“Captain America: Steve Rogers #1” has brought out a lot of opinions and Big Shiny Robot! is no different. We’ve had one editorial so far about “Marvel’s Jewish Problem” and a completely different look about “The Evil We Teach.” This is the third in our series.
PART 1: ART AT GUNPOINT
This isn’t the way it was supposed to go.
We won, you guys. What we love is now what everyone else loves. The general populace saw the light. We should be parading through the streets. That bully who gave you a swirly for reading comics in high school? He went to see “Captain America: Civil War” three times. The movie studios that made comic book movies a sick joke in the 90s? They made “Deadpool,” “The Avengers,” and “The Dark Knight.” If everyone is finally listening to us, then why does it seem like I’m the only one who feels spoiled?
For those just joining us, the newest iteration of “Captain America” was released this last week with a new #1 and the internet took all of about 3 seconds to escalate from curious to mouth-frothing hell-beast. Concluding with a controversial last-page-reveal of Cap “hailing Hydra,” the book has resulted in boycotts and even death threats. Really, I shouldn’t “even” use the adverb “even” to address these threats, as this has sadly become standard operating procedure for fandom.
Where did this culture come from, that casually condones the murder of our entertainers? Back in the day, it was hard making your voice as a fan heard. You had to mail a letter to the ol’ Marvel bullpen and hope you were one of the few lucky fans to get theirs published in the back of an issue. Now you can literally send your reaction straight to a phone in a creator’s pocket. I realize I sound like a decrepit blind man throwing rocks at kids playing in my yard, but do you realize what a miracle that is? In the face of that kind of revolutionary technology, what would compel a person to harass someone when they could engage in a dialogue with the ones who make the things that they love?
I can’t believe I have to say this, but this kind of behavior is never okay, under any circumstance. And I say this knowing full well that I’m pissing into the wind, but seriously, creators (and their critics) don’t owe you a damn thing. Art is not a service you are entitled to. Art is not a commodity. It is not obligated to change on a customer’s whim. If that’s something you’d like your art to do, you are feeding right into the bullshit corporate machine you claim to be rallying against. Please, go on complaining about how everything’s a sequel or a remake, but don’t expect anything to change.
I wish I could say that my first instinct is correct; that these are just dumb kids who haven’t figured out how the real world works. That the people who send death threats to the creators of the “Ghostbusters” reboot are just confused and selfish fans, not lunatic misogynists. That I’m just a cranky old fart who knows better and that someday they’ll see the error of their ways and become cranky old farts too. But I suspect that the truth is much more depressing. Take a look at this letter that was sent to Marvel editor Tom Brevoort, that appears to be from a roughly 40-year-old adult, titled: “Nothing Else To Lose” WARNING: It gets pretty disturbing.
As a Former Active Duty US Marine and a Disabled Veteran, I want you to know that when I joined the Marines back in 95’ I did so under a strict Code of Ethics. Truth, Honor and Justice. This Code was inspired by Steve Rogers. I knew I could never be the person he was, I just wasn’t mentally built for it, but it gave me something to strive for. Yes, the Character of Stever Rogers AKA Captain America is a fictional one, but it is also one that emboydies what the Idea Human Being, not just American should strive to be. Steve Rogers never claimed to be perfect, but he tried his best every day to do the right thing no matter what.
For the last 21 years I have modeled my own Moral Code after the belief that I would NEVER tell a Lie, No matter the consequences. There is no such thing as “a little white lie”. My Honesty, and My Honor was everything to me. It kept me from becoming the Monster that I could have easily become. Thanks to your idiocy and disregard for what an American Symbol stood for, you have made it “OK” to disregard those Ideals. It apperantly is ok to Lie, Cheat, Steal and Murder, because Fuck It, who cares right? Steve Rogers aka Captain American has been doing it for 75 YEARS.
Fine, congradulations, you have made the last 21 years of my life and the Code I lived by, the hardships I endured because I refused to sacrifice that Code MEANINGLESS. You have disgraced what Joe Simon and Jack Kirby had the character stand for. The whole point of that Character was to showcase the potential of what human beings could be. Dispite the Odds stacked against them.
So, thanks to you two I will be throwing away my Moral Code, and become The Monster, that people feared I might become, that I myself feared I would become. I will use every resource at my disposal, every avenue that I can to locate and track you down. I WILL find you eventually, and I WILL kill you in the most painful way possible that I can think of. The ONLY way to stop me is to have me killed. But hey, that should be a walk in the park for you right? I mean I am just one disgruntled Marine, what is one more life compared to the MILLIONS of LIVES you just dismissed by making Captain America a Hydra Agent ALL ALONG. NOTHING and I mean NOTHING you say will erase what you have done, HYDRA was ALWAYS SYNOMOUS with NAZIS. You CANNOT seperate the two. So enjoy your “Fame” while you are able to still draw breath. It’s just a matter of time before I find you.
