One of the other controversial storylines that Marvel Comics has inflicted on its readers, besides turning Thor into a goddess and Iron Man into a teenage black girl, has been the one that revealed Steve Rogers, aka Captain America, as a fascist working for the evil organization Hydra. Marvel claims that politics has nothing to do with the revisionist backstory of the good Captain, but that proved to be too much even for the left-leaning IO9. Clearly, the new evil Captain America is an allegory for Donald Trump.
Captain America, as even people who stopped reading comic books when they hit puberty remember, was a super soldier created to fight the Nazis and wound up as part of the Marvel Universe doing battle with various super villains, including Hydra, a secret conspiracy that grew out of the Nazi movement.
Captain America represented all of the ideals that Americans hold dear, freedom. Justice, and truth. He was the personification of all that was good.
The reimagining of the iconic superhero in red white and blue, carrying the Frisbee shield, into a fascist ubermann is motivated by another, darker vision of America that the Greatest Generation of which the good Captain was a part would not recognize. America, in the view of the people who set up the revisionist storyline, is no better than Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia. Indeed, the United States is worse because it pretends to be different from the more honest, open fascists.
Of course, the point of view thus described is a silly, fake fact-filled narrative inspired by junk history as purveyed by such hucksters as Howard Zinn, who regard all of American history as the eternal class struggle of the victim classes against the Man.
The never-Trump subtext of the storyline has been undermined by the recent bombardment of a Syrian airfield in the wake of a Sarin gas attack and the president’s heartfelt explanation about how gassing babies is never something to be tolerated. Fascists should be made of sterner stuff.
Comic book fans, no more than anyone else, like to be told that they live in a country that is inherently evil and that, by extension, they are either evil or victims.
They certainly don’t like to see iconic characters messed with and distorted into mean, wicked things. Marvel has made a ton of money by bringing its source material to the big and small screens. It should have more respect for that material rather than make cheap, political messages out of it.
