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NRAMA: Was the death always planned as happening in Cap #25? By Mark Millar’s comments on having a significant death in Civil War #7, one gets the impression it was at least discussed on some level? Can you give readers some insight as to what the choices were and how the final one was made?

JQ: I can now come clean. We were deadlocked on several things having beaten them all to death. We were tired, hated each other and just wanted to go home. One of the deadlocked items was the actual fight between Cap and Iron Man, while we knew that pro-reg was going to win, was the actual fight between Iron Man and Cap going to end in a draw? Was one going to walk away having won the battle but losing the war? A half-dozen different variations were on the table and Joss Whedon comes to the rescue.

Then there was also the matter of Cap’s death.

At that same, now legendary, planning meeting the idea was thrown about that Cap was going to pay the ultimate price. We couldn’t come off the subject, and Brubaker wasn’t helping [laughs]. The story was just taking us there and when that happens you have to at least discuss the idea very seriously. If memory serves, we were all pretty much convinced that this was going to happen, the debate then rages over two things: should it happen in Civil War itself as opposed to Captain America and who should the assassin be?

At one point, it was to be Miriam Sharpe who in a fit of anger was to shoot Cap right after he puts his hands up to be handcuffed but we eventually worked beyond that idea and decided that Cap’s death should come later as a byproduct of Civil War and should happen in his own book. This was also important because we felt that the entirety of Civil War would have been dwarfed by this event. Civil War would have gone down as the Cap death story when that wasn’t the thrust of it or the allegory behind it.

While Ed was at the creative summit, this was all new to Ed as it was to all of us, we were coming up with it as we went along, but Ed saw all the possibilities and made it fit seamlessly into his Cap run.

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