See My Friends: Marvel Comic's "The Heroic Age" TPB and Some Odd Outsider Feelings

1.

It had to be me that wasn't thinking right. For there are so many enjoyable moments in "The Heroic Age" that I just knew I couldn't trust my inexplicably lukewarm response to the collection. How could I feel so unimpressed when I could list a string of sequences in the book which I'm really pleased to have read? There's that laugh-out-loud page-turner in the Bendis/Romita Jr "Avengers" tale, for example, where Kang The Conqueror appears out of nowhere declaiming words of apparently world-changing importance only to be immediately silenced by Thor thumping him across New York City. There's the wonderful conceits of Roxxon Industries mining on Mars, in the Brubaker/Deodato "Secret Avengers" chapter, and of the "freakish nerve-toxin jellyfish that fill the water for a half-mile around the island" that's a super-villain prison in "Top Dog", by the Parker/Walker creative team. There's even a most-welcome two-page vignette from the much-missed team of Cornell and Kirk showing Captain Britain and M-13 on a state visit to Washington.


And it's not as if there are any major and common structural problems with the storytelling as a whole that I could fasten onto to explain my feelings of somehow not having enjoyed these stories which, in fact, I actually had. There's certainly no questionable ethics being peddled in either text or sub-text which might be generating a concerned distance in my mind, or if there are, they've sailed right over my head.

In truth, "The Heroic Age" is so obviously well worth the reading that I just couldn't deny that's so, even as I felt that I ought to be rather forcibly carping on about whatever it was that I was having a problem with.

Whatever that was.


2.

In the end, having done my best to exhaust all the rational explanations for my humourless and po-minded response, I thought I'd better consider, just consider, the possibility that I was responding irrationally to "The Heroic Age". And of course, and somewhat shamefully, that's just where the problem lay.

Now, this isn't particularly easy to write about, because it's both rather ridiculous and rather pathetic, but then, this is a blog that's as much about how judgements are made as it is about the judgements themselves.


And the truth is that reading about the many and various superheroes of "The Heroic Age" has left me feeling, without ever consciously realising the fact, rather left out by it all. I feel as if there's a party going on somewhere off in superhero-land, and that I'm not only uninvited to this bash, but that I'm also going to remain uninvited for the foreseeable future too.

What a rather sad thing to feel, and what an odd response for a man of my age to unknowingly have in response to a comic book. But there we are. I have the strangest sense, part wistful and part quietly shocked, that the characters who were my friends and role models when I was a boy now live a life that's so abstracted from the everyday realities that I experience that they don't seem to represent me, or the child I once was, in any substantial fashion anymore.

Although, it must be said, whoever said that they should anyway?


3.

It's not that the outstanding team of writers and artists who've produced "The Age Of Heroes" are delivering poor or even cynical work. Quite the contrary. There's a deep sense of respect for the history of the characters in these stories just as there's genuine skill reflected in a host of personal moments that the creators have constructed. To take but two examples;

• Mr Bendis has Steve Rogers make sure to publicly credit Tony Stark for the idea that Luke Cage should be given the old Avenger's Mansion. It's a subtle but telling sign that Rogers is trying to mend bridges by paying a deliberately public respect to his colleague. A man less concerned with re-establishing old friendships would have declared to Cage that we "knew you were going to have problems adjusting", but that's not the case with Mr Bendis's take on the reborn Mr Rogers.
• Mr Pak and Mr Van Lente have Amadeus Cho, half-smug and half-fantastically relieved, explain to Hebe that Hercules isn't actually dead, and the explosion of joy expressed in her behaviour provides "Blasphemy Can Be Fun" with a heartwarming and much-needed counterpoint to the apparent ultra-competence and even arrogance which Cho displays elsewhere.
  

Time and time in "The Heroic Age", the evidence is there on the page that the reader isn't being palmed off with shallow characterisation, poor scripting or a lack of respect for the history of the MU as a whole.

But for all of that, there very much is a sense in which the superheroes of "The Heroic Age" aren't my superheroes any more.


4.

In particular, there's one single page in "Possession", the New Avengers tale by Mr Bendis and Mr Immonen, which leaves me feeling strangely irritated. It's one which shows Luke Cage and Wolverine confronting Victoria Hand in an attempt to deduce whether she'll be an asset to their team or not. And , speaking as objectively as I can, it's a nicely judged scene, which emphasises the essential decency of Cage's character as well as Wolverine's willingness to play second fiddle to a leader he admires, and Mr Bendis never makes the mistake of having Hand appear too penitent and sentimentally vulnerable.

And that's all to the credit of the creative team.


But it's the setting and tone of the scene which alienates me. Because Luke Cage and Wolverine have always been outsiders to me, have always represented individuals who have never belonged in society, and who've never wanted to either if it meant their compromising in the least. And here they are, and they're not heroic outsiders anymore, but unabashed authority figures. Luke Cage actually owns the Avengers Mansion now! And for all that I'm not wanting Power Man to be sleeping over a clapped-out movie theatre and hustling for jobs in Times Square anymore, it seems jarring and rather uncomfortable to see him portrayed as one of the officer class instead, and a propertied one too.


And perhaps if Cage were the only hero to rise so far up in the status quo of the MU, of course, then that would be fine. But Marvel's Heroic Age has raised up all of its characters on show in the 340 pages of this collection into positions of power if not absolute respect, separated them from the everyday world where ordinary, typical folks exist, and given them lives of privilege so far removed from mine that I can't relate to them as I once did.

For the long process by which superheroes comics have become more and more concerned with superpowered folks in costumes and less and less with the society those women and men come from has now been topped off by the creation of a social class of superheroes helping to police and indeed rule the USA.


After all, there's Luke and Logan and Victoria, and they're discussing serious matters of honour and trust, but they're doing so on the terraced roof of Avengers Mansion, in the sun, tellingly high above and far away from the streets where ordinary folks live, and Victoria is sipping tea in her fashionable sunglasses, fulfilling the state's commission given to them by the President's superhuman head of national security, and my emotions are saying to me that these comfortable and exalted folks wouldn't know me and my life if my car crashed in front of them, beyond dragging me out of the wreck and checking if I were dying or not.

For once, a superhero could be anyone at all living any kind of everyday existence you might care to mention. That lone costumed crime-fighter could in fact be that other bullied kid in school, or the crippled doctor with the sunniest disposition who was always keen to help, or that carnival show-off who secretly longed to do something substantial and responsible with their life. Those superheroes of a different era didn't just represent their readers as characters in their stories; they were also, to a greater or lesser degree, living the same life as their readers too.


5.

But every single superhero in "The Heroic Age" is shown living a life that has no more contact with what we might regard as a typical world than I have with the rich, the powerful and adored of my world. Instead, I find myself reading about folks who seem to mix with no-one but their own costumed kind, as has long been a fact, and yet who also occupy situations of considerable wealth and power. This take on Captain America, for example, doesn't talk of taking direction from President Obama so much as of how he told his commander-in-chief "that the world needs what it always needs. Heroes." I always loved Steve Rogers because he was a lost soul, a man who was chosen to serve and who did so loyally, but who was no more special than you or I and who suffered endless depression and alienation as he tried to serve his nation without bowing to its powerful sectional interests. Now Rogers has "an entire country to worry about" and places his friends in positions of incredible power and responsibility without any mechanisms that I could see to ensure that they behave themselves in an appropriate manner.


It just seems that if Steve Rogers knows you, then Steve Rogers and no-one will decide for America where you serve, and he'll give you the keys to power of one kind or another without oversight or evaluation. For the Avengers are now being led effectively by an individual of huge power and influence in the American state, and each of them is, regardless of what it looks like, working for the nation, or at least Steve Roger's take on what the USA needs.

