Yeah, the term comes from the supervillain group called the Secret Empire, you stupid idiot.
The one problem with your scenario is the fact that that Kobik changed history and Steve was with HYDRA since he was a child. You also seem unaware that in the comics, Bucky only met Steve when Steve was already Cap, he never met pre serum Steve.
Wow, someone really didn’t like my idea for how to redeem Steve Rogers. If this was twitter, I’d be absolutely sure this was Nick Spencer, but I’ll have to remain in a state of wonder, you incredibly polite anon.
I know there’s no time machine involved in the Red Skull’s plot. But there’s plenty of time machines in the Marvel Universe that could be used to bring back the real Steve Rogers – I just used Beast’s because of the link to All-New X-Men, and because the FF are busy rebuilding the multiverse.
I’ve written about the Secret Empire, I know who they are. But if you don’t understand who Jack Kirby was referring to when he created an evil organization of people who all wear hoods and robes and want to overthrow the U.S government, and why Englehart making Richard Nixon their leader was a big deal, you need to do some reading up on the Klan.
Leaving aside the way that Nick Spencer has played fast-and-loose with whether it’s history or his memories that have been changed, so what? Cap’s still been pretending not to be a Nazi, so that’s the Cap Bucky knows and loves. Or hell, it can be a Bucky from an alternate universe – this is comics, there’s always a way to write around.
We haven’t even gotten a full MCU Spiderman movie yet, so it’s still early days. However, I do have to say that I buy Tom Holland more than I ever bought Andrew Garfield or Tobey Maguire – Tobey was always a bit too soft and saccharine for me to buy that he was the irreverent snarker behind the mask, whereas Andrew’s performance was way too much of an over-reaction to the backlash against Spiderman III, and came off as way too cool.
That’s the thing about Spiderman/Peter Parker that makes him tricky: he’s a nerd and a bit nebbishy (although he kind of ages out of that a little – there had to be something there that Mary Jane Watson liked), but once he puts the mask on, he gains the confidence to express himself, even if that is as a smart-alecky motor-mouth. There’s a side of Peter Parker that has an ego, a yearning to show the world that he’s not Puny Parker any more – after all, the first thing he did when he got super-powers was to get in front of TV cameras – that makes him prank J. Jonah Jameson to get back at him, or not just fight the Kingpin but relentlessly crack fat jokes at him.
As I’ve said above, it’s really easy to grab one part of that personality and not the other. And one of the things I really like about Tom Holland’s Spiderman is that I feel like you have both: he’s awkward and stuttery around Tony Stark, but he’s also showboating quite a bit at the airport fight.
I had a thought about this, because I think Marvel is wrong about that. You can’t spend two years with HydraCap being the status quo without that having a substantial effect on the character (my problem with that started with Issue #1 where HydraCap murders a superhero – if that doesn’t have consequences, your writing is bad, because murder should have consequences).
My idea is that one of Steve’s friends – Sam Wilson, Bucky, etc. – is really devastated about the way that the revelation of Steve being a HYDRA agent has destroyed his reputation and the public’s faith in what he represented, and they decide to go to the X-Mansion and talk to Beast about using his time machine…Thus, when the big showdown between HydraCap and the good guys happens, at some dramatic moment, HydraCap throws his shield at a hero…and thus guy catches it:
That’s right, it’s 1940 Steve Rogers – drawn like Chris Evans pre-serum, given the mindset of who Steve Rogers would have been – and he proceeds to beat the living hell out of HydraCap, because that’s how Steve Rogers deals with fascists.
And then the new status quo is young Steve Rogers being a hero without the serum (at least to start with), and I dunno, hanging out with the Time-Displaced Young X-Men over in X-Men Blue.
What’s interesting about these reviews is how many of them tell a similar story: Iron Fist is really badly whitewashy/chi-splainy, but it’s also poorly scripted (spending way too much time on the corporate intrigue of Rand Industries), poorly acted by its lead, and (arguably most damning) the fight sequences are boring.
