Is Michael Jackson? What? What? Tell us!
Oh goody – looks like the SDMB server ate yet another new topic post. :smack:
NO! The Truth* people have taken Captain America hostage until every American puts up with annoying dying rats and 600 mechanical babies and other wastes of money that could feed thousands!! Damn them all to hell!!!
I think it sounds fasinating. First the Transformers comics get me buying again, now something else shows up that i would like to read…i think i’m beginning to re-nerd. (yes, yes, i’m already a nerd, just now i can put comics back on my Geek Resume)
My take, in short:
I like World War II comics. This, as far as I know, is uncharted waters in comics, but a conceivable concept in the Marvel U. given how blacks were treated in that era. So I don’t see anything wrong per se with the story, and given the creative team, I’m looking forward to it.
My problem: I’m upset that they’re shoving this into the Marvel Universe proper. I suspect that with the growing success of the Ultimate line, a more “anything goes” attitude can be taken with the traditional universe. The problem I have is that, realistically, if Steve Rogers had a precursor, we’d have heard of him by now.
I don’t mind retroactive continuity usually, but stories like this go to lengths that I have difficulty swallowing. (For a better example, consider John Byrne’s Lost Generation series. May it never be spoken of again, in his mercy, Amen.) I’d have a happier time with it if it WERE in the Ultimate line, since that universe is so young that the tinkering we’ve seen so far is more…I dunno…acceptable.
I really like this concept.
I don’t think it is going to take too much shoehorning into continuity. I’m no expert on Cap’s origin, but unless it was established that the German scientist who created the serum was only in the country for a short time before the Rogers experiment, then they can have a window of preliminary test time.
Also it’s not like this would have come to light for Cap. He fought in Europe for awhile, got frozen and by the time he was dethawed most if not all the people who worked on the project would have been dead.
Obviously this story is going to end badly. Combined with the fact that these guys got an early un-perfected version of the serum and they haven’t popped up before… I’m saying funeral city for the Black Caps.
It’s ballsy as hell, and doesn’t appear to break any existing Cap continuity. I like it!
(Yes, Virginia, we’re definitely out of the days of the Dumb Stupid Marvel Comics now…)
I dunno.
It sounds interesting and the art looks wonderful. But I see two problems:
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I don’t buy the concept. Yes, they WOULD have tested the SUPER soldier serum on a white guy first. They wouldn’t have wanted a super-powered black guy. Sure, they tested VD on blacks to see what would happen, but VD doesn’t give one super powers. And they knew the kind of damage that super-powers could cause: they’d had months of dealing with the Human Torch and the Sub-Mariner.
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I don’t like it for continuity purposes. We’ve seen Steve’s origin too many times. This can be shoe-horned in, just barely, but I’m sick of Marvel retcons. Stop this “illusion of change” crap, let the damned universe move the forward again and quit raping the past. I’m tired of new revelations about a character’s origin. Make what they’re doing now more interesting.
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I really don’t buy that the Black Cap is still around (my reading of the article implied that he was, plus the bandana thing he’s wearing is a pretty new style: it’s certainly not 1940s). I can buy Nick Fury and Steve Rodgers getting (accidentally or otherwise) longevity. Why’d this guy?
I think this story would have made much, MUCH more sense in the Ultimates universe.
Fenris
Could anyone explain exactly what is going on for the Cap?
I don’t read Captain America, but I do know enough about him and I really can’t see this story bringing about any good. I mean, it’s got a kind of interesting premise, but like Fenris said, the likelyhood of the U.S. Military testing out a “Super Soldier Serum” on blacks just doesn’t sound plausible. The only thing I can really see happening is the first several attempts cause death or insanity, and the final successful case is just going to be kept locked up “for research” purposes as Steve Rogers goes galavanting around as the real Cap.
And again, the likelyhood of any of these test subjects or the project itslef staying hidden all this time is rather unbelievable as well. But hey, it’s a comic, what does believability have to do with anything, right?
It could be interesting if they leave the storyline in the past, but if they bring it up to present day, I feel it’s just going to be silly. It may have worked in the “Ultimates” storyline, but in the “proper” universe, it’s just trying to redo things again to help appeal to a new audience and make marvel “more PC,” which is something I always detest. Don’t rewrite someone just because you need a character to satisfy your “quota,” create someone new and interesting. Comic book companies need to learn to quit fucking with their stuff.
I would be interested to see if this is the first in a three part series, though. I can see it, here we have Truth, which discusses how the U.S. Military used blacks for scientific experiments, and quite possibly the whole thing becoming public knowledge. The follow-up would be Justice, in which the family members of the subjects try to get the government to pay them reparations for what the military testing did to their relatives (again, I’m thinking insanity and death). And then finally The American Way, where the U.S. Government fucks the families over and gives them nothing but a “Hey, they knew they were taking part in a military study, it’s not our fault they’re psychotic.”
Currently?
No.
It’s been rebooted…again. John Ney Reiber (sp)…“Books of Magic” has taken over the book. The art is fantastic, but I’m not really sure of what’s going on (Reiber is a slow-starter on stories). Something about Cap being traumatized by 9/11 and going out to find America and kick terrorist butt.
So far, I’m not thrilled ('cept with the art), but I’m willing to trust the writer for at least a few more issues.
Fenris
Click on the article on the fourth post, supra.
The short of it is that when Marvel was planning to insert Captain America into the Ultimate line about a year ago, President Bill Jemas suggested that he might be made a black man. (Not unusual in the Ultimates line: Kraven is now Australian and the Wasp is now Asian.) The idea was that the U.S. probably would have tested the super-soldier serum on blacks, not whites, as blacks were seen as a lot more expendable back in the WW2 era.
