I’ve dipped in and out of main Marvel continuity over the last couple of years, and read a lot of the Civil War stuff, and more recently, the Siege crossover.
I’m a bit curious how these two have managed to get back in with the superhero community, after trying to hunt down and imprison their colleagues during the civil war. You would think that amongst their peers, they would be less popular than Doctor Doom, but it seems like no one even remembers it now. Spiderman was made into a fugitive during the civil war, but he has even joined Reed Richards FF team now.
Did Marvel just do a big reset button, or did these two somehow manage to get back on good graces with the rest of the Marvel universe?
Tony Stark actually erased his own memories once Norman Osborne came to power in the aftermath of Secret Invasion. Osborne manipulated events to make it appear that it was Stark’s failings as a leader and head of SHIELD that caused the invasion to happen. Stark actually had to g on the run for a bit. He knew Osborne would stop at nothing to get information (specifically hero identities) so he actually wiped all of his memories from the last few years.
He did privately admit to someone–I think, Pepper Potts–that after basically learning about what happened and his part in it, he’d have done everything the same.
Reed is not someone who other heroes are close to anyway so it’s not like anyone besides Sue needed to forgive him. And once she did, I think everyone else let it go.
That was kind of the fallout of SIEGE and the return of Steve Rogers as Cap. Secret Invasion “nearly” succeeded (although we’re never shown anything close to that happening in the comic" because the heroes were so fractured from the Registration Act. The Registration Act also helped put an insane madman in charge of a global police force which led to the SIEGE story. So Cap’s return, along with Osborne being outed as a madman and the heroes having to come together to stop him, put Rogers in a position where he could influence the SHRA to be thrown out.