The 2015 miniseries Civil War: Warzones! offers an alternative ending to Marvel's iconic Civil War event - one that transforms Black Panther into the ultimate villain. A tie-in to the Secret Wars event, Civil War: Warzones! (by Charles Soule and Leinil Francis Yu) takes place in a reality where the Civil War over the superhero registration act never ended.
Civil War: Warzones! begins with the climactic battle that ended the original 2006 Civil War event: Captain America’s anti-registration faction storming Iron Man’s negative zone prison to save their imprisoned comrades. However in Civil War: Warzones! Black Panther discovers that Stark’s Prison is rigged to self-destruct under mysterious circumstances. The hero Cloak tries to teleport the warring heroes away, but the explosion comes with them, destroying a portion of New York City and killing fifteen million people. In the following six years the fighting only escalates, with the United States eventually dividing into two separate nations: the Blue and the Iron, led by Captain America and Iron Man respectively.
After Miriam Sharpe is assassinated trying to host peace talks between Captain America and Iron Man, She-Hulk is dispatched to locate the assassin by Stark. Her path leads her to discover that over the last six years the entire conflict has been manipulated by Black Panther, who was presumed dead after the destruction of Stark's prison. T’challa reveals that it was he who triggered the self-destruct - framing Iron Man to Captain America and vice versa - and that over the past six years he has stepped in to intervene every time it looked as though a peace accord was on the cards.
However, in another twist, it is revealed that T’challa is Veranke, the Empress of the Skrull Empire. Veranke lacks the resources to simply conquer the human settlements, so decides instead to manipulate the Superhero Civil War. Upon discovering this Iron Man and Captain America predictably bury the hatchet and manage to stop Veranke before it’s too late. Civil War: Warzones! is a really interesting worse-case-scenario depiction of the Marvel Universe. It features a lot of crazy twists on characters that would have been fascinating to explore in greater detail: Hawkeye has the Venom symbiote, Wolverine is now the Hulk, and Peter Parker has become the new Falcon. Its use of the Skrulls is also an interesting inclusion. It was eventually revealed in Marvel's mainstream timeline that the Skrulls were working behind the scenes of the original Civil War event, and here they're even more effective.
The miniseries gets to cast Black Panther in the role of an evil mastermind, which gives him the perfect role as an authoritative third party in Civil War, playing Iron Man and Captain America off against each other. The alternate version of events also offers up a satisfying ending. While the original conclusion of Captain America's surrender set up a new era of adventures, Civil War: Warzones! is more contained, bringing a broken country back together after years of strife. Ultimately, Marvel didn't reveal the Skrulls' tampering until well after Civil War, but this version of events turns the conflict up to eleven and makes Black Panther into an amazing villain for the event by tying the Skrull invasion more closely to the event that preceded it.