Powers via Civil War

Way back in September, The Fortress of Soliloquy had this great post about how Marvel could have, and probably should have, set up Civil War to show reason for shifts in character personalities and the change in public opinion toward superheroes. He's absolutely right that to really show these changes things needed to be different. There needed to be something over time to show the major change in the public's opinion from cheering at television during the deadly antics of the X-Statix around the world to the loss of life caused by the New Warriors and that group of villains in Stamford. Maybe it did happen and I just missed it.

During the past eight months, I've had the nagging feeling that I've already read something that could have been the lead-up to Civil War, but just wasn't published by Marvel. Yes, people have compared the idea behind Civil War to Watchmen, but that's not where I found my lead-up. I found it in the first 37 issues of Powers.

Powers establishes a world where super humans have been around for at least as long as humanity. (For all I know, Bendis plans on revealing that there were super powered dinosaurs who have survived, hidden, for millions of years.) It was a world that loved its heroes. It cheered them. Lots of people wanted to have powers.

And slowly, everything changed.

Heroes started to get murdered. People associated with heroes started to get murdered. Heroes started going mad and killing people. And there was nothing that the police could do about it. Until it got so bad, so unbelievably violent that the only choice the people thought they had was to outlaw powers.

Specifics: Retro Girl was killed, shattering the illusion of invulnerability.
Kids pretending to be superheroes are killed, showing how dangerous wanting powers can be.
That whole Olympia debacle spreads from the shattering of illusions to a reason not to trust them.
Schizophrenic Boogie Girl goes on a rampage through the city and Walker tells the world that the government was behind everything.
And then comes the moment when the most powerful superhero in the world loses faith in the other heroes and in humanity and decided to take action by killing other heroes, killing the Pope, and pretty much destroying all of the West Bank.

Now that's the way to change a society from one that trust super-powered beings to one that doesn't. That, in my opinion, is how the lead-up to Civil War should have been done, could have been done. Of course, it takes time and planning, which would have been hard to do. (And delayed the series for a while so it never could have started just as Infinite Crisis ended and 52 started.)

Wasn't World War Hulk supposed to be the event of last year, but they delayed it to do the "Planet Hulk" and set up the company-wide cross over better? Wouldn't Civil War have made more sense if it had taken place after World War Hulk?

Who knows?