[NAME REMOVED]
USMC Disabled Veteran
If you are under the impression that sending death threats is in the spirit of Captain America or Superman (or the… Ghostbusters, I guess?), let me clarify it for you: it is not. Not only is it cowardly, but it is actually hurting the thing that you love and sets back the cause that you are fighting for. You want your art produced at gunpoint? Maybe you have more in common with Nazis than you thought.
PART 2: WHY YOU ARE WRONG ABOUT CAPTAIN AMERICA
For those making the case that this move is anti-Semitic, I fail to see the case for that. The book itself does not textually spout any pro-Nazi ethos. If anything it goes out of it’s way to establish how dangerous and menacing the Red Skull’s methods of indoctrination are. It even throws in a knock at the Ayn Rand-school of Libertarianism for laughs. The text makes it pretty clear where the writer stands politically.
Is Mark Millar anti-Semitic for creating “Superman: Red Son,” an “Elseworlds” version of Superman, raised as “the Champion of the common worker who fights a never-ending battle for Stalin, socialism and the international expansion of the Warsaw Pact”? Superman’s creators were Jewish. Where was the outrage when that book came out? Was it because Twitter didn’t exist yet? Or because that book wasn’t in continuity? A little of column A, a little of column B, I suppose. If playing with a fictional character’s 75-year-old (certainly already-convoluted) continuity is the reason “Captain America”’s twist is supposedly a hateful act, then these people better get started on a list of all the other writers they’re supposed to be mad at, because there’s a LOT of people who have muddied the waters already.
“Captain America: Steve Rogers” is written by Nick Spencer (our death-threat-ee of the week), who is also concurrently writing “Captain America: Sam Wilson,” the story of The Falcon taking the mantle after Steve got turned into a decrepit old man throwing rocks at kids playing in his yard. Spencer is the guy who just last year was catching flak for writing “Captain America” as “too liberal.” I mean, make up your mind Spencer, are you a dirty Nazi or a dirty hippie? I like Spencer (love me some “Morning Glories”), but I’m pretty disinterested with his take on Cap, so don’t take it as bias when I say that if you are outraged over this Hydra development, not only are you reading too much into it, you are reading it wrong on a structural level.
Take a look at the way Spencer arranges the scenes in this issue. The way it’s laid out just smacks of misdirection. The reveal-by-flashback that Steve’s mother was being indoctrinated by Hydra is perfectly timed with the reveal in the present to make you think that one thing led to the other, but by not showing any more than they did, Spencer gives himself more than enough wiggle room for this to be easily explained away in a few issues.
Now, assuming this story isn’t trying to fool people, and Steve really means it when he says “Hail Hydra,” do people seriously think making Captain America a bad guy who works for the Red Skull is something that Marvel is whole-heartedly and permanently committed to? Their flagship IP? More than that, do you even understand how comics work? Take a step back and look at this logically. Not even within the realm of how storytelling works as we know it, where a first act twist almost certainly leads to a second twist or third act reversal. Think about the decades of characters getting brainwashed, Cosmic Cubes that can change reality, time-travel, life-model decoys, shape-shifting mutants, shape-shifting aliens, double-agents, triple-agents, quadruple-agents! (Not sure that last one is a thing.) It’s not even the first time this has happened. All you need is a quick Google search to discover evidence of Captain America saluting the Red Skull and Hitler, under the influence of mind-control. On multiple occasions. The sheer amount of outs the Marvel universe gives itself is so staggering in its ridiculousness, it’s a wonder we take anything they publish seriously at all. Not to mention all the times they ignore continuity altogether and just do whatever the hell they feel like anyway. There’s a reason people roll their eyes every time a superhero “dies.”
I’m not particularly wild about the Cap-is-Hydra twist, not because I think it’s killing some sacred cow, but because it’s SO crazy of a twist that I know it will just be explained away in six to twelve issues. How long did old Cap last? How about dead Cap? And we haven’t even seen the second issue yet. It could be reversed next month and everybody would be face-palming themselves! I’ve read this kind of story before and so have you, so why is everybody jumping to conclusions?
PART 3: PEOPLE GET OFF ON THIS STUFF
We’ve established that there’s quite an amount of evidence that puts doubt on any anti-Semitic intentions or a Nazi-Rogers canon, none of which I feel takes a whole hell of a lot of sleuthing or intuition, so why would these people take it so far as to terrorize Spencer, Brevoort and the fine people at Marvel? Is it the attention that others give them online, even if it’s to an anonymous avatar? Is it a feeling of betrayal that something isn’t being marketed directly to them? (This is surely a significant element of all the “Ghostbusters” hubbub.) Is it because they feel their art form had been disenfranchised for so long that there surely must be someone out there trying their hardest to knock it back down?