And that’s the surprising part – anyone who’d been paying attention to social media and the press circuit could have told you that the show had walked into a buzz-saw of negative press and fan backlash, in an almost complete inverse of what happened with Luke Cage. But the idea that Marvel would drop the ball on even the minimum requirements of producing a martial arts show is astonishing – and I can’t wait to read the behind-the-scenes accounts to explain how that happened. Lack of care/investment in the project? Just box-ticking its way to Defenders and Power Man/Iron Fist? Inquiring minds want to know.
However, I’m not really coming at this from a place of just gloating, because I have a certain fondness for Iron Fist (more Power Man and Iron Fist) and I think this project could have really worked with a few changes, changes that seem pretty obvious to me but seem to have passed by the creative team entirely.
1. Make Iron Fist Asian-American.
I’m just one in a long long line of people who’ve been saying this in the direction of Marvel’s increasingly-deaf ears since this project got off the ground. It solves a LOT of Marvel’s representation problems quite easily: the “white savior” morass they jumped into with Doctor Strange goes away, you can still do the K’un Lun fish-out-of-water by emphasizing the assimilated-clueless-Wall Street-dude thing (more on this in a bit), and if the worry was that leaning into stereotype would be bad, well now we have two data points demonstrating that the opposite is much worse.
But thinking of Overwatch’s approach to diversity here for a second, the main creative reason to have done so is that it expands directions for storytelling in important ways. With Daredevil already there, the writers already had a problem that they were creating a martial-arts-superhero show in a world in which they’d be judged against the one they’d already created. Thus, right off the bat, rather than telling the story of another brooding white dude, you’re telling a different kind of story and you’ve opened up all kinds of new stories that you can tell about how Danny Rand relates to his family, to the revelation of K’un Lun, to martial arts, etc. etc.
2. Make Iron Fist a Martial Arts Comedy.
Here’s the thing about Iron Fist: he’s kind of a silly character. I mean, this is a dude who decided to go into superheroing by putting on not just spandex, but deep-V, popped collar, capris-and-slippers, and a Dread Pirate Roberts mask. And while Marvel has occasionally tried to remake Iron Fist into a grim badass, he almost always reverts (especially when he’s around Luke Cage, and that’s important) into being a slightly goofy, hot-tempered, motormouth. More Michelangelo than Raphael, definitely not a Leonardo.
And that’s great – because it’s a great way to distinguish your show from the brooding Catholic angst of Daredevil. If you’ve already got a martial arts show that’s distinctive for being dark and angsty, the best way to make your new show stand out is to have it be colorful and funny. It also works, and this part is crucial, better for the sake of the larger Netflix Marvel project: in both Defenders and Luke Cage/Iron Fist, you want diversity of personalities so that the writers and actors have something to work off of rather than an angst-off.
So clearly what needed to happen on Iron Fist is that the creative team needed to be led and consist of people with a deep and abiding passion for not just classic martial arts movies, but specifically martial arts comedies, because there’s an entire genre out there waiting to be borrowed from and played with in ways that could actually deal with some of the critiques people have been having of the Marvel Netflix shows. Are people bored of the Hand? Lean into the ninja jokes by throwing ever-more-ninjas at Danny Rand until it turns into the rake jag, have Danny lampshade the whole situation (here’s where having him be the fish-out-of-water Wall Street dude works in your favor). Are people not liking the corporate intrigue? Shoot the boardroom scenes as ott as action scenes, or have them do a MISSING REEL joke every time someone actually explains what’s going on.
As would surprise absolutely no one who’s followed my People’s History of the Marvel Universe series, I’m a strong believer in the idea that our pop culture is both influenced by our political culture and can have a strong influence on that political culture. Thus, it’s a major problem when the author of both of Marvel’s current Captain America comics gets all pearls-clutchy about whether it’s ok…
I found Death of X very very meh – the central conflict that Inhumans vs. X-Men is built on doesn’t make any damn sense as a result.