And even for those who exist outside of the charmed circles of the Avengers, such as the Agents Of Atlas, their lives are lived entirely surrounded by super-powered characters in fantastical environments. The Agents Of ATLAS, for example, can't have even sat in a corner coffee-shop for long enough to notice the bloke bringing over the cups and the woman in the back office trying to balance her sums. They tear around the world through their underground passages and their interdimensional portals and they seem to me, as do the rest of the heroes on show in these pages, to have nothing to do with the people they supposedly exist to protect and serve.


6.

Marvel Comics always seemed to me to be concerned with stories of folks who found it impossible, by chance or design or a mixture of the two, to either rule or serve the powerful of this world and those beyond it. Even Prince Thor was continually being banished from Asgard for the crime of trying to think for himself and act according to his conscience.

But now Marvel Comics seem to be about a power elite, who for all their noble sacrifices and willingness to serve, are beginning to constitute a class utterly separate from the typical woman and man of the MU. It's not just that these costume-wearing folks share their life in the company of others like them, but that they're now assuming positions of authority within the state too.


And the worrying fact that the lives of these superheroes are now so closeted from the everyday world is reflected in every story but one in this generous collection of 340 pages (*1). The massed ranks of the characters in Avengers Academy, for example, exist in a perfect bubble of a superhero school run by old Avengers, despite the fact that the series is sold on the basis of being about teenagers learning to use their powers. Well, it is, but they're not everyday kids from the moment they enter that super-costumes-only world, even if they were before.


Indeed, we only see the various super-folks of The Heroic Age existing quietly in what might be regarded as the "real" world in four scenes, wherein;

• the rather beautiful Maddy is unconvincingly teased by those damn ordinary and uncaring boys for not being attractive enough. After that, Maddy's freed from living with the likes of folks like that and settled in Dr Pym's lab and her proper life can begin.
• the out-of-costume 3-D man soaks up the highlife in a club and discusses being in a reality TV show about superheroes, before he sets out to join the community of ATLAS,
• Brother Voodoo tries to keep his date happy while forever rushing out of a restaurant to save reality from one menace or another.
• Hawkeye drops in, from his flying bike, to chat with his ex-wife's mother
  

Elsewhere, Amadeus Cho has his own endlessly-wealthy corporation with his own skyscraper. Atlas has its own nation. Hawkeye and Mockingbird, strangely positioned almost as "normal" folks with their flying bikes and hyper-fighting skills, slum it with the World Counterterrorism Agency. Even the super-baddies of The Thunderbolts have their own special comic-book base with their own super-powered co-stars.

Everyone's super-powered. Everyone lives in fantastic circumstances. Everyone's free of the constraints of the typical.


For I can't see a single "ordinary" person or even much of "everyday" life at all in these pages, unless we count Jameson's chauffeur-driven existence as Mayor passing for that. Even Spider-Man, the reader's traditional and uncomfortable representative in the halls of the great and mighty is now firmly established in a life of comradeship and relative wealth. For whatever problems he has in his own titles, we can here see Peter Parker tucking into a fine meal with his fellow New Avengers in a very posh and formal dining room, and we know that no matter how tough life is for Peter these days, it's not really tough at all. There's always a room and a meal, and a very big room and a very tasty meal at that, for him at the Mansion.

*1:- That's a story by Mr Busiek and Mr Djurdjevie where J Jonah Jameson observes a crowd of New Yorkers welcoming back the superheroes with the same fervour that so many of them showed in opposition to Cap's forces in "Civil War". I'll be writing soon on the fact that groups of typical individuals in the superhero universes seem to function more as mobs than citizens, and perhaps the warmhearted tale by Mr Busiek here might be discussed there.


7.

There's a very real sense in which the superheroes of the Marvel Universe now constitute a social class. They're not a disparate collection of individuals all carrying their own private inadequacies and limitations through life anymore. They're a super-powered cadre, united together in the good spirits of The Heroic Age and separated from and standing in judgment of the society that they came from. Everyone from the Valkyrie to the Youngest of the Young Avengers has a free ticket to power and privilege. Nobody need worry about status or the rent, or friends or support, or purpose.

And promotion into this elite is certainly not a matter of any Meritocratic promotion. The myth that we're given is that Captain America and Iron Man rise to the top of the state because of their personal qualities, and that they deserve to rule us and we're all better for the fact. But those "personal qualities" which allow Rogers and before him Stark to rise to political power are ones which come to the attention of the powers-that-be because of those chance variables of experimentation, mutation and super-powered experience which mark out the superhero from the common herd. Put simply, the accidental business of becoming a superhero is now a great big foot in the door where wealth, status and power is concerned.


Lord knows how Steve Rogers, a previously often taciturn man given to such misery, willfulness and impulsivity that he caused a super-powered war in the Marvel Universe, managed to pass the Psych evaluation required to OK him as fit-for-purpose where the wielding of such astonishing power over America's National Security is concerned. For all his skills, I just can't believe he deserves to be in such a post, or that he deserves to be where he is any more than a non-powered woman or man who's spent their lives learning the ropes of what it is to be a servant of the state might. Yet, he's a superhero, so he must be worthy of such power, despite all he's struggled with and all he's done before, and that, it appears, is that.

For superheroes no longer have to fear being caught in the supermarket storeroom changing into their long-johns, or of having no-one to call upon when they're trapped in Manhattan and there's no nightbus home to the suburbs. They constitute an elite now, socially and politically as well as in terms of Kirby krackles and lovely tight costumes.

Or so it feels, and those precious moments, such as when Peter Parker couldn't fight crime because his spider-suit had shrunk in the wash, or Wolverine felt he lacked a sense of belonging because he kept killing people without legal sanction, are now gone.


9.

Wearing a superhero's costume and wading into action while wearing it could once be seen as a symbol of those rare and wonderful moments when something remarkable could be achieved by the ordinary individual in their mundane lives. Matt Murdock could on occasion rise above the limitations of his life as a lawyer and achieve something through bravery and self-sacrifice which was made all the more special by the fact that he'd wake up the next day and go to work again as typical people do. And that mundane world grounded the superhero, made each appearance out in the streets fighting super-villains seem all the more remarkable by contrast with the world their alter-egos were usually seen in. But if there is no mundane world, then the superhero ceases to stand for "us", the typical person, and functions instead as a member of at best a community of our superiors or at worst an army of our betters. Indeed, the superhero stops being a superhero at all in those circumstances and becomes a super-powered officer or private, the costumes which used to mark them out temporarily from everyday folks now marking them in as members of a privileged class.


And accessing that class is tough, I'd imagine, in the MU. An ordinary person could work all their life and never become as competent as the least powerful superhero, such as Mockingbird or Hawkeye. Waiting for the luck of a benign radioactive contamination or a chance and productive natural mutation must be all most folks on the MU can aspire to. And while the lucky, if noble and hard-working, superheroes start to dominate key positions of authority in the state or of central importance to it, the children of superheroes are nearly always by the luck of their birth raised up into the privileged superhero class. Look at the Young Avengers, for example, a cast of teenaged women and men who's adventures I thoroughly enjoyed, but who constitute the newest generation of a lucky aristocracy of power.

And as America struggles through one challenging economic crisis after enough, the Avengers have their rooftop parties and discuss who gets the Mansion. What we're seeing in the pages of "The Age Of Heroes" is the latest consolidation of social advantage by an elite group of costumed and superpowered individuals forming themselves into what is beginning to look, as I said above, like a class. They have wealth, power and status. They control vital areas of the state's business. Access to their ranks is often achieved by following their own customs and adhering to their professional and independent judgments, while the superhero's children have a far, far greater chance of inheriting the mantle of advantage than the children of anybody else.


10.