All of those explanations describe a person with a greased lens of personal experience but the harassment and threats are getting so ugly that I suspect it runs deeper than that. The veteran above (if he even is who he says he is) may have already been mentally ill to a degree that he’s impossible to have rational discourse with, but what about the rest? It’s remarkably easy to just say that anyone who sends a death threat over a piece of genre entertainment is just an unstable maniac. But for the sake of argument, let’s try and pick one of these people’s brains.
You hear a story about Marvel possibly turning its back on the underdog Jewish creators of an American icon from WWII. More than a hero, Cap is your hero (mine’s Spider-Man). You don’t actually read the issue in question (because you’d rather not give money to anti-Semites, obviously) and the facts might not spell it out clearly, but the controversy feels right. What’s more, it feels good to be mad at somebody who deserves it. It feels good to intimidate somebody who deserves it. Like you’re sticking up for the little guy. Just like Captain America. What would Cap do to protect people? He’d go to war with some Nazi d-bags.
It sounds like a childish thought process because it is. Sure, the narrative that Marvel is disrespecting Joe Simon and Jack Kirby is a good one, but it’s a lie. An apparently believable one. A lie that doesn’t even have a motivation beyond the way it makes you feel. I believe that these guys really, honestly think that they are sticking up for people, but they’re not. They’re trying to make themselves feel good.
Because people get off on outrage.
It’s the only explanation I can think of. Oftentimes these things are peppered with undertones of sexism (see: #gamergate) or racism (see: uproar over black actors playing traditionally white characters) but it’s clear the people in this case just need something to be pissed off about (I feel like it might be relevant to point out that a guy might be elected President in November based on a platform consisting solely of making shit up to be pissed off about). It’s an effigy to take their frustration out on. They invent the narrative they want to hear. That’s how conspiracy theories work. Not with facts, but with emotions. And sometimes when enough people get behind one of these ideas it gives others a kind of twisted legitimacy to express their anger however they see fit.
“So what do we do about it, smart guy?”
I’m taking suggestions. Seriously, I really don’t know. How do you redirect that kind of rage? You can’t control what teenagers do on the internet, so that’s immediately off the table. You can’t easily find out who these guys are because people have a right to privacy (what little the internet affords these days). You can’t expect creators to give up self-promotion through social media. And you can’t expect those creators to give in to violent demands.
Actually I did have one idea how this thing might solve itself.
The other day, Kotaku broke a story, reporting that the highly-anticipated video game, “No Man’s Sky” was being delayed a mere seven weeks. Gamers, ever a reasonable bunch, accused journalist Jason Schreiber of making up the story and sent him death threats. After the delay was confirmed, these “fans” promptly turned their ire towards the game’s director, Sean Murray, who received… you guessed it, death threats. Murray, commendably tweeted that dirt right off his shoulder:
First of all, it boggles my mind that these people would even want to play this game if they hate Murray so much. Second, the about-face of “defending” this game from the scumbaggery of the press to screaming at the creator of the thing they love, for taking the time to make it better, is proof that they were going to throw a fit no matter what. These guys have gone so ridiculously far with the death threats that they’ve made the act passé. Congratulations rage-aholics, you’ve jumped the shark. Death threats aren’t cool anymore. Seriously, you guys can stop already.
CONCLUSION: BLOW IT UP
Some people say that adherence to continuity is essential to the enjoyment one gets out of these books. I disagree. It’s a tool that can help a creator do something new, just like Nick Spencer is. It’s a tool that can manipulate the reader, like it’s doing now to everyone reading “Captain America.” It’s perfectly acceptable to bend it and mold it or even break it if it makes for good storytelling.
If you’re not willing to play by those rules then, hell, maybe serialized comics are not for you. I find myself frustrated by the way continuity works at the big two sometimes, but then I’ll just go read something else. It’s that easy. You don’t have to make Twitter a pissing match over who is the most outraged. Just take your wagon somewhere else. Come back when there’s some new take or new creator that interests you. It’s the same reason I can’t bring myself to get upset at bad comic book movies anymore. It blows my mind that this has to be said every time one of these things happens, but the thing you love is still there. If the only “Ghostbusters” movie for you is the original, they aren’t burning film prints or anything; it’s still there. If this run isn’t, in your mind, the ultimate version of Captain America, go read the one that you think is! There’s no sense in sending death threats over one comic book (or any number of them). Do you really think they aren’t going to make more Captain America comics? PLEASE. There’s always going to be another one, and there will be wildly different ones. It’s healthy for someone blow up these properties every once in a while. I think Guillermo del Toro put it best (as he usually does) when he said: “Adapting material is like marrying a widow. You have to be very respectful of the late husband’s memory, but at some point you’ve gotta fuck.”