I’m having a hard time getting it up for the death of Captain America.
The entire Civil War storyline — wherein superheroes are forced to register with the government, reveal their identities and essentially become federal agents or risk prison — somehow just never hit me the way it did other people.
It wasn’t that I didn’t think it was well written, didn’t recognize that it used superhero archetypes to make a comment about the current political climate in America, didn’t like the characters or the people writing them. Somehow it just all seemed…like a gimmick.
Which, of course, it was.
The two big comics companies have been engaged in a sort of Big Gimmick Arms Race for decades now.
“I’ll see your Secret War and raise you a Crisis on Infinite Earths!
You call that a crisis? Let me introduce you to my little Acts of Vengeance!
Some gimmick that is! Have a little Millennium!
Oh yeah? Well we’re rebooting the whole universe!
We already did that!
So? We’re Killing effing Superman! And breaking Batman’s back!
Ha! We’re going to erase everything and send all our heroes into a pocket universe! Er…just kidding.
Oh yeah? Well, we’re going to kill Green Arrow and Green Lantern!
So? You killed the Flash a decade ago. Big whoop.
Well…at least we kept him dead! Well…mostly.
We kill people too! Jean Grey! Professor X! Magneto! They never stay dead long…but we kill them!”
As a local comic retailer told me about a year ago — we’ve gone from a period in comic where there was a big event every summer that made you buy a bunch of extra comics and cross-over titles you wouldn’t have otherwise to a period when the event never ends, when it just drags out across the entire year with extra issues, crossovers and min-series galore. You can read just the titles you want…but you’ll always have the vague idea you’re missing something, you wont’ get references to the larger universe and what’s happening in it and, every now and then, your favorite character will get iced in the bargain.
Which bring us to Captain America. This is, technically, the fifth or sixth death of the character, depending how you’re keeping score and whether it matters to you who was wearing the mask when Cap bit the big one.
As I read the mainstream news coverage of this — which I’m not sure would be covered as heavily if the character weren’t wearing the American flag while we’re at war and certainly hasn’t gotten the level of attention Superman’s death garnered — I keep thinking of something I read a few years ago, when Marvel pulled its head out of its ass, cleaned up its business mess and started putting out great books again. It might have been in a sort of mission statement from then new head honcho Joe Quesada or it might have been from Grant Morrisson’s New X-Men pitch. But it went something like this:
“Why do we keep killing off characters to manufacture drama? Let’s just tell good stories. When a character needs to die let’s give it the gravity it deserves and for god’s sake, keep them dead. The revolving door we’ve got going with mortality is really ridiculous, even for comic books.”
I agreed with that then and I agree with it now.
So when Captain America is assassinated, I’m not sad. I’m not even interested. Because he’ll be back. Soon. The whole thing will have been a set-up, Nick Fury having engineered the whole thing from the shadows. The dead body will have been a clone. Cap’s consciousness was actually uploaded and saved minutes before his death. Something like that.
It’s cheap and unnecessary and frankly feels a little lazy. The death can’t possibly have the impact it should because no one believes he’s actually dead — or that he won’t be resurrected one way or another like every major comic character who’s died in the last twenty years.
And when they bring him back, when we’re done with all of this and all the mini-series issues have been sold, if they get a decent writer on the book (Ed Brubaker did wonders for Cap’s book) I’ll read it.
But until then I’m going to pass. Somebody wake me when it’s over.
3 Comments
July 4, 2007 at 2:09 am
At least Cap’s still alive in Ultimates. If the folks in Hollywood had any sense, they would copy that whole series verbatum in the upcoming Avengers movie.
July 4, 2007 at 2:16 am
They’ve done two direct-to-video animated films based very closely on that series.
Have only seen a few minutes of each — but they looked good.
July 4, 2007 at 9:16 am
I watched the first one in its entirety, and thought it was okay. For cheapie animation, I guess it could have been much worse ((remembers the original Captain America animated series)), but the way the stories were adapted overall, I was a little overwhelmed.