Today is the first installment in what I’m hoping will be an at-least-weekly series for me: Blogging my favorite comics run of all time, J.M. DeMatteis’s tenure Captain America, which ran for nearly forty issues beginning in 1981. I’ve been inspired to take on this task by Jason Powell’s issue-by-issue examination of Chris Claremont’s Uncanny X-Men over at Geoff Klock’s Remarkable, and by Marc Sobel’s similarly organized exploration of Love and Rockets vol. 1.
Dematteis’s Cap is a different animal than either of those: It’s not a franchise-defining, nay genre-defining, run like Claremont’s, nor does it redefine the very possibilities of the medium like the Hernandez brothers did. DeMatteis is a justly respected comics author, but he’s never quite been a huge star. But his run on Captain America is, I hope to show, a significant, under-appreciated, and impressive accomplishment nonetheless: an attempt to bring a degree of philosophical seriousness to a mainstream adventure comic without losing the fun that keeps us reading mainstream adventure comics in the first place. And one idea that I’m going to be testing out is that it’s a deliberately self-reflexive run, that it foregrounds DeMatteis’s own chafing not only at the constraints of the genre but also at the arguably even more restrictive constraints associated with its title character.
(It’s possible, of course, that I’m mostly mis-remembering this run, and that it doesn’t live up to the version of it I’ve constructed in my mind—I’m open to that possibility and that’s part of what I’m interested in exploring.)
A lot of that sounds pretty high-falutin. But I’m planning an informal issue-by-issue look at the run; some posts will surely involve more speculative lit-crit rambling than others. I look forward with mingled dread and anticipation to having eventually to write something meaningful about Cap’s team-up with Team America.
I often refer to DeMatteis’s run as the “DeMatteis/Zeck” run, but that’s not really accurate. Penciller Mike Zeck left the series with issue 289, and Paul Neary was the regular penciller starting with issue 292. For a long time I bemoaned Zeck’s departure; although my affection for his pencils are no doubt shaped in part by fanboy-first-exposure syndrome, I still think of his Cap as the definitive post-Kirby rendering of the character: barrel-chested, supremely confident, surprisingly graceful, and, for all that, unexpectedly vulnerable. Cap always seemed fundamentally decent in Zeck’s hands, too. In retrospect, I can see Paul Neary’s pencils are actually perfectly suited for DeMatteis’s final storyline (for reasons we’ll discuss in due time); but Zeck’s Cap is always the Cap to me.
So, all that as prelude to: What to say about Cap 261? Here’s the cover:
“Together Again for the 1st Time!” reads the banner above the title; does anyone know when the first time this phrase was used in comics was? I say “in comics,” though I’d be very surprised if it had ever appeared anywhere else, since where else but in serial superhero narratives are reunions also first meetings? I’m wondering if DeMatteis (or someone in Marvel editorial) actually created the line? For some reason I suspect that’s not the case, but then again this would be before the various post-Crisis reboots and sidekick promotions made “together again for the first time” an apt description of DC Comics’s entire publishing strategy there for a while.
DeMatteis’s first issue sets up one of the controlling themes of his run: The question of what it means to be “Captain America”—a symbol who stands for something deeper—in a world of pure surface in which symbols rarely refer to anything but themselves. Thus the the title of the story, “Celluloid Heroes,” refers not only to the plot—in which a shadowy figure is attempting to sabotage the making of a film about Captain America’s life—but also to a (the?) fundamental question of the run.
The plot is pretty straightforward: Cap receives a letter notifying him that Galactic Pictures wants to make a movie of his life, and wants him to come to the West Coast to participate in “pre-film publicity.” Cap doesn’t want to go, believing that his participation would be unethical (and, as the Beast puts it, “tacky”). But during a routine workout at Avengers Mansion, he sees some startling news footage: A hero called Nomad battling a group of nihilists in California. This is startling, as longtime Cap readers know, because Captain America is Nomad, or was anyway; “Nomad” is the identity he took during a period of post-Watergate disillusionment with America. (The Marvel Comics analog for “president has to resign because he broke the law” is “president offs himself in front of you because you discovered his plans to hand control of the US over to a shadowy cabal called the Secret Empire.”)
When Cap heads west to investigate this mystery (under the cover of accepting Galactic Pictures’s offer to promote their biopic), he finds himself quickly drawn into a team-up with the new Nomad, a darling of the local media whose borderline incompetence when battling the Nihilist Order seems suspiciously deliberate. Of course, he’s right: What we know, but Cap does not, is that Nomad is working with the shadowy figure whose identity we won’t discover until next issue; nor is Nomad the only henchman, nor even the only henchman to duplicate Cap’s image. Allied with Nomad and Shadowy Leader Guy is the Ameridroid. Yes, the Ameridroid! He’s, well, he’s a Nazi named Lyle who transferred his consciousness into a 20-foot tall robot Captain America. And now he’s unhappy about having lost his humanity and can only get his jollies by trying to kill Captain America. More on him next issue. All you need to know right now: Giant Nazi Captain America Robot Named Lyle. Oh, who was a special effects wizard for the Nazis.
Did I mention that all this action is taking place on a movie lot? Is that all I really needed to say, and then everyone could have written this essay for himself or herself?
