PrettyFakes

So, yesterday I picked up the much ballyhooed new Captain America #1, written by Ed Brubaker with art by Steve Epting. I don’t know much about Brubaker besides that he has a loyal fan following because of his DC work on Catwoman and Gotham Central, but it’s easy to see why people like his work: this is a top-notch comic. I was initially wary when I heard he was going to do something with the Cosmic Cube—an overused plot device whose main power is to generate lazy writing—and even warier when I heard it was going to be a Red-Skull-and-the-Cube storyline, which Mark Waid had done twice during his relatively recent run on Cap (once successfully, once not). But Brubaker makes it work with a suspenseful plot and a nice switcheroo twist ending that I didn’t see coming. Steve Epting brings a nice superhero-meets-noir sensibility to the art, and, overall, I have high hopes for this comic.

But I’ve got mixed feelings nonetheless. The high-profile launch of this series means that big and unplanned-for changes are in store for Christopher Priest’s Captain America and the Falcon—changes that include taking Cap out of the series, more or less. This book is just now hitting its stride after some disastrously bad art on the opening “Two Americas” arc. Priest is my favorite comic book writer, mostly because of his great 60-issue run on Black Panther and the unfortunately short-lived The Crew, and CAF has been vintage Priest—complicated, twisty, dense, action-packed, and funny, with a real sense of what makes his title characters tick. I don’t think anyone else could pull off bringing back MODOK and making him/it a credible, even horrifying, threat. I don’t think anyone else could make the Falcon as interesting as Priest has. Plus, Priest is putting his own spin on a classic Cap ur-story—Cap v. a darker version of himself—a story that tends to rear its head every decade or so, with good and bad results: Dan Jurgens with Protocide (shudder), Mark Gruenwald with the Super-Patriot (who becomes a nationalistic 1980s Rambo-ized version of Captain America for a while), Frank Miller with Nuke (in the pages of Daredevil), and, most famously, Steve Englehart’s 1970s tale of the 1950s Cap—a man who idolized Captain America and took up his mantle when Cap disappeared during World War II, but who, made mentally unstable by the process that gave him Cap-like abilities, became a paranoid, Red-baiting racist.

I think writers are drawn to this story because of the implicit difficulties of writing Captain America; there are so many contradictory and conflicting currents in America that it’s not clear what “America” he’s supposed to be representing. It’s the same problem Springsteen had in the 1980s with “Born in the USA”; Reagan attempted to appropriate the song because it sounded upbeat and it mentioned America, so it must be a patriotic song, right? And by patriotic, don’t we mean Republican? When patriotism has come to mean an uncritical acceptance of a particular political party’s ideology (a strategy honed by Reagan and perfected by the current administration), how do you make it clear that wearing a flag doesn’t mean you buy into all the things that the people who want to appropriate the flag believe? A good slugfest against a corrupt version of yourself if always a good way to do it. Priest’s Anti-Cap is in some ways the most sympathetic of these dark Caps: an idealistic, gung-ho young kid who lost parents in the Oklahoma bombing and volunteered for an experimental procedure not unlike the one that turned Steve Rogers into the original Captain America. But he’s a cynical Cap, a black ops Cap, a Cap who believes that America can only be defended by doing things that the real Captain America would find fundamentally un-American. As ever, Priest is spinning a great comic book yarn and getting at some sticky and uncomfortable political issues while doing it; I hope that Marvel’s plans for the title will let him see his story all the way through.

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 7th, 2004 at 10:37 am and is filed under Comixx, Professor Fury, Springsteeniana, The Rock and The Roll. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.