A panel from Captain America #602 that peeved the right. Why shouldn't comic books cover the same ground as editorial comics in newspapers?
Captain America is a comic book and film character that gets a particular kind of attention due to what it represents: America. Will that be the America Kos readers want it to be, or 'murica? I saw the new
Captain America: The Winter Soldier movie last night. I paid through the nose to see it in 3D a day in advance of its official release, in a double feature with
The First Avenger. In general I liked it a lot. I agree with some of the reviewers out there now calling it Marvel's best movie, although we'll probably be hearing differently from many of them when
Days of Future Past and
Guardians of the Galaxy come out later this year.
I promise no spoilers here. I can say that what the movie represents is (1) a fictional version of popular fears that long ago, the government was infiltrated by what we have been told are the country's worst enemies, (2) how at the moment of coup, officials justify it and argue that it's in our best interest, and (3) an ongoing fight to resist it. If you liked the Brubaker-Epting run in the Marvel Comics' series, you'll find things to complain about but will probably mostly like it too. If you don't read comics and have no idea what a Brubaker-Epting is, but the themes above intrigue you, you will probably enjoy the movie and may be very pleasantly surprised that it's not just unreflective, patriotic flag waving and unintelligent fare for a post-Project Paperclip, post-Nixon, and post-hanging chad America. Even though, in the final analysis, it's just comic books.
What interests me about Captain America is how people get their undies in a bundle over the underlying argument of whether the 'America' in Captain America should be a progressive one, or 'murica. I have enough of an obsession with this that I wrote one blog about it already, and there will be more. This time time I want to travel back to 2010, when Captain America #602 was briefly the focus of an intense fight about why America in the comics should be 'murica.
But wait, there's more...
A few years ago, there was a moment of anti-comic hysteria for the right that was exceeded only by televised anti-comic book hearings in the 1950s. Those hearings by the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency were the brainchild of Estes Kefauver (yes, the same Kefauver who ran for VP with Adlai Stevenson), who tried tried to carve himself a name by flaming comics the way that Joe McCarthy vilified the film industry. How well did that work? Sad to say, it worked pretty well. For many years, superhero, horror, and crime comics all but completely disappeared. Some companies like EC Comics were forced to close, but that led to one of the 20th century's success stories when EC's title Mad changed to a magazine format to avoid censorship. The rest is history.
The brouhaha this time was over Captain America #602, with a cover date of February 2010. This was already four years ago now, but the pot is getting stirred again over the release of Captain America: The Winter Soldier (which officially comes out today). The new movie involves characters and plot lines created for the story arc that led up to #602 in the Marvel comic book series. What's interesting are the bizarre twists that occurred in the discussion of Captain America #602. I'm betting we'll see a lot more of the same in the near future.
On February 8, 2010, Warner Todd Huston posted an entry on Publius Forum about this issue of Captain America. It was entitled “Marvel Comics: Captain America Says Tea Parties are Dangerous and Racist”:
Marvel Comic’s Captain America is the mightiest soldier with the super powerful secret soldier formula that makes him a super man. Sadly, this muscle bound hero that took on the whole Nazi army during WWII seems to be afraid of those American people who’ve joined the Tea Party movement. Not only is Cappy quaking in his little red booties, but he’s sure that the Tea Party folks are dangerous racists, too.
Isn’t it wonderful that a decades old American comic book hero is now being used to turn readers against our very political system, being used to slander folks that are standing up for real American principles in real life — and one called “Captain America” at that?
Captain America #602 was the first in a four-issue story arc, “Two Americas,” in which Captain America and his partner, the Falcon (introduced in movies for the first time in
The Winter Soldier), prepare to infiltrate and stop a terrorist organization called the Watchdogs. They stake out a tax and health care reform protest in hopes of spotting signs of the organization, and instead find protesters holding signs with messages inspired by those from real tea party events, including “Keep the Government Out of My Medicare” and “Tea Bag The Libs before They Tea Bag You”. Huston continues his narrative:
The Falcon character then snidely tells his partner the Captain, “So I guess this whole ‘hate the government’ vibe around here isn’t limited to the Watchdogs.”
The two then discuss their plan to infiltrate the subversive group that Marvel comics seems to be linking to the Tea Party movement. This discussion culminates in The Falcon wondering how a black man would do such a thing. “I don’t exactly see a black man from Harlem fitting in with a bunch of angry white folks,” he tells the incognito Captain America.
This account of the story as an attack on “real American principles” by a character “quaking in his little red booties” is a surprisingly effortless gloss on McCarthyist imagery and rhetoric of the Cold War years of the early 1950s. But how much of what Huston claims actually happens in the story? Nowhere does Captain America say that tea parties or their members are dangerous and racist, nor does he show any fear of protesters or slander them. The essay’s language also serves to direct readers in what they should think about the story, for instance, by describing the Falcon as snide for wondering about the potential for racism at such a rally, in Idaho--the land of Ruby Ridge--no less. Huston closes by stating that Marvel Comics has made “patriotic folks” into its “newest super villains,” which doesn’t happen either. Despite its inaccuracies, for such a brief essay it has garnered a lot of attention. One day in 2010, I counted 2680 hits for this blog entry by Huston in a Google beta search (I told you I was obsessed). Judging from how the blog was reproduced and disseminated across the internet there are a lot of people out there sympathetic to Huston’s claims, many of whom have never read an issue of Captain America or could really care less about it, except that it should be representing 'murica.
Other members of the media and blogosphere quickly came to Cap’s defense (including Keith Olbermann, no less), chiefly over Huston’s use of the Falcon’s comments to claim that Marvel is calling tea partiers racist, which several characterized as a tactic for denying that there has been racist behavior at the tea parties.
What concerns me the most about this is not just the vitriol over things like the Falcon's more than justified comments about racism at tea party rallies, which was already more than adequately documented in 2010. It's how this situation relates to censorship, which has been the primary point of intersection between American politics and comic books. Commenting on Huston, Village Voice blogger Roy Edroso wrote:
It's like Fredric Wertham's Seduction of the Innocent all over again! Only the cause this time is not sexual perversion, but "moral relativism," embodied by a comic book character talking down a street demonstration ...
There are a lot of bad and ignorant people out there (some associated with tea parties, others not) who are racist, and increasingly don't care who knows about it in ways I don't remember seeing (at least from my own white bread vantage point) since the 1970s. But if they can control what's in something like comic books, we are well and truly screwed. Comics, like the movie
Captain America: The Winter Soldier, let us wrap our mind around the idea of "what if?" the world was the paranoiac dream we see in the fictionalized account. That's important in deciding if that's the kind of world we want to live in. The much-maligned comic book, once considered no better than the worst hardcore porn, can be a forum for "politics by other means" as Walter Benjamin once said about popular culture, but was forgotten in the political witch hunts of the 1950s.
Why shouldn't a comic book cover some of the same ground as editorial cartoons, which is arguably what happened in Captain America #602? Social commentary is one of the reasons Mad had to become a magazine in the 1950s. Is that the way comics, at $3 and more a pop, now read mostly by adults like me, have to be in 2010 or 2014?