It’s the worst when comic book authors write juvenile storylines, innit?
There are serious problems with bigotry in geekdom, I absolutely agree. But having hacky, juvenile storylines is not a serious problem. While I love me some literary SF, including graphic novels, it’s not the only thing out there; and I’m having real trouble thinking that Captain America is ever going to be a strong contender in the literary SF world. The character is schlocky from the beginning. What is punching Hitler in the face, if not a juvenile (and deeply satisfying) response to an atrocity of a world leader?
Where this falls apart is that in the real world and in the books that they keep trying to tell us that Hydra aren’t Nazis while simultaneously using Nazi imagery and allusions in the books. It’s coming off to a lot of people like the white college freshman who tries to tell you the swastika on his backpack is his attempt to reclaim the symbol (“it’s a really ancient symbol, you know.”) and the stars and bars on his pick-up truck is just his “heritage.” Does he think he’s fooling anyone?
Wasn’t Superman a Nazi twice (and a Stalinist once)? He had Jewish creators, and while he wasn’t created to fight Nazis, did a bunch of that back in the day. How come there wasn’t more of a to do about that?
All of those were alternate versions and presented as such–Marvel keeps telling us “No this is really Cap… This is all true and is happening in the main universe.”
Yeah, both Nazi Superman and Stalinist Superman have actually appeared in-panel with regular-flavor Superman. It’s very much a different kettle of fish from what’s going on with Cap, regardless of how you feel about it.
Yep, it feels different when it’s explicitly an alternate universe, though I will say DC’s ‘Injustice’ series where Superman goes evil leaves almost as much of a bad taste in my mouth, and the upcoming Nighting : New Order miniseries smacks way too much of a fascist turn for a character of Romani descent for me to bother picking it up, even if it is an Elseworld.
And Miller, you’re missing my point with that one link. I’m just trying to point out that we don’t get to tell members of marginalized groups what they have a right to be offended by. I would have thought you’d be down with that sentiment, but I apologize for the incorrect assumption. I’m glad that another Jewish person enjoys the story, but that doesn’t invalidate someone else’s offense.
I took a hard pass on the Injustice stuff, too. I’m ambivalent about the Nightwing series, but the fact that he’s Romani and supporting a fascist state doesn’t really figure into it. Fascism is a terrible, oppressive form of government, but it’s not synonymous with Nazism, and there’s nothing inherent in being Romani (Or Jewish, or gay, or disabled, or any other group victimized by the Nazis) that makes one immune to supporting fascist ideas.
I generally support giving deference to people’s lived experiences, but that doesn’t excuse poor argumentation or ignoring objective facts. If you’re going to argue that it’s offensive to make the signature creation of a couple of Jewish guys into a fascist, you’re going to have to address the stories written by those Jewish guys with that exact plot. If you’re going to argue that taking a character created for the express purpose of punching Hitler and turning him into a villain trivialized a war fought seventy years ago, you’re going to have to explain why creating that character while that war was ongoing was not similarly trivializing. If you’re going to base your outrage over an alleged fact, you don’t get to get all pissy when someone points out that your alleged fact is incorrect.
Also, if your going to post a blog, don’t take up half the screen space with a picture of yourself. I mean, I guess that’s unrelated to the over all point, but who does that?
In-universe, a Green Lantern is a big deal. But in marketing, I’d say DC’s first string is Superman and Batman. But yeah, maybe I’m being unfair there.
Now, when you and I were kids, Captain America was second-string in that way. But now? He’s one of the big stars of the MCU. MCU Cap has a lot of fans, and Marvel’s comics division just showed that they don’t know what they’re doing. I think if they wanted higher sales, they ought to take comic-book Cap a bit closer to Chris Evans’s portrayal.
Marvel has been coping it for a while by fans and critics for its creative strategy. I really, really like what Marvel have done with Thor and Wolverine, less so with Falcon Cap, much less so with Iron Man and the Hulk. But this entire thing smacks of a lack of editorial discipline: first, over the concept itself, and second, over the writer.
This all reminds me not of Emerald Twilight but of the Spider-Clone Clusterfuck of 1994. Remorseful Cap for being a Nazi Hydra douchebag isn’t going to be a scintillating read.
Again, you’ve missed the point. I’m not saying the background would make a real person immune to supporting those ideas, I’m saying it’s tasteless for a white whitey-white-white writer to use a character with that kind of background to tell that story. You may disagree, and that’s okay, it’s a free country.
But the fact isn’t incorrect. Captain America has been turned into a fascist, authoritarian murderer leading a racist, nationalist takeover of a democratic country and implementing concentration camps for Inhumans. You can quibble comic book continuity technicalities and point out that Hydra existed for five minutes before Strucker and the Red Skull turned it into a full-on Nazi successor organization - but this version of Cap is a Nazi in all but name, at a minimum.