So with that rather enormous caveat, I’ll say that the Inhumans vs. X-Men team are doing a better job of making bricks without straw, and there’s some really interesting ideas here (I really liked the Jean Grey/Karnak “fight” as a clever use of telepathy), but it seems to be heading toward a rather clumsy outcome where the X-Men are restored to Earth and the Inhumans go off to space to trace their Kree ancestry or something. Which isn’t a bad status quo, but the weirdness they had to go through to end up there is bizarre.
I think one basic reason is that hero vs. hero is super easy – there’s a reason that went Marvel started the big line-wide crossover thing with Secret Wars, they went with the simplest possible story where everyone gets teleported to an arena and told to punch everyone. You don’t need backstory, you don’t need interesting motivations or a good setup, you just smash action figures together (literally, in the case of Secret Wars, which was created at the behest of Mattel to get them to do a series of Marvel figs, and Mattel’s focus groups decided everything from the name to what characters would look like) for 12 issues and call it a day.
Another basic reason is that editorial and publishing focuses a lot on trying to replicate past successes – sometimes this works ok, and sometimes this doesn’t. I would argue that Infinity Gauntlet and Infinity War build on one another nicely, but it’s patently clear that the only reason Civil War II happened is because Civil War sold despite Civil War’s garbage quality, so surely Civil War II will sell as well? Turns out not so much. So it’s a bit like movie studios trying to chase past trends instead of understanding what underlying features made those trends popular.
A third basic reason is that, for a long time (up until Time Runs Out/Secret Wars) Marvel didn’t really do line-wide continuity reboots that require crossovers, especially in comparison to D.C. who did a lot of these, primarily to “solve” various problems with alternate Earths and timelines, conflicting character identities and backstories, and the like. While Marvel did have alternate Earths/realities, it didn’t go in for them nearly as much as D.C did and historically it was perfectly comfortable leaving those alternate scenarios as What Ifs? or cordoned off in their own times, as opposed to trying to bring everything together into one Earth/universe. So if you don’t have that as a guiding principle for the story and your genre’s fundamental mode of expression is action, you can see why people keep reaching for “Who Would Win in a Fight?”
So while I’m at it, I thought I’d talk about how to incorporate the Fantastic Four into the MCU if the deal with Fox ever works out.
So the first thing I’d do is to have the first Fantastic Four movie set in the early 1960s similar to how the first Cap movie was set in WWII. Because as revolutionary the FF were in 1961, one of the problems that the movies have had is that everything after built on what they introduced, so that inter-team conflict and flawed heroes isn’t new. A lot of their personalities work best in their time: Reed Richards as an emotionally repressed, know-it-all, Type-A, paternalistic personality is more at home in Apollo Project-era NASA than 2016; Susan Storm (at least in the way that Stan Lee interpreted Kirby’s art) is very much trapped in the Feminine Mystique waiting for Second Wave Feminism to come around; Johnny Storm is very much a teenager of the James Dean era, all hot rods and hot dates; Ben Grimm is a product of a Jewish working class Lower East Side that no longer exists.
So here is my vision of how the movie would go:
The movie starts in a stylized Cold War/Space Race/Mad Men 1962, at an international science conference on the recent theoretical work on the existence of a parallel dimension called the Negative Zone, credit for which is split between NASA wunderkind Reed Richards and the USSR’s own Doctor Victor Von Doom. At the conference, Reed and Von Doom are pitted against each other in the media – Bobby Fischer vs. Gary Kasparov – and have something of a clash of personalities.
We then skip ahead to a race between the US and USSR to launch shuttles to orbit the Blue Area of the Moon at a particular cosmic convergence where it’ll be possible to travel into the Negative Zone. In the process of putting together the mission, we meet Ben Grimm (chief engineer), Susan Storm (biologist and mathematician who wasn’t supposed to be on the mission), and Johnny Storm (hotshot pilot). Right before they’re set for launch, NASA gets word that there’s an unprecedented solar storm that will make the launch too dangerous. At the last second, Reed pleads with Mission Commander Jack Kirby that the one-time-only conjunction is too important to miss, no matter what the risk. They blast off into space.
