First, a little context. In Marvel comics, the current Captain America is Sam Wilson, previously known as The Falcon. He’s black, so that decision has attracted its fair share of racist commenters crying about the death of white superheroes and comics being liberal indoctrination tools. The current story in Sam Wilson: Captain America is now pissing off Fox News and all of that ilk. Cap, after taking down Hydra, separates from SHIELD and begins fighting the elements of society he feels are threatening liberty. Namely racists in the form of the Sons of the Serpent - Cobra-esque group victimizing Mexican migrant workers crossing the border.
Fox & Friends, The Washington Times, and conservative think tank The MacIver Institute have all decided this means Captain America is taking on conservatives in general because of his pro-immigration, pro-police reform agenda and by characterizing the right as racists and villains.
“He’s got a new odd enemy,” Fox News host Clayton Morris reported, noting that Captain America was now a black man. “Instead of going against Hydra and the typical Captain America villains, he’s going up against conservatives. That’s his new enemy.”
If the shoe fits and all that, because the comments on Marvel’s Facebook page are hilarious and sad.
Never mind that the Sons of the Serpent date back to the 70s, and that Cap has dealt with political issues since the same period. (I can only imagine how these guys’ minds would be blown by theSecret Empire storyline.)
The thing that’s fascinating about these sorts of outraged!!! people is the way they love to insist that everything was pure and simple Back In The Day when the facts inevitably show it was anything but. How dare reality not conform to my demands?
I can understand the anguish, it’s not so much the thing itself, it’s what it represents - it’s just another tiresome example of the sort of rote liberal conformism that dominates the entertainment industry.
Just like some of the other recent stuff Marvel (comics) has been doing in a desperate attempt to appear cool (female Thor, Pakistani-American Ms. Marvel, etc.), the changes are dull and preachy. Political propaganda is always boring in art, even more so when it’s half-assed, and mere virtue-signalling (“Please like us! Look, look we’re saying the right things!”).
It’s quite symptomatic that at one time (the time of Captain America’s invention) it wasn’t considered at all unusual for someone to be both liberal and blazingly patriotic (as Simon and Kirby both were). Nowadays, liberals tend to be patriotic only just after the success of a Democratic candidate, then return to hate-America-first codswallop, as per usual.
Even in the 60s, a liberal attitude meant that you invented a cool black superhero. But of course the rot was already setting in at that time as well. I remember at the time, apart from a few fairly cool odds and ends like Stan Lee having Spidey say a good word about anti-War protestors he was passing, the various attempts at “relevant” comics writing through the late 60s and 70s were quite dreadful - GL/GA was pretty good, but it was all downhill from there. By the mid 70s, once the New Left had taken hold, that old-fashioned kind of sense-of-fairness-based-liberalism was no longer relevant. It was all based on ideology and saying the right (“politically correct”) thing from then on.
It’s amazing that people praise this sort of stuff, and don’t see how the root cause of it is what they’d presumably hate in the other compartment of their cognitively-dissonant brain - that root cause being Marvel’s brand name greed, its desperate attempt to keep on “breathing life” into superannuated characters who should have lived a natural life and died permanently years ago.
This reminded me of something, so I went to my library, and dug out my pile of US comics. These are from the late 70s - mid 80s I guess, amongst 50 or so comics is one where Ironman fights the 2 Soviet suits in Armor Wars, an Avengers titled “introducing Taskmaster!” and a much loved comic, with its cover missing…
First and last pages of Captain America fighting racists in an issue about racial tensions, and older than most of the people complaining about the new storyline, I bet.
When you think about it, comics were a huge thing in the 60s, when the civil rights movement was in full swing. The idea of comics addressing social issues is not, in even the most remote sense, a new thing.
I suspect that most of the folks bitching actually didn’t read comics.
Isn’t this just an argument for Captain America and most superheroes to stay exactly the same? Because I think arguing they should simply end all their Characters and make new ones is impractical.
Yup. Complaining that the new Captain America storyline is too political is showing how ignorant you are about Captain America’s various incarnations throughout the decades. He’s always been a natural platform for political commentary. People complained when Captain America punched out Hitler. Jack Kirby and Joe Simon talked about how they got hate mail for that cover before the US jumped into the war.
What makes this newest dust-up funny is that the complaining folks are taking umbrage with the fact that their politics are being used as the bad guys’ motivation. “Hey! It’s not fair that you’re making my racism into villainy!”
#BoycottStarWarsVII is infinitely more stupid than the Capt America outrage. It’s a troll campaign but many have taken the bait and now its gained momentum and trending.
Honestly, Twitter really is a force for evil these days.
Boycotting Star Wars over the race issue is dumb for multiple reasons. Whether it started as a troll campaign or not, it’s monumentally dumb. No mater what, it’s no big deal. No one with any sense thinks it’s more than a stupid complaint.
The mind blowing thing about the Captain America issue is that it’s dumb, but there are mainstream news sources that are apparently proud to side with the evil cartoon snake-themed racist villains.