I know that elsewhere in the Marvel Universe, there's still a mass of hard luck stories, but there's not that many characters anymore who are truly outsiders. Even Bruce Banner now his grand laboratories. And I know the impression of happy times and group action is something of an illusion created by the optimistic set-up of The Heroic Age, but beyond that illusion is a fact; the Marvel Universe is becoming a place that's as unfriendly in many ways for the reader who's something of an outsider, or feels so, as it was once welcoming. What was once a home for losers and free thinkers, misfits and non-conformists, is now the arena in which winners win more, and more, and then win again, and then talk about winning in their various grand headquarters amongst their many superpowered friends and allies.


And what would a Peter Parker bitten by that radioactive spider for the first time do when his new powers developed during this Heroic Age? No doubt he'd set himself off without concern or hesitation to see the Avengers, and perhaps, if he didn't go straight into one of their first teams, he'd get a room in one of the rather more pleasant wings of the Avengers Academy. He'd never have needed to have been the character that so many of us associated with because he didn't tend to win, because he didn't belong, and because he had nowhere to go for help when trouble came. In fact, who needs to be an outsider at all in this superhero-filled, typical-individual-free Marvel universe of The Heroic Age, except for all of those losers, those misfits, who can't leap buildings at a single bound or scurry up the sides of them really quickly?

It's a fine collection, The Heroic Age, of high-quality stories produced by extremely-able creators. But I can't see my fellow outsiders in that universe anymore, whether here or over in the X-Men's section of the MU, as we've discussed here in a different context recently. And given that even the supposed outsiders of ATLAS own a nation of sorts and live almost exclusively in their own rarified company, where can those who feel themselves at times to be powerless go to see themselves represented in today's mainstream Marvel books? For wherever the likes of me live and work in the MU now, they're not on the roof of the Avengers Mansion drinking tea with the not-always charming Victoria Hand.


11.

Please don't get me wrong. "The Heroic Age" is an undoubtedly worthwhile collection. I really would recommend it to you, and sincerly too, for all that I believe that the seperation of the superhero from the mundane is, and always has been, a very bad idea.

It's just I thought I was looking at one thing, and I was looking at another, and that's why I was having problems. When the "Avengers" and "Secret Avengers" storylines are collected, for example, I'll be reviewing them here in the light of what they are rather than for what they're not, for what's actually on the page rather than for what I expected, without realising it, to see there.


.

More about →

I Know Nothing No: 6: Captain America 610 (Too Few Notes, Mozart!)

In which the blogger continues the tradition of his "I Know Nothing" pieces by attempting to make sense of the conclusion to the recent "No Escape" serial in "Captain America" without having read the first four parts beforehand.

1.

Comic books are, we're constantly told, as if we might otherwise forget, a visual medium, and it certainly can't be denied that there's a great deal to be said for that point of view. After all, yes, we do indeed look at comic books, and, yes, they certainly do present images to their readers.But we seem as an age to be in danger of missing the fact that the word "image" can be applied to words as well as pictures, and that the interaction between the two can achieve some remarkable effects that neither on their own can create.

We know this, of course, and yet somehow we also seem to be quite forgetting it too.


But then, it won't have escaped your notice that for a long time now, a great number of the writers in the mainstream of superhero comics have seemed hellbent on avoiding as many of those pesky words as they can in their scripts. Writers such as Don McGregor and Chris Claremont once seemed set on creating great baroque follies of words on the pages they wrote, regardless of the brain-numbing and pace-slowing effect of their more extreme grotesqueries. Now, as with all puritan reactions to periods of perceived excess, the supposedly-virtuous absence of the thought balloon and the narrative caption has become an item of apparently unthinking dogma. Less, it seems, is somehow more, and even less than that a very good idea indeed.

The simple fact that an absence of wordiness might speed up the reading experience seems to have somewhere along the line become inseparable from a sense that storytelling excellence is synonymous with an incredibly restrained use of text. It's as if the very awareness that words might obscure the worth of the art they're placed over has transmuted into a fundamentalist faith that demands that not only must words be avoided wherever possible, but that they must be abstained from even where a story suffers gravely from their absence.
2.

One of the more unfortunate consequences of the fashion for the textually-unadorned panel can be seen at work in Ed Brubraker and Jackson Guice's "No Escape: Conclusion" in Captain America 610, where a very traditional and rather sweetly absurd plot has been pressed into service and presented using the very modern traditions of wordilessness (*1). The result of this is the incoherence that often threatens when a rickety if charming set of Silver-Age premises are put to work without cloaking them in a great deal of explanation, colour and, indeed, misdirection. For to cut the writer's contribution beyond the adaption of an age-old genre plot to the barest bones of dialogue and a tiny measure of narration is to reveal the rather silly basic traditions of the superhero narrative, many of which are well to the fore in "No Escape". For example, Mr Brubaker and Mr Guice here present their readers with the following genre tropes from what must be classical antiquity;

• the super-villain with the ridiculously complex and impossible-to-grasp plan to destroy a superhero. (What exactly is Zemo trying to do? Why does he keep changing his explanations of what his purpose is?)
  
• the hero who's captured, made helpless and then set free again, twice, for no apparent good reason. (Why didn't Zemo put Barnes on the missile at the beginning of issue 610 rather than freeing him so that the two could fight again?)
  
• the villain who's been defeated and then permitted to get up and strike back at the protagonist for no good reason except that it's fun to see folks fighting. (Why did Barnes not make sure that his enemy wasn't capable of hurting him before he released his grip? He was enraged, but surely not insane.)
  
• the secret hideout and death-trap which must have cost a fortune in time and money, and which serves no good purpose except that it looks spectacular. (Surely Zemo never expected Steve Rogers not to check that island out? Surely anywhere with a space of open water over which a missile might be launched could have done?)

• the friends who can't get to their comrade's side quite in time. (Aren't there European superheroes that can be called in? Aren't there hyper-sonic jets, teleporters and, er, entire NATO armies available at the other end of a mobile?)
  
• a spectacularly improbable death trap matched to a typical "I'll-reveal-all" speech by the big bad baddie,
  
• the protagonist who walks into a trap knowing it's a trap, knowing his enemy has the high ground and knowing that the low ground is swarming with costumed underlings,
• and so on, and, indeed, so on and on ....
  

To present these traditions so unadorned with the details and distractions of a greater measure of text is to draw attention to their over-familiarity and illogic, and sadly that's what Captain America 610 does. The wearily over-familar plot has been here stripped down to a few spectacular set-pieces which are then rushed through as if the audience might be alienated if they were asked to stop and notice what's actually going on, an irony, of course, since those few ill-explained set-pieces throw the reader out of the story anyway.

*1:- Me, I like words so much I even make them up. "Wordilessness" as a term makes me smile.


But if Mr Brubaker had perceived it to be appropriate to add a greater measure of detail to his sparse dialogue and even sparser captions, he might have at the very least have explained away the inconsistencies and incoherences of the tale, and beyond that, might have added such extra worth to the story that the reader would have readily forgiven the tales pulp-era carelessnesses in return for some authorial invention and audacity.

After all, Marvel's history is full of pathetic death-traps and inane super-villains turned to a spectacularly good use through an author seeking to add rather than to detract from the information being given to the audience. This reader's mind turns to Dr Doom in Lee and Kirby's Fantastic Four 87, for example, wherein the supervillain choose to accept defeat rather than watch his precious art collection burn, and the suicide of the manically-depressed Scorpio in Kraft and Giffen's Defenders 50, the under-achieving antagonist dying without ever realising that the LMD Nick Fury who'd been his final companion would touchingly regret his passing.

The basic stories of superhero conflict we've read a thousand times, but it's the little inventive details piled up one upon the other by the most daring of comic book writers which have so often marked out the difference between the run-of-the-mill punch-ups and the truly memorable affairs.


3.