And you’re wrong that this exact plot has been done before, as well. The hero being subjected to mind control doesn’t compromise the hero. It’s not him doing those things. Nick Spencer has been very clear that this is the real Cap, under no mind control - this is him making the choices that a Nazi would make. It may be mitigated by false, implanted memories of an alternate reality, but unless the reset at the end of the story reveals that Spencer is lying and this wasn’t the real Cap, that character will be (and should be) permanently tainted.
And you’re wrong about Cap trivializing the War, too. He was created as a kind of self-liberating power fantasy - much like Superman - to take the fight directly to bad guys in a way that his creators wished they could. There’s nothing trivial about inspiration.
I can tell you’re digging the story and kind of defensive about it, so I won’t engage you on this any further, but I certainly hope when Marvel takes some tragedy that’s important to you, and makes a tasteless miniseries based on it, no one mocks your outrage as absurd because of some hypertechnicality.
You are not the first person to make that comparison, nor, I suspect, will you be the last. It’s also going to be like the last years of the original Barry Allen Flash title, where Barry is wracked by guilt for killing the Reverse Flash and is on trial for that act. Boring as crap, and they decided to kill him off as a result. Comics, everyone!
No, I get that point, and it’s that point with which I’m specifically disagreeing.
Except for the part where he kills the chief Nazi of the Marvel universe specifically because of his Nazism, sure.
Except that this isn’t even remotely the first time a Marvel hero has been turned temporarily evil by a Cosmic Cube.
I’m not saying the original Cap stories were trivializing the war. I’m also not saying that the current Cap stories are trivializing the war. It’s on people who claim the second to explain why it doesn’t apply to the first.
In such a circumstance, I hope to be able to put up a more coherent defense of my reaction than the blogs you’ve linked to.
You mean besides the Hail Hydra salute which has always been the stand-in for Heil Hitler?
Or the Hydra Youth?
Then if you want to go with general fascism? http://pm1.narvii.com/6380/e099861bdfda4255745e88221cc9372f0a8483d4_hq.jpg
Without any context, I think just about anyone would know that the guys in green represent a fascist regime.
Bingo. The US superhero genre is, with notable exceptions, on the same creative level as professional wrestling and soap operas. (I watched some sort of monster truck TV show a few months ago with my three year old son, and I noted that monster trucks have adopted some of the same iconography of goodies and baddies, mysteries and backstories. Same audience as WWE I guess.)
I’m following the **Miller /CandidGamera **debate with some interest, munching on popcorn. Two quick observations:
a. I think its an ethical fallacy to say that because of someone’s ethnicity that this automatically disenfranchises that person from telling a particular story.
b. On the other hand:
The following is an opinion, not supported by citations, so place whatever weight upon it you wish.
WW2 was plainly an important war for Americans, both because of the very high death toll and because it was a patriotic war. US territory had been bombed by stealth, and Americans killed, all an affront to American sovereignty by governments who did not share American principles of liberty and democracy. Americans led the charge into Europe under the Stars and Stripes to liberate people from Nazis. (From where I sit, Americans also won the Battle of the Coral Sea and saved my homeland from significant Japanese assault or invasion.)
Symbols of patriotism during that war in particular were important to rallying popular support for the war effort (countering ultra-isolationist hold-outs), recruitment, purchase of war bonds and so on. Captain America was less important than Uncle Sam pointing his finger out of the poster. But the character was certainly an important element in the propaganda landscape.
A modern eye would view such a character with intense scepticism and possibly distaste, if, say, “The Crusader”, a guy wrapped in the US flag fighting the Taliban, was tomorrow introduced into comics orientated at boys and young men. But I think in the 1940s there was much less sophistication about overt patriotic iconography contained in a medium which adults generally didn’t take seriously. Or if there was, people were mum about it.
So I don’t think at the time Captain America - nor Superman, Wonder Woman, or even the Justice Society going off and beating up Axis soldiers - were intended to nor had the effect of trivialising the war. On the contrary, these characters glamorised patriotic duty. You were a hero if you fought in the war (assuming you were going off to punch Hitler, rather than being stuck on dank Pacific island with gangrene), just as Captain America was.
But as time has passed since WW2, as the survivors have passed away and their memories of the war have gone with them, we are left with memorials and text books to explain what it was all about. Memorials have their own very strong iconography. Captain America and his story is, in one sense, one of the few people left to tell the story of that war. The character has been elevated over the decades, perhaps, from a silly thing in a comic which got young boys and teens fired up about opposing fascism, to a minor but important symbol of American goodness and heroism in that patriotic war. I think the first Captain America movie probably assisted that.
(I have been caused to wonder that if there were superhero comic books in the time of that very patriotic war, the Spanish-American War of 1899, whether people would remember it better.)
I am not an American and have no affinity with nor loyalty to the Stars and Stripes. But, with all of that as context, I entirely get how the idea of rendering a patriotic symbol of WW2, something which helped rally patriotism during WW2, into a Nazi substitute, especially mindful of how awful the Nazis were, is upsetting to Americans.
