What do you think about Marvel’s Captain America movies? To be honest, I’m not really into comic book films (or comic books, for that matter; I’ve only read Watchmen, the wonderful Eternauta and a few others), but your People’s History of the Marvel Universe posts on the Cap’n have really intrigued me. Would you recommend the movies? Or, if not, where could I begin with the Captain?

I absolutely adore the Marvel Captain America movies. They certainly have some shortcomings – there’s not enough about Cap having domestic politics as well as opinions on foreign policy and civil liberties – but they really capture the essence of Steve Rogers. 

Captain America: First Avenger isn’t a perfect film, but Joe Johnston gets Steve Rogers at a bone-deep level and understands how to make American pop culture of the 1930s and 1940s sing like no one else. (Seriously, everyone should watch the Rocketeer) The Cap origin story is rendered perfectly – skinny Steve standing up to bullies, Erskine and Steve’s discourse (”The serum amplifies everything that is inside, so…a strong man, who has known power all his life, they lose respect for that power. But a weak man, who values strength, and love, and compassion?… Whatever happens tomorrow, you must promise me one thing. That you must stay who you are. Not a perfect soldier, but a good man.”), the wonderful camp sequence of “Star-Studded Man With a Plan” wonderfully evokes both the good and bad of 40s Captain America and WWII patriotism. The rest of it is a fairly decent action movie and love story, even it it’s not spectacular. 

Captain America: Winter Soldier is one of the best Marvel movies, and the Russo brothers being at the helm of Civil War and the next Avengers movies gives me a lot of hope. And they absolutely nail Steve Rogers and Cap America – both the good and bad sides of him being a man out of time, the way that someone who really believes in America as an ideal not as its institutions is not a boring or conservative person but a genuine rebel, his secret super-power being weaponized ideology, using Operation Paperclip and HYDRA to reflect on the moral compromises that came out of WWII, all of it. A perfect adaptation of the 1970s Captain America comics.