Those old well-worn plots require a great deal of words, of plot and story and invention, to make them work in this day and age, and perhaps it's time that we all accepted that the new tradition of "illustrated screenplays" requires writers to come up with a different type of superhero story to match their relatively new methods. For those hoary old stories demand that a great deal of informing and entertaining material is woven into them to hide their weaknesses and over-familiarity, and beautiful art alone can't ever paper over all their stupidities and redundancies. Simply abstracting the most spectacular and emotional scenes from those pulp-era plots and focusing on them as if those moments were in themselves a satisfyingly complete story just means that their absurdities are isolated in plain view without the essential connecting-tissue of words being present to hold everything together. Mr Guice's art on "No Escape" is undeniably able, but it can't in itself explain away the oddities and the irrationalities of the story, or add unexpectedly surprising twists to a exceptionally predictable tale, and it certainly can't communicate to the reader the fact that plot and spectacle are just the beginning of the comic book reading experience, rather than the be all and end all of it.

Or: if we're going to be sparse, we need to be producing stories which don't require by their very nature a great deal of explaining and buttressing with the very same unfashionable and inconveniently-demanding words that are more and more becoming culturally verboten in the pages of the superhero comic-book.


4.

I. The problems associated with presenting old-fashioned plots and characters without an old-fashioned measure of thought balloons, speech bubbles and narrative captions can perhaps be best illustrated by examining Baron Zemo's various pronouncements in "No Escape: Conclusion" concerning the purpose of his nefarious master-plan. Because there are so many inconsistencies on display in this one single script where Zemo is concerned that the reader is left completely lost as to what the super-villain in the purple-and-gold helmet thought he was up to. Indeed, the only rational conclusion to draw after reading this conclusion is that Zemo is not only mad, but mad in quite different ways on quite different pages, and that his insanity is such that he never realised there was any discontinuity between his state of mind in one scene and that in another. A shame, therefore, that there was so little space given in the story to allowing Zemo to express himself, internally or in conversation, so that those apparent inconsistencies might have been ironed out, or explained as reflecting his state of mind, or even simply obscured by some extra measure of apparent depth being added to a rather lackadaisical story.

II. The introduction to "No Escape" presents a straight-forward motivation for Zemo, explaining that he "recently discovered that his father failed to kill Bucky in World War Two", and that he's now determined "to destroy Bucky's life". Assuming that these two statements follow straight on one from the other in terms of their meaning, the reader might therefore quite understandably expect to be soon reading a comic book where the antagonist is set on taking revenge in his father's name upon the new Captain America.


Yet the story itself soon starts to offer up confusing and even contradictory explanations for the younger Zemo's actions in kidnapping and then freeing Bucky Barnes, all of them delivered in sparse word balloons originating from the bad Baron's mouth, who declares in turn that he's;

• testing Barnes to see if Bucky is a sane man in control of his decision-making powers (page 5)
  
• not motivated in any way by his father's experiences with Captain America and Bucky in World War II, despite what the introduction declared. (page 8)
• already in possession of a precise knowledge of what sort of person Barnes is, meaning that he surely wouldn't need to be testing him, of course, and that he's actually designed the whole "island trap" as a means to show the new Captain America that he's (a) no better than anyone else (?), (b) unworthy of being Captain America, and (c) guilty of the crimes committed with his body while brainwashed by the Soviet and Russian authorities. (page 9)

• aware that Barnes is also lying to himself about his true nature too, a situation that Zemo also seems to feel responsible for teaching Barnes about, (page 13)
• actually working to get the new Captain to face up to his guilt and his need to engage more pro-actively with his own destiny, (page 15) a procedure which strangely involves chaining Barnes to a weapon of mass destruction before firing it off over the English Channel with a thirty-second fuse ticking away on board.
  

III. But the problem is that we never discover which of the above, in isolation or combination with each other, are Zemo's true motivations. All we're left with are a series of possible explanations of the Baron's purpose which in truth short-circuit each other. Why, for example, did Zemo create a death trap for a man he apparently wanted to destroy if that death trap was one that could be successfully escaped? And if Zemo didn't want Barnes "destroyed", then why has this story been telling us that he did? Had the Baron been deluding himself, perhaps, even as he'd been rebuilding obsolete World War II super-weapons? Or is Zemo truly a vengeful super-villain, or perhaps a one-man kangaroo court, or an unorthodox shrink bent on using violence and more violence to somehow help his client come to terms with his own demons?

We're never told, and so we can't say, and without that grasp of the Baron's purpose, there's no possibility of catharsis at the story's end, because there's no chance of grasping what the whole great brawl across two continents was about in the first place. For not only haven't we been given the information that we need to make sense of this tale in its own terms, but we've also been ladened down with contradictory data that short-circuits any logical model of psychological consistency that might be constructed for the Baron and his designs.

Which means, of course, that this is a story which not only hasn't explained itself, but which actually has logic-bombs seeded along its spine ready to blow up in the face of anyone dodging back through the confusing if thin narrative to make sense of it all. For though there obviously is a sequence of intense scenes on display in "Captain America" 610, those scenes aren't knitted together with the care and attention to detail which a more "wordily" literate tradition would demand, and so the whole tale carries with it a strong sense of the dreaded hyper-reality, of a media product that relies on presenting the reader with a smorgasbord of previously-familiar fare abstracted from its original context and delivered as a series of eye-catching moments rather than as a more traditionally-coherent story.

In truth, there are holes in this thing all over the place.


5.

I. And so much of the problem seems to a significant degree to lie in the fact that Mr Brubaker is leaving Mr Guice's art to carry far too much of the meaning of the story. Page 21 of "No Escape; Conclusion", for example, carries just 6 words on it, and yet that page is in truth the climax of the five-issue long tale. In it, Bucky Barnes swims back across the Channel to the island, copes with swirling tides, climbs a cliff, runs over fields and then discovers that Zemo has left his shield and costume for him as, presumably, a reward for his choosing to survive. Are these panels showing Captain America overcoming great natural distances and challenges symbols of Mr Barnes' state of mind, or do they perhaps encapsulate his life's progress up until this point?

After all, if they don't mean anything at all in a precise fashion, then I'm baffled by what they're doing there, because they occupy space which might otherwise have been used to help the reader make more sense of, and gain more value from, this rather confusing story.


II. Or perhaps that sea-scape and the beach and the cliff and the field mean nothing at all. After all, without any kind of text being present, we can't know one way or another. For, obviously, there's a limit to what pictures can do where storytelling is concerned without the context and detail that words inform them with.

And yet how very helpful it would have been, and perhaps both moving and fascinating too, to actually be told, to a greater or lesser degree, what Barnes was thinking and feeling about his ordeal. After all, he's just been put through a pantomime repeat of an event which was to all intents and purposes a replica of his own "death" in 1945. Certainly, the reader who's just witnessed this might feel a touch entitled to be given some small hint as to what the meaning of this was to Barnes himself. Is he too exhausted to care, or does he feel quietly jubilant at his own survival? Does he regard Zemo as a caring mental health professional with a strange set of alternatives to a black leather couch in his secret hideout? Is Barnes furious? Did he want vengeance when he saw the costume and shield there, as if they'd been a gift that Zemo thought he'd rightly held in his possession and could distribute as he saw fit?

Or does Barnes perhaps thinks that he's left the gas on across the ocean at home, or that the cat's been left unfed?


Because we're never told nor precisely shown, and so, in addition to never knowing why events have occurred as they have, we can't say what their impact has been either. Yes, Barnes chose to free himself from the flying bomb, but it's hard to see that as a marker of any kind of personal development in the terms we've been given in this story. After all, he was fighting hard at the beginning of the tale, and at every point from then onwards too, so it'd be odd if he hadn't chosen to fight on at the tale's conclusion as the fuse burnt down over the English Channel.

And so, we have a story where the villain's motivation is undefinable, the heroes response undetectable, and the purpose of the whole tale beyond understanding. "Zemo was right.." we're told Bucky thinks as he's flying across the waters on a great weapon of mass destruction, "I've not earned this life ... yet.", and for all that sounds informing, it doesn't truly make much sense at all.

