Another astute observation on how Capt. America "ended"
Published by Avi Green on Saturday, March 10, 2007 at 9:31 AM.
I hadn't noted this previously, but in Peter Sanderson's latest op-ed on Quick Stop Entertainment, he makes a good point about how Cap "ended" his career in defeat:
I thought about some of this before, but hadn't the time to write about it until now. But this too is a serious problem with comics today, that they're shunning heroism in favor of defeatism. Another serious problem that needs to be fixed.
The end of Civil War, in which Captain America decides he is wrong for fighting for the freedom of his fellow superheroes, and an already infamous Civil War: Frontline sequence in which a woman self-righteously denounces the Captain for knowing nothing about America since he doesn’t waste time on YouTube (Say what? I would think Cap keeps himself rather busy continually saving the lives of this woman and other Americans over the course of his career. This woman’s attitude smacks of ageism. This suggests that 21st century Marvel regards the original Captain as a dated character. “‘He hasn't been living in the modern world and the world does move," says Marvel Editor-in-Chief Joe Quesada.” in the CNN report.Exactly. This end-in-defeat approach is something that's been turning up quite a bit lately. 3 years ago, both Identity Crisis and Avengers: Disassembled bore conclusions that showed the DCU and MCU casts as unheroic and incompetant. And to call Cap a "dated" character is also insulting and shows that Quesada and company have no genuine respect for the character. And just what does YouTube and MySpace have to do with any of this?
And here I think of Captain America as representing American ideals, which have endured for over two hundred years, just as I believe Lee, Englehart, and Gruenwald did. Just reading the better Captain America stories from the last four decades, such as theirs, demonstrates how the character consistently adapts to changing times. I’d feel better if CNN and the Daily News had quoted Marvel representatives as extolling the greatness of the original Captain America rather than seeing Marvel, in and out of the stories, badmouthing the character as irrelevant to 21st century America.
If Marvel was intent on killing off Captain America, why couldn’t the company have given him a heroic demise, like the one that Stan Lee and John Romita, Sr. gave Captain George Stacy in Amazing Spider-Man #90 (1970) or the one that Chris Claremont and John Byrne gave Phoenix in Uncanny X-Men #137 (1980). Even Mar-Vell’s demise from cancer in Jim Starlin’s The Death of Captain Marvel (1982) showed more courage and dignity than the ignominious killing of Captain America, arrested and handcuffed as a criminal for his role in Civil War.
I thought about some of this before, but hadn't the time to write about it until now. But this too is a serious problem with comics today, that they're shunning heroism in favor of defeatism. Another serious problem that needs to be fixed.
Labels: Captain America, marvel comics