So: DeMatteis’s first issue, taken on its own, is merely solid. Well plotted (although a long intro in which Cap and the Falcon get drunk and then decide not to do that anymore is kind of weird) and well scripted, featuring Mike Zeck art that is at this point more serviceable than striking; perhaps he hasn’t quite gotten confident with the characters yet, or perhaps the team of inkers credited might have something to do with the generic flavor of his art this ish. But as we look at it in the context of the whole run in the weeks to come, we can see that the conflict DeMatteis is establishing here isn’t, as it was Englehart’s 1970s Cap stories or in my favorite single comic of all time, different versions of America duking it out. Instead, it’s Captain America versus empty suits, versus superficiality, versus not alternative visions but absence. In fact, the Shadowy Figure (accidentally?) says as much in a therapy/brainwashing session with the Ameridroid:
What is interesting to me there is that he wants to annihilate symbols: Not to change their meanings or to offer new meanings in place of old but to destroy (“squash”) them. And perhaps we shouldn’t parse megalomaniacal rantings too closely, but it is indeed symbols in general that he seems to be ranting against against. Symbols, by definition, refer to things beyond themselves: They require (create?) depth. But he wants to “squash” them, to mash them flat, so that they can only refer to themselves and become not symbols at all but pure surface. Though Captain America is his main antagonist, the villain of the piece seems to be after bigger game indeed, though whether or not he’s completely aware of that is another question.
This is why Nomad is the perfect antagonist for this issue; Cap’s “Nomad” identity originated in a period when he believed that he the things he symbolized, the depth he pointed to, did not truly exist: “I felt I could no longer call myself a symbol of this nation, and walk with my head held high.” He enabled himself to reclaim the mantle of Captain America by changing the referent, by electing not to stand for the nation but, rather, choosing to “stand as the embodiment of this country’s highest ideals.” Depth restored, Nomad banished. So Nomad’s return, especially in the covert service of the Nihilist Order, is a haunting, unsettling reminder of an anxiety that Cap thought he’d dealt with once and for all.
Interesting! DeMatteis caught my attention at this time (predictably) by being something in my eyes much like a successor-writer to the Two Steves, so I was verrrry interested in reading his Cap and his Defenders. The latter hasn’t aged particularly well, I think—possibly because it’s where DeMatteis began to find that he wanted to say things in these comics that they just didn’t really fit, or that he’d prefer not to have them fit…later, and I’m thinking particularly of his Dr. Fate run, these things perhaps got a little more breathing room, and that was better than his Defenders…at least to me it was.
But from what I remember of his Cap run, he didn’t have that same kind of trouble. Oh, yeah, the Ameridroid…that was pretty neat and tidy, as I recall, but I’d forgotten Nomad was “fighting” nihilists, and I didn’t remember that they were much more thoroughgoing nihilists than the bunch Englehart dealt with.
You know, I think DeMatteis was, for me at any rate, the first Marvel writer of whom I thought “this guy gets it” in the same way I tend to think of (for example) Kurt Busiek today—the first writer who obviously shared my likes and dislikes as a fan himself, and then brought those enthusiasms to the same comics that had inspired them in the first place. I could be all wrong about that, of course…but that’s how I remember it. And maybe that’s why I was so often slightly dissatisfied with DeMatteis’ run-ending finales, because at first I felt that this guy was working off the same page as I was, but then instead of staying on it he went off on his own individual writerly obsessions—oh no, he wasn’t Gerber or Englehart after all! But by that time I felt a bit proprietary about Gerber/Englehart “riffing”, so I thought “this guy isn’t as good as I thought he was—he’s doing it wrong, now.”
Well, I was a kid—what did I know?
So, really looking forward to you reintroducing these comics to me. I think I may just read along.
Plok—on the subject of DeMatteis’s endings—did you read this CSBG “urban legends” piece on his planned Cap finale? Good stuff that I hope to deal with in more detail when we get there.
And yeah, read along when you can! (You, too, rest of the internet!) It’d be good to know when I’m missing something, or if you think I’m sometimes looking at things askew, etc . . .
just a quick note of encouragement: i love the dematteis cap run. it was what brought me back to comics after discovering girls. haven’t recently reread the run myself, i greatly look forward to reading what you have to say.
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Wow, this is awesome. I’m so excited to hear that you plan to make this a continuing series! I have never read any of the Captain America run (besides Kyle Baker’s highly-criticized mini, “Truth”) so this is a great opportunity to see what I’ve been missing.
I was really surprised by the unexpected insight of the scene you’ve highlighted: “Symbols are harder to squash than men.” Nice!
It makes sense that a character who takes on the name “America” would have to grapple with this kind of iconic baggage a lot – unlike one called “Orrgo” or “Dragoom” – LOL. Still, it is striking how the Shadowy Figure seems to be alert to the way certain signs derive their power from a simulated reality, an illusion easily manipulated by those who have taken the “red pill.” My knowledge of Baudrillard is very weak (and mostly based on multiple viewings of The Matrix, but still…). And the fact that this whole story takes place on a movie lot is priceless!
I’m going to really enjoy this, and hopefully following along (local comic shops permitting). I always loved Mike Zeck, too—likely prompted by his intermittent work on Secret Wars and the Punisher, a big deal to be as a kid, and most certainly Kraven’s Last Hunt.
It’s his heavy use of inky blacks—look up there at Nomad’s rib cage and around Cap’s knees. They’re just soaked in shadow.
Haven’t read the comix you reference—they came after my childhood infatuation and before my return—but can honestly say you have done that rare thing, written a critical analysis (sorry if that sounds too stuffy) of a narrative that makes enjoyable reading in its own right.
Way to go!
[...] Cap’s 1980s girlfriend Bernie Rosenthal, recapping the highlights of the Stern/Byrne and DeMatteis/Zeck eras, and tying up the various loose ends associated with the supporting cast of that era? That is [...]