For what does it actually mean? Is Zemo now admired as a kind and learned authority by Barnes, or what? Did Barnes stumble upon self-knowledge because of the Baron, or despite him?

Well, I don't know, and the text won't tell you either, if all you have is this single issue.

The answers just aren't there, though you'd swear they must be, because Captain America 610 looks like a traditional comic, and it contains so many moments that have traditionally been found in superhero books, but those moments haven't been strung around a coherent story. Oh, there's drama, and emnity, suspense and mystery, and explosive set-pieces and a great deal of teeth-gnashing and angst too, but it's not a story, or even an effective conclusion to one, and so it relies on the reader pretending that it is one in order to make it work as entertaining fiction should.


6.

We're always told to laugh at the Emperor Joseph II and his apparently ignorant proclamation to Mozart that "The Marriage Of Figaro" had "Too many notes". But a modern equivalent of such an out-of-step critical heresy might be to suggest that the opposite problem has become a given today where superhero comic books are concerned; there simply are too few words, and too much silence.

And, as a consequence, so many of the most gifted of today's writers stray regularly into producing thin scripts based on over-familiar plots which contain small clusters of supposedly spectacular events and which, in their predictability and sparseness, lack the richness and invention that much of the best of the genre previously displayed.


Coming soon: a review of "The Only Good Dalek", the new graphic novel from the BBC by Justin Richards and Mike Collins, and, yes, of course they say "Exterminate!"

.

More about →

On "Captain America: Reborn!" by Ed Brubaker & Bryan Hitch - Part 3 of 3!

1. "It Is Great Cleverness To Know When To Conceal One's Cleverness."

I like clever, I really do, but the type of clever in comic books I tend to notice on first reading is the sort of clever which shouts about itself alot. It may take me a while, but I'll probably get that that masked crusader story-line is referencing Shakespeare, or that there's a touch of Wagner in that sword'n'sorcery barbarian-fest. And that'll be because there's a real big sort-of-cleverness-here flag flying in full view over those stories, helping me out, helping me spot where "x" marks the cleverness.

But then there's really clever, clever that hides its' own cleverness in plain sight, clever that doesn't even care if sombody never notices how really clever it is, and I think that Ed Brubaker and Bryan Hitch's "Captain America: Reborn" is very possibly that sort of clever.


2. "We Think We're In The Present, But We Aren't. The Present That We Know Is Only A Movie Of The Past."

I. My first response to "Captain America: Reborn" was, as I've already touched upon, lukewarm. It seemed a perfectly competent run of issues, though nothing particularly special. In an ideal world, this would mark the plimsoll line of superhero comic books: nothing below this standard would ever be permitted, and everyone setting sail in a book like this in future could feel secure that the journey would be safe and worthwhile. But it did seem, all the same, to be terribly familiar. Indeed, the plot was so well-worn, the characters so predictable, the action so by-the-numbers, that I almost feared to look too hard at the pages in case I could see through the more threadbare elements on the panels before me.

I had, of course, so missed the point.

And I continued to miss the point as I started to note the homages to previous Captain America artists that Bryan Hitch had so fondly peppered throughout the story. For example, isn't that a perfect evocation of a Simon/Kirby Cap at 2:2:1/2:3:1, that hunched, compact figure with the stretched running legs, one thrown far back behind the body and one hauled up before it, just as in the very first Captain America story from 1941? And that has to be a tip of the hat to a great solid Dan Jurgens' Cap at 6:17, surely? Oh, look, Neal Adams-ness in the Kree/Skrull War scenes (3:20:3), Steranko-isms in the Rick Jones and Hydra brawl (4:5:1), and - be still my 12 year-old heart - that must to be a strangely elongated, appropriately and oddly foreshortened Frank Robbins riff in the Masterman punchup. (1:6:1.) The sheer love for Captain America borne by Mr Hitch must be exceptional. (*1)

But exceptional reverence for a comic book character doesn't necessarily produce work which will in itself inspire reverence. All this re-heating of previous achievements just seemed to me to be more evidence that this was warmed-over greatest hits, stitched together into a mundane and functional plot which efficiently took Captain America from (a) assassinated hero at the beginning to (b) prospective modern super-spy at the end. It was, I couldn't stop myself believing, the sort of story which is so often advertised as a celebration and so often revealed as an effective cut'n'paste job.

We're walking over the same hallowed ground time and time again, I thought, and it's not even as if we've reached an audacious post-modern synthesis of the material a-la-Morrison just to make things a little bit more different. No. This is just the same super-heroes hitting the same super-villains in exactly the same places in precisely the same ways as so many times before, even down to Captain America throwing off the Red Skull's mental control simply because he's Captain America and he can think in a more patriotically focused sense than anybody else.

Oh, look, there's an Avengers's Quinjet crashing yet again with all the inevitability of a SHIELD helicarrier plunging to the ground, though Quinjet's strangely often seem to leave more damage behind them. And there's the Avengers themselves, and a showdown before the Lincoln Memorial, and a visit to a what-if-the-Nazis-conquered-America-world, and, taken in sum total, it seemed like the laziest, if albeit fond, collection of Captain America cliches that could be imagined.

And just as Mr Hitch was riffing off the styles of previous artists on the strip, so Mr Brubaker seemed to be doing so similarly as a writer, even down to the classic Marvel dialogue given to second-level characters in the story. Consider, for example, how utterly un-Brubaker-like the following speech bubble is in its' traditional-evil-super-villain tone from Arnin Zola;

"Once I crack the Vision's security codes, the secrets of the Avengers will be mine."


II. But it was at that exact point that the proverbial penny dropped, and even I realised that for a supposedly lazy grab-bag of Captain America's most popular and commonly-recycled story-elements, this was a remarkably careful and well-researched one. It simply couldn't have been that Mr Brubaker's mind was so full of Cap's history that he decided without a great deal of preparation and care to represent so much of Captain America's past with that much precision and purpose. For that presumes that Mr Brubaker was behaving out of character as a writer, throwing off a piece of work which stands apart and distinct from his usual careful plotting and delieberate scripting. No, that much care and rigor in discussing Captain America's past could never have been generated by chance or even by a sloppy intention to take the easy route to a commercial success.

Indeed, could it really be chance that Mr Brubaker just happened to touch base with, for example, every situation which we've been discussing here that possesses a considerable disadvantage for how Captain America is used and read as a superhero in the modern MU?

And that realisation left only one conclusion possible about the nature of "Captain America:Reborn", and that is that this really is Captain America REBORN, that this is more than the return of Steve Rogers to the modern-day MU again. This is more than the temporary transference of the concentric circles of the shield to one Bucky Barnes for awhile. This is, at least for a good period of time, and for longer no doubt if Marvel decides to run with it, a complete reboot of the franchise on a fundamental level. "Reborn", it seems to me, is a deliberate sealing off of the flaws in plot and theme which have trapped Cap as both a middle-ranking public sort-of-success as a superhero, and as a dubious political icon in much of the material he's appeared in, while also opening up new and more productive avenues for the development of the franchise.

Or, to put it another way: what if this wasn't yet another nostalgic tour of the familiar, but a fond and long lasting and quite deliberate goodbye to it? What if Captain America wasn't lost in time in the narrative simply as a plot-point, but rather to ironically show how Mr Brubaker knows that Cap has been forever looking backwards into his own past, re-experiencing the same themes with the same villains, forever saving the world now simply by the virtue of the fact that he saved the world back then from the forces of fascism?

(*1) Somebody who knows their stuff must have listed these homages somewhere. Can anybody point out such a splendid reference? Or have I imagined homage where no such homage exists?


