The original Civil War came out in 2006, 10 years ago. Why make a sequel to it now? Was it born directly out of the movie?

It actually had nothing to do with the movie! Marvel doesn't do a lot of sequels ever. What was going on was [Marvel Editor-in-Chief Axel Alonso and I] were just talking about what’s going on in the world and how it's reflecting in our work. And we're talking about personal accountability and profiling and how people are shocked that their internet behavior has a price. And it's fascinating to me.

The superhero version of America's law enforcement issue

We were going on about profiling and what's been going on with the cops all over the country and what's the superhero version of that. And he called me up and went, "Listen, we want to go forward with this idea. We think there's a story in it. Our publisher said we're going to call it Civil War II because everyone else will. We might as well call it that." It's a spiritual sequel, not a direct sequel, and I got very excited about it. It had a lot of challenges to me, creatively, and as I get older, that's all I'm looking for. I know people are like "Ah, you're taking advantage of the movie." It was born out of [a] good story and good timing.

Civil War was extremely political in nature. With this one, you're commenting directly on profiling. Was there a particular moment when you decided this would be the right story for your new cast of characters?

Well, yes, actually. We have these Marvel retreats, where all the writers working on the franchise books come to New York and we sit with the editors in a big room — the geekiest Algonquin Round Table you've ever seen — and we talk about what we're going to do and what we've done and what we should be doing that we're not doing. And in this instance, it was specifically for me to show everybody what Civil War II could be. "Here's the moral dilemma in the sand, and what we would like you, the writers, to do is to tell us where your character would go. Tony's side or Carol's side? And [the vote was] right down the middle. That's when you go, "Oh, we got the good stuff!"

I was actually in the room for the birth of the original Civil War event, and it came out of a very similar, organic place. And sometimes that's a tough room, that Marvel editorial retreat. If you can't survive that room, there's no way in hell you're going to survive the internet. I have seen stories die because someone just asked a simple question that pops a hole right in it. But [seeing] how excited people were getting about the idea, the story beats, I got excited. I thought this is gonna be worth doing. If I can get these jaded nerds, I can get everybody on board!

With this story, you have the Inhumans and the Avengers directly involved in the conflict, and Captain Marvel and Iron Man serve as the crux. Without going too deeply into spoilers, can you speak a little about what's going on?

So there's a group of superhumans called the Inhumans, and they're kind of popping up all over the world. A new mini-race of superheroes. And a new Inhuman is birthed into his superpowers, and his superpower, it seems, is being able to have very profound visions. I wouldn't even call them visions, I'd call them experiences of the future. And one of his earliest visions is that of a destroyer coming to Earth and leveling us, as is everyone's fear. And because the Inhumans were able to go to the Avengers, they were able to thwart, in the very first issue, this disaster before it happens. Which is very good news. I'm very proud that this is the first Marvel event that opens up with a win. They usually open up with something really bad happening.

Afterwards, the other heroes find out how they were able to get this win — because of this new Inhuman — and that is a moral dilemma for some of the heroes. Like, "This cosmic event coming to destroy us? That's fine. That's all well and good. But if this guy's having visions of the future and we're gonna act on them, we're basically saying we're going to 'arrest' people before they do what they're going to do." And that's a moral quandary.

How hard is it to balance both sides as the story progresses? In the original storyline, it seemed like Captain America was ultimately in the right. How are you going to go forward and justify the decisions of each side?

I would counter to you that you may have seen that clearly the moral high ground was on Captain America's side, [but] I know for a fact that a great deal of the audience felt like Tony was on the right side of the thing. I saw the movie a couple weeks ago, and I saw the argument spill out into the lobbies of theaters just like I saw it spill out at the original retreat that the story was born in.

"Nobody is the villain of their story."

I started teaching myself early on, in my earliest days of Ultimate Spider-Man, the idea that nobody is the villain of their story. The Kingpin sees himself as a hero. Norman Osborn [the Green Goblin] sees himself as the hero. This is something you've heard before, but everybody thinks they're right. I'm already writing that way as a writer. I always tell the story that there's no "ha ha ha crazy" villain. Everyone damn well thinks they're the hero of the story and right. So, to come into a story like this, and I'm already thinking that way, that's what the job is. The job really is to not express one idea over the other. It's to express both ideas equally so that the audience on their own can decide what side they want to be on. So just keeping it balanced is the hardest thing to do. But it's not when I equally see Carol and Tony's point, and I actually really do.