The Ultimate Cap…ahem…ultimately turned out to be basically the same Steve Rogers we’ve always known. However, Marvel decided to follow through with the “black Cap” story anyway and insert it into the Marvel U. proper.
Fenris, after your post I’m wondering how early the U.S. had developed a backup plan to take down rogue super-soldiers. There was the TESS-1 project (although I’ve always found it corny that there’d be a robot THAT advanced by WW2, Human Torch aside), but I get the impression that this Cap appeared maybe in the mid-30s.
Heaven forbid, maybe the Army had this guy killed before Steve Rogers’ time. Maybe some halfwit general figured that the United States couldn’t have a black man as the super-powered representative of the country. Yeek.
I like the idea of a black Captain America a lot, and if I was still buying comic books I would probably get this series. But I don’t think it fits in with continuity. Going on the most recent origin story that I know of (from Universe X), the scientist who experimented on Steve Rogers was an agent of Hitler and was specifically looking for the ideal Aryan man to conduct experiments on. Also, it seems to me that the origin stories were pretty consistent with the fact that the scientist was killed after only completing one experiment (which was done with Steve Rogers).
<<Yes, they WOULD have tested the SUPER soldier serum on a white guy first. They wouldn’t have wanted a super-powered black guy.>>
No – they knew it’d be dangerous; they’d have definitely used black guinea pigs.
I’m looking forward to this book.
–Cliffy
DC beat them to it, with their All-Star Squadron series, published in the 1980s but set in 1941 onward. It was basically an excuse to dust off old characer licenses. For the first 60 or 70 issues it worked pretty well, until the DC “Crisis on Infinite Earths” retcon caught up to it and completely screwed it up.
In issue #23 (published 1982, set in 1942) the series introduced an original character named Amazing-Man, a black Olympic athlete who competed alongside Jesse Owens in 1936, encountered racism all his life, and was given super-powers by a longtime DC baddie, the Ultra-Humanite (Superman’s first villian). Amazing-Man became a good guy and appeared in multiple issues. His (initial) powers were virtually identical to Marvel’s Absorbing Man.
DC beat them to it, with their All-Star Squadron series, published in the 1980s but set in 1941 onward. It was basically an excuse to dust off old characer licenses. For the first 60 or 70 issues it worked pretty well, until the DC “Crisis on Infinite Earths” retcon caught up to it and completely screwed it up.
In issue #23 (published 1982, set in 1942) the series introduced an original character named Amazing-Man, a black Olympic athlete who competed alongside Jesse Owens in 1936, encountered racism all his life, and was given super-powers by a longtime DC baddie, the Ultra-Humanite (Superman’s first villian). Amazing-Man became a good guy and appeared in multiple issues. His (initial) powers were virtually identical to Marvel’s Absorbing Man.
I really disagree on this point. Remember the POV of the Marvel Universe at this point in their history: people were terrified of people with super-powers: the only two examples they’d had were the psychotic Sub-Mariner and the inhuman Human Torch. They had battles resulting in massive property damage and loss of life.
Given this environment, there’s no way they’d have chanced giving a black guy super-powers. Never. They’d have chosen someone loyal, completely expendible and white. Like Steve Rodgers. Don’t forget: he was literally a 98 pound weakling from Hell’s Kitchen. IIRC he had no family or close ties. And if it worked, they’d have had a super-powered showpiece. They may have even had a whole string of loyal, expendible white-guys. But I don’t belive, given the fear and contempt for black people that was extant at the time that they’d have taken the chance that a black man would have gained super-powers any more than they’d give an “atom-bomb” to a black man.
Given that there’s an endless string of white guys who are loyal and have no family ties, why in the world would they “risk” giving a black guy the same destructive power as the Sub Mariner?
And in any case, I’m pretty sure that Dr. Whatshisname (Rhienstien?) had escaped from Germany with a vial of his serum. Steve Rogers had to be the only guinea pig: if there were testing, etc, the Doc’s notes would have been written down. The way the story stands, the only reason there’s only one Super-Soldier is that
A) Reinstien(?) escaped with one vial of the formula
B) They decided to test it at once, before the Doc had a chance to write things down.
C) They chose Steve Rodgers
D) They gave him the formula and he became super-powered.
E) A Nazi spy shoots the doc and the formula is lost forever.
If there’d been an extensive testing program with black victims/subjects, control groups, etc, they’d certainly have kept notes. And that doesn’t fit with Cap’s origin at all.
Fenris
What if what they were testing on the black soldiers was not intended to be a Super Serum? Maybe it was a supposed to be a treatment for disease or some such thing. Certainly that might be a more plausible explanation for trying it on a black man not a white.
If they were trying to avoid a WW1 Agent Orange situation in WW2, they could have subjected test subjects to immunity chemical (CHEMICAL X!!!) and then gave them a hit of various types of chemical warfare (Oh no, something’s gone wrong in the lab! Very wrong!!!), thus producing their first Super Soldier.
I’m looking forward to it too.
Although blacks were often looked upon with a racist eye back then, I’d think the majority of white Americans were still happy with Jessie Owens hosing Hitler’s men at the Olympics. That might have been their view of an American kicking Nazi ass, black or white.
~t
That’d be fine and given fears of gas warfare left over from World War 1, it makes sense.
However it simply doesn’t fit with Cap’s origin at all. That’s why it would be so good in the ULTIMATES books: there’s a blank slate and plenty of room for it.
I have this horrible fear that they’re going to do a Captain Atom-type butchery on Cap’s origin (“Everything you knew was WRONG! The origin you know was all propaganda!”) and if that happens, it’ll be forgotten within weeks. Remember Byrne’s Hulk Chapter 1 and Spider-Man Chapter 1 origin revisions? Neither does anyone else. (Thank heavens!)
Fenris