3. "For Everything You Have Missed, You Have Gained Something Else .. "

What if the point of "Reborn" was, therefore, in addition to creating a popular series and a suitable celebration of Cap's past, to change his life completely, to revisit certain familiar scenes and themes for one final time before leaving them utterly, if not permanently, behind. Because, rather like a sports' fan who knows the result of a game that's been taped for them and therefore watches it with a somewhat distracted involvement and a smaller degree of interest in finding out how the final whistle is reached, so too the readers of "Reborn" knew the ending of the tale before the tale delivered it. Scheduling snafus and commercial logic had combined to leave the reader knowing that Steve Rogers would survive, meaning that "Reborn" seemed to often be engaged with by readers as an old piece of necessary business. And too, there was a fair degree of certainty that "Reborn" would conclude without Steve Rogers resuming the post of Captain America, so again, there didn't seem to be anything too fundamental and radical going on as the series progressed. There was, indeed, a widely-reported and respectful sense of anti-climax at "Reborn", as if somehow Cap might have, for example, found himself convinced of the merits of Nazism through his flashbacks and become Captain NaziMan instead, if only Marvel Comics had kept their nerve and done something radical.

But they did do something radical, and they did it right before our eyes. It's just that some of us - and that "some of us" includes me as a brightly-decked out standard-bearer of missing-the-pointness- couldn't see what was going because it was hidden in plain sight. It was the kind of cleverness that knows it's so clever that being seen to be clever wouldn't be clever at all.

And if you'd like some evidence for what might be seen as a theory that's reading too much into a perfectly competent comic book, why not start with the very first few pages, and the narration from Sharon Carter that intones over deliberately bog-standard, if impressive, shots of Cap leading the American assault into Normandy on D-Day;

"The story of Captain America is filled as much with myths and lies as it with truth, but that, after all, is how you build a legend. You leave out the ugly bits, the death and hardship, and you focus on the parts everyone can digest easily. The natural born hero, the super-soldier built in a U.S. laboratory, the finest of his generation, always the first into battle .. always leading the way, always the victor ... That is the story everyone knows about the life of Captain America."

And that narration surely has to be serving a double-purpose. Yes, it's perfect to bring new readers up to speed, but it isn't actually something that Sharon would say to Henry Pym in these circumstances in that way. These are words, I suspect, that are also designed to tell the audience that the writer of this book knows all about the moral and story-telling pitfalls that have developed over the years since 1964, "the myths and lies", and that he intends to do something about it too. (He'd hardly bring up how the legend of Captain America is "filled with myths and lies" if he wasn't even in part going to reference them, which is at the very least the first step towards engaging with the problems those "myths and lies" might create.)

So, is it possible? Did "Captain America: Reborn" signal up something of a fundamental deconstruction of Captain America on its' very first pages , and yet do so without very many folks even noticing it, having hid this particular purloined letter in plain, four-coloured, Summer-popcorn-widescreen movie splendour from the first?

And perhaps Mr Hitch was so keen to do his excellent work here, in spite of what was reported as being a very tight deadline, because he knew it would be the last time for a good while that these familiar themes, characters and events were to be placed centre-stage in Cap's books. It may be that this was more than Mr Hitch's celebration of a character so obvious dear to him. It might have been his chance to be there when that whole traditional approach and deep history was to be, at least for awhile, consigned respectfully to the "been-there, done-that, must-move-on" file.

4. "An Expert Is A Person Who Has Made All The Mistakes That Can Be Made In A Very Narrow Field."

Or perhaps, yes, I've been thinking too much about it. This is absolutely likely. Perhaps, then, you'd be best to read this as an example of how the hubris of the bottom-of-the-food-chain comic-book blogger can generate a beguiling and invalid artefact from the misapplication of inappropriate methodology, or, namely, I thunk too much and I thunk too poorly and I thunk wrong too.

But I do think that "Reborn" is far more clever and significant than just a mini-series which saw Steve Rogers return to the present-day MU while Bucky Barnes became Captain America. And that's not simply because of what's been achieved by "Reborn" within the pages produced Mr Brubaker and Mr Hitch; it's also because of the depth of understanding of the franchise, if I may use that ugly word, that informed the radical changes I'll be engaging with. And, like most clever solutions to complex problems, the answers on show in "Reborn" are elegantly straight-forward. So elegant, in fact, that they might be mistaken for principles which had existed all along.


5. "History Is A Nightmare From Which I Am Trying To Escape."

If Captain America had previously become so indistinguishable from the moral centre of the Marvel Universe, and if that leaves his every action equivalent to the highest ethical standards, with all the problems that that brings, then "Reborn" cuts that particular Gordian Knot. Because, as we discussed, although the Captain America costume is a holy relic, it's Steve Rogers who is the sacred object. It's Rogers who fought for decency even before being blessed with Dr Erskine's formulae (*2), Rogers who won the Second World for us, Rogers who was broken and denied entry into the holy land of the post-war peace, and Rogers who has set the ultimate moral example to a greater and greater extent in the MU ever since. Take Rogers out of the costume and that wretched business of the last golden warrior, from the last American generation to deservedly win a Just War, disappears. (*3) And with Rogers elsewhere, the costume can return to being what it was originally meant to be; a uniform for a lone man fighting for the survival of America's civil society, rather than a signifier of America itself.

Of course, replacing Steve Rogers with Bucky Barnes is a stroke of comic-book plotting genius, and only a fool would think that the replacement by Bucky of Steve Rogers was so obvious that it was inevitable. I think alot of folks in some strange fashion forget that Bucky Barnes was as dead and buried as it is possible for a comic book character to be when Mr Brubaker took over "Captain America". It was actually inconceivable that "Bucky"could be returned to the MU in a way that was involving to the reader while not undermining the poignancy of the character's death in World War II. In fact, it was as unbelievable then as the idea of President Obama parachuting Donald Rumsfeld into the White House now as Secretary Of State for Whatever-The-Hell-He-Wants-To-Do. It simply wasn't something that anybody with an ounce of common sense would consider, unless in truth they had an excess of common sense ounces hidden away where the rest of us put our prejudices. Yet Bucky Barnes we now have, the "Winter Soldier", fully integrated over many years into the MU, a character unblemished in the eyes of the audience by his unlikely and unlooked for return, and perfect as a choice to adopt the role of the new Captain America. If this isn't a sign of the kind of intelligent design that doesn't have us reaching for Richard Dawkin's latest learned tome with steaming ears, then I'll eat my hat. And it is, so I won't. Because Mr Brubaker took such time and care to place Bucky Barnes where he did, the cleverness and radicalism of the whole affair is masked by familiarity. It feels inevitable because Mr Brubaker made it feel that way.


And Bucky Barnes is an appropriate bearer of the Captain America costume because his character and experience is a mass of contradictions which both express and undermine the very qualities which made Steve Rogers such a problematical figure. Barnes too is a survivor of World War II, but he's in truth a far more disturbing and actually representative figure than Rogers, for Barnes was the teenager turned into the killer, the orphan taken into the Army and in return turned into propaganda mascot, assassin and man-of-war. His run at fame was not the simple straight forward sprint towards glory that was Steve Rogers', and Bucky, as with all the other fighting men and women of the US forces, was no superhuman. Barnes was and is a creature of both light and shadow, and the shadow was truer to his experience, but he was no insult to the "ordinary Joe", in that he was as ordinary as they were. And considering how "ordinary" and terrible his experiences in the War were, God only knows how he would've acclimatised to returning to the USA after the fighting ended. I doubt that it would have been easy. He certainly wouldn't have returned to American shores as anything other than a brave and yet compromised human being, which is, in so many ways, something quite different from how Steve Rogers might have experienced his homecoming.

