and Dead Tree Comics

[Büge]

[Thad]

It's Death of Superman with a big ol' added dose of antisemitism. And wildly, massively out of character.

Well, no fucking shit.

Superman dying doesn't mean he's not Superman,

No, but they tried to tell us one of the four other guys who showed up after that might actually be Superman.

And then none of them were.

You see where I'm going with this?

It's more like ... imagine a story where we find out Clark Kent beats Lois Lane.

There's a pretty long history of comic books having superheroes do things that are wildly out of character and then things not being what they seem. I'm not saying the resolution to this is going to be good, but I am saying it's going to be some variation on "that's either not really Cap, he's not responsible for his actions, or he's faking for some reason." And that assuming any other resolution is the equivalent of seeing a Peanuts strip where Lucy is holding the football and assuming it will end some other way besides Charlie Brown flat on his back with wavy lines around his head.

[Mongrel]

I just want to say that a significant portion of our fridge is covered by a set of magnetized prints of covers of Superman's Girlfriend Lois Lane that Buge got somewhere, and seriously they are the funniest goddamn things.

[Thad]

I have that actual comic.

I've never sat down and read it. They're never as good as their covers. I mean, they're pretty much all the result of Carmine Infantino coming up with an amazing cover and then saying "Here, make a comic around this," and the result is exactly what you'd expect from that arrangement.

[Büge]

Actually I got them from TedBelmont in a Dirty Santa one year.

[Büge]

[Lyrai]

Middle of the last page, buge.

[Büge]

I knew I'd seen it before.

I've been hanging out with Mongrel too long.

[Thad]

You know, come to think of it, there totally was a big 1990's event comic where a beloved superhero turned out not to be the person everybody thought he was, and also he hit his wife. It was called the Clone Saga.

It ranks as one of the worst comics storylines of all time, but it didn't really do any permanent damage to Peter Parker's character. Everything was back to normal within a year or so.

It was around the same time that Hal Jordan murdered all the other Green Lanterns and then tried to destroy the sun. That took a lot longer to get fixed than the Clone Saga, but eventually somebody came along and handwaved it away as some kind of mind-control parasite, and nobody really thinks of Hal as the guy who turned evil back in the '90's anymore.

Those two things are pretty much the worst-case scenario for this storyline. (We're not talking about Hank Pym here, a character who's still primarily remembered for hitting his wife mostly because he never really did anything else that was interesting or notable; we're talking about a character with a movie out that's topped $1B internationally over the course of the past four weeks, and also whose name is Captain America.)

But I gotta say, I really don't think this is heading toward "worst-case scenario"; I would be very surprised if the fakeout weren't revealed in the next five issues.

It's not like I have a tremendous amount of faith in Marvel editorial (though I've been a fan of Alonso's since X-Statix), but I find it pretty hard to believe somebody greenlit a story where Captain America turned out to have been a secret Nazi all this time without there being a "Nah, just fuckin' with ya" twist a few issues in.

Again, that's not to say the storyline is good or smart or any of those things; I haven't read the first issue and I certainly haven't read the 83% that hasn't been published yet. For all I know, it could be a legitimately shitty comic.

But anyone who thinks it's going to stick is about as gullible as all those people who thought Peter Parker was never coming back and Dr. Octopus was going to be Spider-Man forever. Or the people who think it's a big seismic change every time a comic restarts at #1. Or the people who thought the New 52 was a permanent change and the old continuity was never coming back. Or, I dunno, I'm sure there's somebody out there on the Internet right now who thinks that Scooby-Doo Apocalypse is the new status quo and we'll never see the classic versions of those characters again.

[Mothra]

Anyone ever do a writeup of the Clone Saga? I remember a ton of "you're not the clone... I'M the clone???" back and forths, then Spider-Man being forced to kill like 40 half-baked clones of himself. There was also a really tall, buff Peter clone named SPYDERCIDE

[patito]

It's not that anyone thinks it's going to stick, it's just that it's particularly offensive given the context of captain america's creation. That's it, that's the whole thing. And all for what, to make some political statement that could have been done some other way.

At least you're not like one of those awful nerds going around saying "Hydra isn't even nazis, so it's fine".

[Thad]

It's not that anyone thinks it's going to stick, it's just that it's particularly offensive given the context of captain america's creation.

And that's another thing: quit acting like you're offended on Simon and Kirby's behalf. Simon and Kirby would not give a fuck about this.

You wanna talk about awful nerds? Awful nerds are the people who said "Oh well, it's Jack Kirby's own fault his family isn't getting any money off the characters he created that are making billions of dollars," shrugged, and kept buying Marvel comics and Marvel movie tickets when Marvel was in the process of suing Jack Kirby's children, but who now have the gall to cloak their distaste for (the first 17% of) a comic-book story as a high-minded defense of Jack Kirby and the ideals he stood for.

[Blossom]

Anyone ever do a writeup of the Clone Saga? I remember a ton of "you're not the clone... I'M the clone???" back and forths, then Spider-Man being forced to kill like 40 half-baked clones of himself. There was also a really tall, buff Peter clone named SPYDERCIDE

Indeed, someone did! In quite a bit of detail and with a lot of inside information.

[patito]

It's not that anyone thinks it's going to stick, it's just that it's particularly offensive given the context of captain america's creation.

And that's another thing: quit acting like you're offended on Simon and Kirby's behalf. Simon and Kirby would not give a fuck about this.

