Here's my take on this particular story, how it should be played out.<br/><br/>1 - It should be silly and a bit goofy overall.  I'm personally tired of the dramatic takes you see in media for superheroes.  For some, it's appropriate - Batman was always meant as a darker sort of hero, so a darker sort of story is needed.  (That said, I quite liked the tone that they used for Batman TAS.  Probably my most perfect Batman depiction.)<br/><br/><em>Man of Steel</em>, on the other hand, was not at all what I expected out of a Superman story.  Okay, Christopher Reeve and being able to fly around the planet to reverse time and save Lois Lane is a<em>bit</em>sillier than what I was thinking of, but the answer was not<em>Man of Steel</em>.<br/><br/>Ditto, TV-wise, with<em>Arrow</em>and<em>The Flash</em>.  Everything always has to be super-serious, the personal dramas of the heroes going alongside the superheroic battles, etc.  No.  No more of it.  I don't know when the last mostly-humorous superhero cartoon or movie or whatever was made, but we're bringing it back for this one.<br/><br/>2 - That said.  Just because the overall tone is light and comic does not mean there are not serious moments, or times when the comic aura that should pervade the whole thing be pushed into the background.  Keep it light, but perhaps have serious themes/questions to be answered in the course of the story.<br/><br/>To give you a few ideas.<br/><br/>A: This takes place in a world where up until not-so-long-ago, the superheroes had won.  The bad guys were locked up or deep in hiding in the Amazon (or maybe the far western parts of China), so the need for the big superheroes went away.  Teams disbanded, groups that had existed for years or decades suddenly finding themselves without work, and being forced to leave or adapt.<br/><br/>Then Zohar shows up and frees all those captive villains (and apparently a few captive heroes).  Shakes everything up, everything starts over again.  The world is realigning, everything is changing.  This may be the moment that a few villains find it within themselves to break ties and leave behind the world that they knew in exchange for a different one.<br/><br/>Heroes can fall, this people know.  But can villains be redeemed?<br/><br/>B: The world is changing.  But that does not mean that everyone welcomes the change.  Some people, now that they've been given new opportunities, new chances...will decide that none of those are worth taking the risk or spending the effort to build, and want everything to go back the way it was before.  Same old lines, same old enemies, same old grind.  (Or maybe they just had a really sweet deal with Starbucks and want to be rolling in cash again.)<br/><br/>At the same time, there will be those who want to change the paradigm, insist on a newer, hopefully-better world.  Redraw the lines, or erase them entirely.  Both sides will have their champions, and who is willing to fight more to make their world real?<br/><br/>And finally, C: give the basic idea of Marvel's<em>Civil War</em>the treatment it deserves, rather than the treatment and horseshit it got, both in the comics and the films.  That basic idea being this:<br/><br/><em>Who watches the superwatchmen?</em><br/><br/>Because I'm not afraid to spoil internal thoughts, Darclight would be this universe's equivalent of Captain America.  Heroes are about helping people, and nationality, political identity, all of those things, get in the way of doing that.  No hero should be beholden to a body that is run by people, by elected or appointed officials or bureaucrats.  Part of this is because Darclight has reason to distrust human governments, as well as sheer pragmatism - how many supervillains do you know of who would be the same?<br/><br/>I would suspect that the previously-set-up CHESS, and one of its major heroes, will be the story's Iron Man equivalent.  Not for the same reasons as him, though.  I would expect talk from the opposition about things like setting up resources, about what will happen when groups like CHESS are disbanded, and just how this 'supers policed by other supers' platform would work.<br/><br/>Right, now that I've finished with this, on to -<br/><br/>3 - I think overall, the closest analogue I can come to in media is to replicate the feel (minus the cosmic scope) of<em>Guardians of the Galaxy</em>, and hopefully its sequel.  Guardians had fun with itself, it wasn't afraid to be humorous and engage in the shenanigans of most of the crew.  But at the same time, the stakes were serious, the villain definitely a threat (even if he had no FUCKING idea what Star-Lord was doing there at the end with the dance off), and an overabundance of comically large weapons.<br/><br/><br/>Anyone else?