And yet of course, Bucky Barnes didn't get to return to America at War's end. But unlike Steve Rogers, frozen in ice like Christ behind the rock and Arthur in his tomb, waiting to save us because they are better than us - which is what that metaphor says, of course - Bucky was perverted by the Cold War, taken by the Soviets, rebuilt by their industrial technology - unlike Steve who was rebuilt by America's chemical technology - and sent out to kill in the name of Communism. It's hard to believe, even as it's hard to admit that such a thought is anything other than stupid, that Steve Rogers would have allowed himself to have been similarly taken, although Bucky had no choice, or that Captain America would've permitted himself to stay a killer for the "Reds" when his force of American will would surely have broken him free, although Bucky could not help himself. But Bucky? No matter how brave and true, Bucky was already the compromised boy-killer by the time the Soviets reached him. There was that shadow in his soul, that darkness that the child with a gun and a good excuse is held to carry. And so Bucky is both American patriot and American vulnerability, American strength and weakness, superhero and susceptible everyman. As a soldier for America, he's one of us, compromised and well-meaning, and we can in a way support him even more than Steve Rogers. But we can't ever mistake his CAPTAIN America for Captain AMERICA. Though he is in many ways more American than Steve Rogers, because America is the sum of fallible as well as impressive humans too, he can't ever be mistaken for any abstract mindwiping symbol of the Home Of The Brave. Bucky was brave too, but he didn't get to come home. Not for far too many decades. And when he did come home, it wasn't as Arthur, or Steve Rogers, but as something far more profane, and yet laudable and human too.

So, perhaps Mr Brukaer has removed "Captain America" from the problematical and ethically compromising role as the moral centre of the MU, and in the place of Steve Rogers given us back our super-soldier, or at least, America's. And in doing so, another of the problems we discussed gets resolved too, because if Captain America is no longer the best of us all, but rather our representative and servant, then Cap isn't going to be able to close every conflict. Things are going to be more interesting from now on, because the Captain America who used to both graciously take and yet in effect give orders is no more. And now we have a Captain America who exists to be a soldier, and another "Cap", of sorts, far higher up the chain of command, a member of the brass, a man of political as well as physical power.

And who's to say that the two of them, best of friends and oldest of colleagues, are even going to be able to agree on the mission anymore, let alone the best way to undertake it? Not one America, but, at the very least, two.

* 2 - Credit to Harvey Jerkwater to pointing out how my own mind was contradicting itself over this point in the last blog. But it wasn't my fault! It was that pesky mind of mine!
* 3 - Let us thank the spirits who try to watch over the superhero world that the new Captain America wasn't a poor soldier who'd survived the recent wars of liberation and stabilisation in Iraq and Afghanistan. Boy, but that would have thrown up enough moral confusion and story flak to wipe out a generation of comic book readers.


6. "So We Beat On, Boats Against The Current, Borne Back Ceaselessly Into The Past"

I. Something very strange happens to Steve Rogers in "Reborn" even before he hangs up his wingnuts and shield. He stops in part being the character who settles every debate and closes every conflict. Now, I know that it's an exaggeration straying into the territory of an outright lie to suggest that that's how adventures with Cap have always worked, but I think, as I've argued, that there's enough evidence to suggest that over time that was becoming more and more so. But in "Reborn", it's Cap who needs saving time and time again. It's as if Mr Brubaker was gently lowering him from his pedestal and placing him back into the ranks of the super-heroes and the super-heroic, in preparation for a more prosaic and functional future. Consider how, for example, it's Sharon Carter who "takes out" the Red Skull at the battle's end, not either of the Captain Americas. And if Steve Rogers is still strong enough by himself to expel the Red Skull from his mind, just because he's Captain America and no Nazi can defeat him in his soul, then it's undoubtedly a massive team-effort which results, often by mishap and mischance, in bringing Cap back to the present day at a time and place where he might be freed from Fascist control.

And what of those Fascist relics from a war won and lost 65 years ago? No matter how dangerous today's fascists are, they aren't quite the same beasts as those who swept across Europe and were in the end swept right back again. (*4) Today's Fascists are political beasts to a man and woman, of course, but they're different to their ancestors in Rome and Berlin. Constantly having Captain America cycling back to fight once more against the Red Skull, and another Zemo, a Zola (*5) and so on, has locked the character, just as his WW II experiences and his holy aura have, into endless repetitions of fights which have become less relevant to the world that we know as time passes. And in that light, surely "Reborn" is also more than a grand tour of Steve Rogers' previous adventures. It's a closing of the door on them. It's the outcome of some hard thinking, I believe, which has seen that Cap's association with the War has brought not only a depth of informing experience to the character, but also a limited and ever-more irrelevant set of conflicts to play out. I don't think that the following discussion between The Falcon and Captain America is merely panel-filling on this point;

FALCON: "Is that it? Is the Skull really dead this time?"
STEVE R: "There's nowhere else for him to go, Sam ... Not anymore."

So perhaps "Reborn" was in some sense a Gottersammerung for the old Nazis of Captain America's past, and those endless loops of the Just War and its' sacred triumphs and travails, as well as a necessary updating and repositioning of Cap? It's interesting to note how it's the Skull who collapses in flames at the end, in a typically Wagnerian fashion, after all, and how his daughter ends up so terribly burned that she can return as a Red Skull of a similar but more contemporary fascism, one of terror and opportunism. This is a reboot on a more complete level than just costumes, I think. For again, what we have here isn't one more jog round the grand tour, but the last fond look before locking the door on the past.

And if that's so, then here has been created a remarkable opportunity to completely recast the myths of Captain America. Bucky as Cap, for example, means that the halo effect of the Second World War is dimmed into something more real and less pernicious. The War itself can finally be ended, with the old Nazis dead, and the old reinforcement of Captain America's virtue by constant comparison with exhausted historical stereotypes gone. And in the place of that old metaphysical dogma comes something new, because now Steve Rogers himself is free to travel to somewhere he hasn't been able to travel before; his own future. And therefore it can't, just can't, be coincidence that Mr Brubaker and Mr Hitch show us, in the last scene of "Reborn", that Steve Rogers is haunted by visions of a future alien invasion of America which only he has the foreknowledge of. Ah, the land of the free still needs saving, but not entirely from the Government, or even from those bloody-handed Nazi relics. There's something worse out there, and something perhaps less ideologically fixed and more morally informing. (*6) It's a remarkable change of direction for Steve Roger's mind, because ever since 1964, his thoughts have been those of the past, of his lost mother, and his lost partner, and America's implicit and explicit loss of unity and purpose. He's been the neurotic, traumatised war veteran, the old man in a young man's body, the survivor who can't rest in or belong to the society that he's been beached upon.

No wonder it's been hard for a mass audience to attach itself to Captain America in a way that would allow his solo book to feel as significant, and to sell as many copies, as his appearances elsewhere in the MU might lead us to believe would be the norm. Captain America has perhaps not spoken to a present-day audience because he's so often not been living in the present-day. And beyond all the political implications of that, which we've discussed, lie fundamental problems of what he is to his audience. After all, it isn't hard to be bored and disinterested by the very things that we regard as sacred, and all that being dragged backwards in time by psychology and history can't be said upon reflection to always make for the most obviously dynamic of characters, though I have always retained my fondness for "Captain America".

II. It wasn't my intention to touch upon events since "Reborn" here, but there one or two developments in Mr Brubakers' "masterplan" that are impossible to ignore, and several which are essential to pay attention to in order to appropriately close off the above discussion. Firstly, as we all know by now, Steve Rogers has been made head of America's "security system" by the MU's President Obama, a service to the State which the ex-Captain America undertook upon condition that he could he could do things " his way". And secondly, we're told that Rogers will be, in addition to his bureaucratic duties working within the State, in order to protect the State, leading a team of "Secret Avengers", though their exact reason for existing hasn't yet, to my knowledge, been announced.