Once they’re coming around the dark side of the moon, the combination of solar energy and the transfer into the Negative Zone transforms the unshielded Americans as they crash-land onto a planet in the Negative Zone. In the crash, Ben gets buried in rubble and becomes the Thing, Johnny gets caught in a fire and becomes the Human Torch, Sue telekinetically holds up the roof to allow them to escape the ship, Reed stretches to grab something while pinned.
When they emerge from the craft, they find out that the Soviet team have made a controlled landing to provide assistance to the Americans, albeit in a patronizing manner. It turns out that, as opposed to being cavalier about the health of their cosmonauts as we might expect, the Soviets are protected by Doom’s armor.
Here’s where the twist comes.
Doom taunts Reed about his arrogance (why didn’t you protect your friends from the energy) and limited vision (doesn’t he realize that because the Negative Zone exists at all points in time, you can use it to go back and forth in time?). Reed thinks the Soviets are going to Terminator the U.S and makes his accusation known.
But Doom reveals that he doesn’t give a fuck about the Soviets. They were the stepping stone he needed to get to the Negative Zone, but now Doom need kneel to no one. He’s going to go back in time and liberate Latveria! The Soviets try to stop him, but they’re wearing his armor, and he remote controls their armor, killing them all, and bids his adieus as he flies off the planet in his armor looking for another portal.
Meanwhile, Reed and Co. have to build a new spaceship from scrap to chase him, because it turns out that the planet belongs to Annihulus or Blastaar! Either of whom would be fine as the throwaway first villain, allowing Doom to remain the arch-nemesis for future movies. After some well-staged action where the heroes learn to harness their powers and work together, they manage to cobble together enough of a spaceship from the Russian ship and Annihulus/Blastaar’s tech to get off the planet and go after Doom.
The Four have a big round-table discussion about whether to go back home or to take the risk of jumping through another portal to find some place and time where they can get the technology to stop Doom. And at the end of the day, they’re explorers, To Boldly Go Where No One Has Gone Before…
And they land…in the MCU present. And this presents some fascinating possibilities: all of the sudden, Reed’s fifty years behind the scientific curve and needs to prove himself, Susan Storm now lives in a post-Second Wave world, Johnny can immerse himself in X-Games and Red Bulls free from the stultification of the fifties, and Ben….Well, Ben represents nostalgia and a sense of loss for what they’ve left behind. His Lower East Side is gone. But my thinking is that rather than just lament the past, Ben Grimm finds meaning as an anti-gentrification activist in NYC.
That’s a fair argument, especially when the characters that are standing in as metaphors are (in their civilian clothes, and it’s noticeable that all the original X-Men could pass) five WASPY teenagers (with only one woman to boot) who live in a private boarding school in Westchester that’s run by one eccentric millionaire.
At the same time, there are a couple ways to deal with this: the first is Chris Claremont’s strategy, which is to make your cast more diverse so that you have characters who are black and mutant, gay and mutant, and so on. Thus, rather than the metaphor supplanting or erasing the thing it’s supposed to stand in for, you can explore interesting questions of intersectionality, passing privilege (see: the Morlocks), etc.
Another strategy is to have the issue of mutant rights actually interact with these other movements and politics. We see a little of this when we get into Magneto’s fascinating role in the Cold War, but I’d love to see more, especially in the original period setting. How would the black power movement of the 1970s have reacted to Storm suddenly appearing as the most powerful black woman in America? How would San Francisco politics have changed with the X-Men spending some time as the city’s super-hero team? Why don’t we see mutant urban enclaves (again, other than the Morlocks) before Grant Morrison’s run on X-Men, and how would those enclaves have fit in the complex urban politics of the 1970s? Why don’t we see a mutant rights movement, and how would that movement have developed relationships with the gay rights movement or the civil rights movement or the labor movement?
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