Oh man, don’t get me started on the Civil War comics. Total trainwreck, and a huge part of it is that the writers couldn’t decide whether the Registration Act was gun control, the Patriot Act, or the total abrogation of the 13th Amendment. (And remember, if Civil War was supposed to be about the Patriot Act, Millar thought that pro-Patriot Act was the right side…)
Here’s what I want from the Civil War movie: make the conflict make sense for both Tony Stark and Steve Rogers. Let them both have important points to make that are grounded in their characters, rather than turn Iron Man into a fascist because you need that to make the fight happen.
Yes, it’s going to turn out that Baron Zemo and HYDRA are manipulating General Thunderbolt Ross. But let’s have that exacerbating tensions between positions that both men hold already.
We’ve already seen the foundations of this – Iron Man 3 and Age of Ultron show that Tony Stark (partially due to his PTSD) can’t stop himself from trying to build the whole world an Iron Man suit (or build a giant fleet of drones to be everyone’s personal Iron Man) despite the awful consequences of that, and if someone hurt one of the people he cares about (even in self-defense) that would kick it into overdrive. (Also, Tony tends to over-correct when he fucks up – hence blowing up the Iron Man suits, hence building Ultron, hence embracing Sekovia Accords after Ultron goes rogue)
And we already know that Cap will react to that kind of security state the same way he did to Project Insight – fear vs. freedom, the individual’s right to due process etc.. He’s not going to stand for Ross and Stark building a black site prison in the middle of the ocean, or preventative detention for people supposedly too dangerous to put on trial. This is especially the case when it comes to Bucky, someone whose possibility of redemption he has already shown himself willing to risk his life for.
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.
Welcome back to A People’s History of the Marvel Universe, where I explore how real-world politics (and weird bits of pop culture) was presented in some of my favorite bits of classic Marvel comics. In this issue, I’ll be discussing how Captain America made the transition from his Timely Comics incarnation to the Marvel era.
Timely Comics’s
version of Captain America was (to be kind) rather crude, still in that stage
where superheroes as a genre are still emerging from pulp, so there’s a lot of
repetitious scenes where Cap and/or Bucky get tied to chairs because that’s the
only way the author can think of to get to the plot exposition, most of the
villains are pretty generic mobster types, and so on. However, Kirby and Lee
were able to go back and sift through the old material to find the stuff that
worked – Steve Rogers as Captain America, the uniform and the mighty shield,
the Red Skull, Agent 13 – while ditching the stuff that didn’t work (the secret
identity, Bucky to an extent, etc.).
At the same time,
there were a number of strategies that Marvel used to make the transition work.
First, in the very act of updating Captain America from the 1940s to the 1960s,
Kirby and Lee made Steve Rogers a man out of time, giving a previously rather
thinly-sketched individual a rich source of Marvel-style pathos and
interiority. The Steve Rogers who emerged in the pages of the Avengers, Tales
of Suspense, and Captain America is a veteran haunted by the memory of his
losses during WWII, a rare example in which PTSD is given its place in that
conflict. (Indeed, a lot of stories from this era involve Cap having vivid
flashbacks or hallucinations that make him question his sanity.)
However, with Kirby
there as the keeper of the sacred flame to ensure that the original spirit of Captain
America wasn’t lost, Steve Rogers’ status as a man out of time was never an
excuse to position him as a conservative or reactionary
figure. Rather,
Captain America’s position was that he would embrace these changes and fight
for the same progressive change that he had back in the New Deal:
And that’s what I
think people often get wrong about Captain America: while he was born into the
“Greatest Generation,” he’s not an old man. Rather, because of his variable
number of decades frozen in the ice, he’s a young man who’s traveled through
time, bringing the passion and idealism of youth into a new era.
Second, Kirby and
Lee kept much of the political edge of the original comics by making a
foundational element of the new Cap comics that Nazism was not dead, but had
continued into the present day as a hostile force that threatened liberal
values, often hidden beneath reactionary causes and movements (hence the
usefulness of HYDRA as a dark mirror through which to question and explore the
national security state in Captain
America: Winter Soldier). For example, early on in Tales of Suspense, they
posited that Nazi agents were at work in modern Germany:
To argue that
Nazis were hidden in German society, as if Himmler’s Operation
Werwolf had
really come to pass, was a pretty bold political statement in a Cold War world
only five years past the construction of the Berlin Wall and in which the
Western German government had yet to publicly grapple with the legacy of the
Holocaust. But Kirby’s political acumen shines in these issues, grounding these
stories in contemporary politics, as with this reference to West German laws
banning the display of Nazi iconography:
Third, another
thing that Marvel could bring to the table is a fully matured Jack Kirby. As I
mentioned above, the Timely Captain America comics were too close to the pulp
era to really be distinctively superheroic. But by the 1960s, Kirby was Kirby.
And so what the Red Skull’s sleeper agents were out to awaken was not merely a
coup against the Federal Republic of Germany, but a giant Nazi robot:
The Timely Comics
version of the Red Skull had been a petty saboteur and sometimes assassin, very
much within the wheelhouse of pulp antagonists. The new Red Skull (who’ll be
explored in future installments) was reimagined as a full-on supervillain with
a flair for giant robots, doomsday devices, world conquest, and grandiloquent
speeches complete with cigarette holder. And so Kirby gave the world not just a
giant robot menacing the free world, but a Nazi Voltron:
This was the
secret alchemy that brought Captain America into the contemporary world of
Mighty Marvel Comics: on the one hand, Jack Kirby’s larger-than-life visuals and
Marvel’s attention to interiority gave Captain America new life, but on the
other, the original political spirit of the Timely Comics was carefully
preserved, so that what made Captain America unique is a superhero is that his
power is essentially weaponized progressive ideology:
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