Get Ready For Civil War All Over Again In 2015

Civil War was the biggest superhero comic event of 2006, and Marvel is hoping that it can still make an impact in 2015, not even a decade later. The publisher released a teaser image for some kind of revival of the event in summer of 2015; in it, Captain America and a very 2006-looking Iron Man pull Spider-Man, in his spider armor costume, to their respective sides.

The image opened up rampant speculation among Marvel fans Monday evening, especially in conjunction with the news that Robert Downey Jr. will likely reprise his role as Iron Man in Captain America 3, which is set for release in May 2016.

Variety made a push toward connecting the dots, reporting that the third Cap movie could be an adaptation of the Civil War storyline. That, of course, has led to further speculation that Spider-Man could very well appear in the movie (that's backed up by reports that Sony and Marvel/Disney have been in negotiations to bring Spidey into a Marvel film, though many assumed that would be an Avengers movie).

None of that answers this question, though: What in the world is the comic going to be? It's unlikely Marvel would go the teaser route like this for a reprint of the original series, but at the same time, these aren't the current versions of the characters. That's Iron Spider, an Adi Granov-designed mid-2000s Iron Man and classic, pre-helmet Cap. Is a new creative team going to retell the original story from a different perspective? Is it going to be reimagined from whole cloth, but still be set in that period? It's a head scratcher.

And here's another wrench in the gears: Marvel already announced its big event series kicking off in the spring of 2015, which also bears the title of a previous big event: Secret Wars. Both series would have to run concurrently. And to confuse matters further, on Tuesday morning the publisher tweeted a teaser for another event next summer, recycling two previous storylines, Age Of Ultron Vs Marvel Zombies. Maybe all these events tie together as part of the alternate reality angle of Secret Wars? But let's not rule out the possibility that Marvel is just trolling.