It's not another thing, that's the whole thing. Like I said before, nobody believes it's actually gonna be a permanent change.

[Destynova]

Issue 10 of Hellboy in Hell has arrived and Mike Mignola will be taking a year or so vaction from comics.

[Thad]

Heidi MacDonald's got a pretty great breakdown of the Cap controversy.

Part of it involves a link to Jessica Plummer's On Steve Rogers #1, Antisemitism, and Publicity Stunts, and this response from Jim Simon:



Jim shows up in the comments and adds:

Yes, Heidi, I was and am offended by the story line. Hell, all I heard was Captain America was always a member of Hydra (Nazism) and is now as well. Do I have a right to find offense in that story line? Damn right I do. At the same time I am against death threats or any kind of violence against the writer or anyone associated with the story.

So, to correct what I said earlier: the evidence we've got at this point from people who knew them is that Kirby would not have given a fuck about this but Simon would have been offended.

It was just as shitty for me to put words in Simon's mouth as it is for anyone else to put words in Kirby's, and I apologize.

But I don't withdraw my criticism of fans who only seem to give a fuck about creators' rights when it comes to arguing about current storylines, and not when it comes to how publishers actually treated and continue to treat those creators and their families. One of these things concerns stories and the other concerns real life; vocal fandoms tend to lose perspective on which of those two things is more important.

Tim Hodler at The Comics Journal raises another point, even if he doesn't do it in a very good way:

Not that the people complaining don’t have a certain point; it’s true that the new storyline (Captain America is revealed as a secret member of the evil terrorist organization Hydra) trivializes real-world problems such as white supremacists and fascist paramilitary groups. But that criticism holds for any story featuring Hydra, regardless of whether or not Captain America is a secret member. And once you go that far, pretty much every colorfully costumed supervillain trivializes terroristic violence and every superhero is a travesty on vigilante justice and/or the police state. The genre is inherently messed up, politically speaking.

Captain America has always, on some level, trivialized Nazism. So does any superhero story that features Hitler or Nazis.

Warren Ellis wrote this about Kirby back in '09:

He had killed the soldiers of a foe that we now forget was this vast and surreal thing. Even their flags were the size of office buildings, and bore only an alien-looking, jagged black symbol upon them. It’s worth watching Leni Riefenstahl’s TRIUMPH OF THE WILL, to grasp exactly how strange Nazi Germany was. My daughter’s great-Nana was German, and she’d speak sometimes of those days in Germany, when Hitler arriving in your German town was the cause of utter hysteria, people losing control to the extent of pissing themselves or (also recalled by sf writer Algis Budrys, who also worked on the comics magazine HELP!) having seizures and literally shitting themselves.

Just from the single sheer presence of a man built up by art as much as politics: a man whose very appearance caused body-wrenching awe and fear, this ultimate villain, this enemy of life who had no compunction about stamping out Jacob Kurtzberg’s life along with that of his entire race.

I could have sworn there was a line in there about how it's easy to forget how deeply scary Hitler was because guys like Ellis himself have spent generations mocking him, telling stories that serve to de-fang him and make him laughable. I can't find that line now but I'm pretty sure I read something to that effect by Ellis a few years ago.

(For a bit of a note on the timeline: Kirby, of course, co-created Cap before he served in the war, but came back to him in the 1960's and again in the 1970's. I think you can definitely see a difference in perspective -- Cap's clearly got PTSD when they thaw him out, and spends most of his time mourning Bucky -- but he is, after all, fighting a Nazi scientist who can't take his hood off because it is superglued to his face. A sober rumination on genocide it ain't.)

I think Cap's a great character, and certainly what he symbolizes is inherently a part of who he is. But he's also a four-color superhero, and subject to the same kinds of stories as other four-color superheroes. And those stories are about exaggeration, about simplistic, over-the-top depictions of good and evil. I don't see a story where Cap turning out to be a Hydra agent (or having false memories implanted or whatever this turns out to be) is inherently different from one where Iron Man turns out to be an AIM agent (and I don't see either one of those premises as being nearly as bad as the one where Iron Man turned out to be an alcoholic). YMMV, obviously. I'm not interested in this story, but I'm not offended by it, either; at least, not any more than I am by every other dumb "everything you know is wrong" last-page reveal.

[Thad]

The finale of Rachel Rising highlights the problem of long-running serialized storytelling: we finally find out who killed Rachel, and I don't remember who any of these people are.

There's the string of reveals you get at the resolution of any good murder mystery; details that were dropped over years, pieces falling into place -- and I'm going "Huh? I guess I vaguely remember that. And that. And...no, that's not even ringing any bells."

It's a pretty good argument for waiting for the trades. Maybe one of these days I'll read it through beginning-to-end and it'll all make sense.

Then again, I still haven't gotten around to rereading Planetary all the way through from beginning to end.

[Mongrel]

You missed the scariest, craziest, most way-out thing from that Cap article: this insane and very specific death threat manifesto against Brevoort

Jesus fucking Christ

[Mothra]

Ahhh, classic internet...

[zaratustra]

Captain America has always, on some level, trivialized Nazism. So does any superhero story that features Hitler or Nazis.

Yeah, but they're not going away. WW2 was the last movie-like war in history: the US heroically walks in, defeats its obviously villainous opponent, and everyone is measurably better off. Even the whole nuclear bomb thing is conveniently pushed aside because the US -needs- this narrative as much as it needs oil and guns.