Though I worry greatly about the idea of President Obama allowing anyone to run the U.S.A.'s "security system" - whatever that constitutes - their way, for I dearly hope that way is a Constitutional one, the fact is that Steve Rogers is now working within the American State, and for it. And while I have no doubt that he'll find endless corrupt politicians, twisted spooks and parking-privilege-abuser secretaries, this does provide a historic opportunity for Marvel to stop the State being represented as being little except incompetent or evil. I hope against hope that we're not going to see the return to the type of tale told by Mr Brubaker in "Captain America" # 8, where Cap and Nick Fury invade, in complete contradiction of international law, a foreign state on the Mongolian border only to be ordered back by the corrupt Chief of Staff To The Vice-President of the U.S.A. Oh, those corrupt politicians, stopping superheroes invading other countries while they themselves pile into the Middle East and even yet-more distant lands without a binding UN Resolution to cloak their own political modesty with. And if only the State would just let superheroes do what they want, well, would 9/11 have happened? Invade more countries was the message there, and, on the whole, I'm against that, given that, as Iraq and Afghanistan have shown us all over again, surgical or more brutal strikes upon the leaders of rogue states don't solve the problems at hand at all. The messy business of lasting engagement is the only solution, and I hope Steve Rogers represents such real-world knowledge in his new role.

But placing Steve Rogers within the State is a tremendously positive move. Played out in a way which would combat those tendencies to denigrate the state we've been discussing for a while here, it could be a cracking idea. The contradictions between individual morality, political exigencies, the Constitution and international law, and the pleasant absurdities of the superhero comic book, would surely generate enough conflict to power an endless string of stories. And of course it separates Steve Rogers further away from any abstract notion of America and grounds him in politics, that grubby matter of compromise; it strips the sacred away a touch and shows the profane beneath, which is exactly the opposite process that's been underway since 1964. When he comes to his fellow superheroes in his government guise from now on, Steve Rogers won't be the saintly Captain America anymore, and he won't even be Steve Rogers: ordinary man of the people with some very big muscles. Instead, he'll be a representative of a political system, part of the debate, on the side of some policies and against others. He won't be able to speak for everyone anymore, because nobody rightly embedded in the State can, even as it's their duty to try to do so. And so, through him, unless we're going to swamped with even more of the might-as-well-be-Ayn-Rand anti-democratic rubbish that we've been talking about, we might get the idea that Americans can value being citizens of the Constitution as much as they might want the kudos of being the holder of an Avengers privilege card. ("Privilege" meaning, of course, that you can HIT people, and be admired for it!)

We might even see Steve Rogers taking orders as well as giving them. Assuming that Mr Roger's "way" is the American way of, er, following American law, might we not see him being contradicted, being rightly as well as wrongly admonished, and from more than just a cuddly Liberal version of President Obama. Might we hope for some oversight of his activities, for example, and not just a pen-pusher moaning about budgets? May we even see that Steve Rogers doesn't actually know anything about running this American security system, that he needs the help and advice of those already in place, as much as he needs to start cleaning out the filth from the many stables of King America.


And perhaps we might see a superhero or two breaking the law in the name of Justice and actually being punished for it, no? Similarly, perhaps we might see Steve Rogers sullied not by some ugly adolescent sense of emasculation because politicians won't let him beat up who he wants, but rather because of the noble compromise of real life. For he'll be living in something which could be just an story-beat closer to the real one of ours than before, where nothing is easy and no one action entirely morally secure, so that Steve Roger's lost halo becomes so coated with fluff and dust, as all ours are, that he won't be able to pick it up and go straight back to solving every moral problem with a swish of a shield anymore. Because certainly Bucky Barnes can't play the "perfect American" card either. They're both grounded in something more mucky, and far more interesting, than the martyrs' garments and the saviour's glow. And neither can act alone anymore, saving the world by themselves, or rather, not in such a way that their actions, regardless of what they actually do, can be read as being as beyond question and perfectly good.

Which is a good thing, no? A really good thing.

*4 - Readers might care to check out "Well, Is Judge Dredd A Fascist" in the May archive of my other blog for some more on this question of the definition of fascism where comic books are concerned. And if you do go there, that means that I don't have to cover the material here, as it seems I haven't.
* 5 - Er, isn't "Zola" a name more commonly associated with the fine and brave French author who fought against anti-Semitism? Why did Mr Kirby choose that name?
*6 - Readers who are curious about what this future threat might be are advised to head to "It Came From Darkmoor", the blog by Mark Roberts, where his May 25th entry "A Theory About Captain Britain And The Avengers" is a fascinating look at what Steve Roger's vision might involve. To get there, head for the Comic Book Blog Of Honour box UK box to your right.

7. "What A Splendid Summer Morning And It Seemed As If Nothing Could Go Wrong."

I realise that the above on the future of these characters is 100% conjecture, and that Steve Rogers' future role both within the state and possibly against it is something which will play out in the MU over the months to come. But the truth is that Mr Brubaker's "Captain America: Reborn" has created the possibility for such future developments. "Reborn" simply wasn't a look backwards over Cap's career, and in the story-paths it's closed off and the ones it's opened up, it has created the template for the most radical, successful and appropriate re-setting of a super-hero franchise since Frank Miller shook "Daredevil" up with his fusion of crime noir, Will Eisner and Ninjas. That template set down by Mr Miller for "Daredevil" has largely held ever since, and if it's been drifting more and more away from "morally compromised" to "morally disgusting", it's still an example of that rarest of all tricks; seamlessly picking up the threads of a less-successful-than-it-should-be franchise and making it sturdy and self-consistent enough to flourish. For where many fans of Spider-Man, for example, will say that they've enjoyed the stories since the deal-with-the-devil, they'll still see "One More Day" as a discontinuity, as something broken and unresolved in the character's history. But the current status quo of Steve Rogers, Super-Soldier, and Bucky Barnes, Captain America, has been arrived at so relatively quietly and carefully, and yet to such radical effect, that beyond what is often assumed to be a temporary leave-of-absence by Rogers from his old role, nobody is too much on their feet applauding.

But everything has changed, and even if the intention I've thought I've seen here was absent, the changes to "Captain America" have effectively shown how this comic book and this character could be rescued from problems which have afflicted it in the past. And that's an incredibly useful thing. Because when we consider how hard it's been to find a new and workable status quo particularly for characters of World War II vintage, we have to conclude that it's a nearly-impossible job to get right. Consider how Superman and Wonder Woman, and Namor and Captain Marvel, have all suffered multiple and radical surgeries to bring them into the modern day marketplace without losing their charm or core values, and how those many interventions have often fared so poorly, despite the highest level of craft and the greatest measure of good intentions. And I think, despite whatever may have happened since "Reborn", or whatever may happen from now, there is in this mini-series the keys to this particular kingdom.

The old Nazis are gone, and so is the halo effect of WWII. And there's a strong possibility that Steve Rogers is going to be more an active component of the America State rather than America's Olympian conscience, and the old narrative cycles which Cap has been thrown through endlessly have, since "Reborn", been taken off the table. This is, as I said at the beginning, really clever. It was hidden in plain sight, it was placed in a mini-series which has often been assumed to be backward looking and conservative, and yet at the end, look, all is pleasingly not-shiny and new.

So I admire "Reborn", partially for what it has achieved as an enjoyable widescreen comic book "event", and partly for the oppurtunity for lasting and positive change to the Captain America franchise that it's created. It's clever. It's helped to clear the board even of Steve Roger's obsession with the past. And I'm sure that it's got a tribute to Frank Robbins in it too! What more do you want?


It may be that I admire "Reborn" more for how it reworks Cap's franchice, its' informed functionality, than I do repect it as a superhero story, but it is indeed the plimsoll line of modern comic books and anybody who knows how important the principle of the plimsoll line was will know I'm not being insulting there at all. I say "Try It Out"!

And anyone who recalls me promising to discuss "Reborn" as a fairy-tale, that idea threatened to take over this piece and it's now been hived off into a piece on Golden Age superhero origins and the structure of fairy-tales. I hope you'll join me for that at some undetermined time in the future. And that you'll join me in a few days for more "shot-me-down-I'm-a-fool" musings on comic books and stuff. I wish you, whoever you may be, kind reader, a splendid day!


.

More about →