. Search any comic book fan subreddit on the site, and you’ll find people making passionate arguments, despite the fact that the characters’ power sets vary wildly according to circumstances and writer.
But the best hero vs. hero stories work because they reveal something about the character as a person, not just as a fighter. Take the scene from Civil War #6, in which the Punisher briefly joins Captain America’s team after saving Spider-Man and then guns down a pair of supervillains who also want to oppose registration. A horrified Cap pummels him for killing people in cold blood, but Punisher refuses to fight back. Even at his most delusional, Punisher respects Steve Rogers too much to raise a hand against him.
Likewise there’s the scene in 2007’s New Avengers #2, written by Brian Michael Bendis and illustrated by Leinil Francis Yu, in which Iron Man’s Avengers fight Cage’s Secret Avengers. When Doctor Strange launches a magical attack against Iron Man’s team, we readers see the insecurities driving the pro-registration heroes. Sentry witnesses himself becoming the Void, Black Widow recalls getting condemned by her Soviet colleague Crimson Dynamo, and Iron Man gets attacked by a zombie Steve Rogers. The vulnerability they show in this moment does a lot of work to undo the damage of Civil War, making the pro-registration Avengers less authoritarians who want power for its own sake and more flawed people trying to make the best decision possible.
Perhaps the best modern example of character building via Avengers vs. Avengers fights comes in Hickman’s runs on Avengers and New Avengers. 2014’s Avengers #29, penciled by Yu, features a familiar beat, in which Captain America punches Iron Man. This time it’s because Cap has learned that Tony wiped his memory to prevent his disruption of the Illuminati’s actions.
Rather than break out into a full brawl, the contrast here comes from legitimate differences in opinions about an impossible situation. Tony sees the existential threat posed by the Incursions and initially tried to work with Steve to stop them. But when it becomes clear that Steve’s methods wouldn’t work, Tony and Doctor Strange wipe their friend’s memory. Yet even then, Tony respected Steve, as the memory wipes allowed Captain America to hold to his values and remain an icon, qualities that Iron Man and the rest of the Illuminati couldn’t afford.
While Hickman’s Avengers run demonstrates how to use inter-hero conflict for character building, there are plenty of examples of the opposite. Two terrible X-Men-focused crossovers around the same time, AvX and Inhumans vs X-Men saw the Avengers and the Inhumans, groups usually presented as heroes, actively attack mutants just for existing. When Captain America, a man who canonically had so little bigotry that it forced Magneto to pause his campaign against humanity (see: 1987’s X-Men vs. Avengers) starts preemptively locking up mutants before they can do anything wrong, we’ve lost the plot.
