Captain America (Post contains spoilers)
Major development for Captain America (for now, anyway). Cap – strangely for such an “iconic” creation – is probably the character who has changed the most, tonally, in my comics reading lifetime. This latest event seems pitched perfectly for Captain A’s development over the last 20 years, ever more serious and brow-furrowed, a character almost audibly creaking under the weight of a decade where there’s been a renewed awareness and debate around what “America” and “American values” are. Not that his comic’s been bad – the writer found some liberation in turning CA’s long-dead former sidekick into a stealth videogame assassin badass, who is clearly more interesting to write than the ‘sentinel of liberty’. Now’s a good time to kill him for a while (only in comics can that phrase be so matter of fact), with readers so invested in and worried about what he stands for.
Hard to remember, though, what he was like in the late 80s, when he has a slightly embarassing and unfashionable character with a low-selling title. Highlights of this era – and they are highlights, his comic was reliably more entertaining and pacy because nobody cared what happened in it – included:
- Captain America turned into a werewolf.
- Captain America turned into a woman after infiltrating a boat full of lady supervillains.
- Captain America fighting Ronald Reagan who had been turned into a giant snake monster.
- Cap in loads of thinly disguised Indiana Jones bites, chasing round having pulpy action adventures.
- Captain America sent psycho by accidentally taking the made-up devil drug ICE.
- Captain America having some kind of treble-sized trip and hallucinating meetings with Paul Revere, Johnny Appleseed and other myth-heroes of America, who give him the opportunity to retire into fictional heaven! (He doesn’t take it as he has yet to experience being turned into a woman)
Remember him that way.
Tom in FT /The Brown Wedge • Comics • 1,204 views
What is quite interestign about the reporting around this is there is a tacit agreement from just about everyone (including the writer and the company) that somewhere along the line he’ll be back. Usually there is a real flip-flop that DEAD means DEAD. Here, we know he’ll be back.
I was thinking about expanding on this very point, specifically WRT goings on in a certain americang telly series right now.
In genre fiction it’s very hard to pull off the ‘no they really are dead and you won’t see them again’. Even harder when it must be obvious that actually they MUST be coming back.
When Alan Moore killed off Swamp Thing (the first time) and he was absent from 2 or 3 issues before re-appearing on an alien planet – how was that received?
Also, I learn from Metro that after killing off Robin, which I remember, they brought him back as an ENEMY of Batman? WTF!?
I think the Robin incident is the straw that mended the dead camel’s back and brought it back to life – that iteration of Robin was one of the few characters EVERYBODY knew would stay dead, so when he came back it created the climate of “oh whatever” which now means even the most minor of characters is assumed to have a return ticket.
The most botched death of recent years has to be the Question, who by all accounts may well stay dead, but hardly anyone even REALISED he’d died, because he’d had 3 separate “death scenes”, and then nobody believed it, because two other chatacters who had died in the same series had just come back.
I read the Swamp Thing stories at the time – I did not believe he was dead but I thought the funeral issue v.moving and dramatic and the end-of-issue “blue swamp thing” sequence is incredibly well done by the artist.
And Captain America has its Robin analog in Bucky: and the death of Bucky was about as canonical a death you got in Marvel. But when he was brought back (by the current writer) everyone seems to have really liked it and thought it added to the character.
Its quite hard to think of a superhero character who HASN’t died at least once.
“Lost” writers have made a specific committment to people staying dead. I am DYING (ho ho) to talk with someone about the telly thing i alluded to up there. :-(
Is it BSG Alan, and where doe sit happen (ie if I see them all in Spain i can talk for hours about it). Of course BSG has a get out of dead free card, at least for its bad guys.
it is, and it’s just happened. “Of course BSG has a get out of dead free card, at least for its bad guys” this is what ramps up the significance of the death in this story, but then the story ramps it up even more to the point that i cannot believe that there is not some come back later on.
Love the issue in question – got very annoyed about all the hoopla, especially Civil Bore: The Sedative (ho ho I have a million of them) which basically pissed all over it, saying ‘oh um hes in critical condition but aliiiive’, which they really didn’t need to do. They could just have done the decent thing and had Ms Marvel shout “YES HE IS DEAD DEAD DEAD AND WHO WILL BE THE NEEEEEW CAPTAIN AMERICA???!?!?!!” but I guess that wasn’t Bendis enough.
I’m hoping for New Cap shenanigans featuring Falcon and Bucky strutting their stuff in the costume with all the EMO that would entail.
The only thing that would have made Cap #25 better, though, is if the title shown dramatically at the end was not “DEATH of the DREAM” but instead simply “OH NOES”.
What’s that uncle of Spiderman called? Has he come back from the dead yet?
It would be interesting to do a detournement of some spandex title where you reveal that the characters are all in hell – destined to fight and non-permanently kill each other for eternity.
Uncle Ben and essentially yes.
Dear Maj. Development:
The “transgender” moment you allude to never really happened. True, Cap and the bounty-hunting Paladin were captured by the so-called “Femizons” of Superia, who _almost_ metamorphed them.
But, they were helped to escape by Black Mamba and the Asp of the Serpent Society!
Cap and Paladin did have to pass themselves off as steroid-enhanced superfemmes by dressing in drag. And, as Thor might say: “Therein, lies the confusion, methinks.”