Captain America #602

What with Spider-Man and Wolverine and Iron Man being some of the biggest movies of the last ten years, everyone’s a comic-book superhero fan now. Or so I thought, until the huge controversy over an issue of Captain America erupted a month or so back.

SHAKOOOOOOM!

Story goes like this: in this comic, this dude Captain America and his long-time buddy the Falcon go investigating an anti-government group of villains called the Watchdogs. (None of these characters are new. Cap came along at the start of the 40s, Falcon in the 70s and the Watchdogs in the 80s.) Cap and Falcon carry out surveillance on an anti-tax rally in a middle-American town.

Big group of people holding signs like “America 4 Sale” and “Stop the socialists!” and “Tea bag the libs before they tea bag YOU!” Says Falcon, who is black, about the prospect of infiltration: “I don’t exactly see a black man from Harlem fitting in with a bunch of angry white folks.” So they come up with a plan: Falcon pretends to be an IRS man turning up in a bar threatening an audit, while Cap pretends to be a roving trucker who punches out the IRS man and wins over the locals.

KRAKOW!

Then the blogs got involved! It started here:

So, there you have it, America. Tea Party protesters just “hate the government,” they are racists, they are all white folks, they are angry, and they associate with secretive white supremacist groups that want to over throw the U.S. government.
Bet you didn’t know that when you were indulging your right as a citizen to protest your government that you were a dangerous white supremacist that wants to destroy the country, did you? Bet you didn’t realize that your reverence for the U.S. Constitution was a subversive thing to do, did you? And I’ll also bet that you never imagined that you’d scare the little blue panties off of Captain America!

GANOOSH!

Soon the entire rightosphere was raging with animus and fury, overcome by a frightful and all-consuming hunger for vengeance! Rich Johnston has the overview. Even Glenn Beck, crying, screaming superstar of the political rightiest, devoted some airtime to the comic. Fox News grabbed the story and made much hay out of story writer Brubaker’s left-leaning Twitter-expressed politics. Faced with this uproar, Marvel hastily damage controlled to say “it’s part one of the story, give us a chance to show you the whole picture” and “we didn’t mean for it to specifically be a tea party rally”.

SMACKASH!

Meanwhile, comics people cashed in their copies of the suddenly-in-demand Cap 602 for easy cash money.

KACHING!

And now the whole storm is gone and forgotten, except not by me because I found a copy of Cap 602 and of course I bought it. Because I had to see for myself what the fuss was all about. And here’s the thing: there isn’t much to get fussed about, here. To the extent there is, it’s in the plan to get in with the anti-government extremists by punching out a black civil servant. Even in the shorthand and broad-strokes storytelling of comics, that’s kinda weak.

What I like about this whole saga is how perfectly it encapsulates the way popular politics works in the U.S. right now. (Similar patterns are apparent elsewhere, but in the U.S. this process is very well-established.) The network of conservative blogs, always voracious for content, grab on to anything that emerges in their network and start howling enthusiastically. When enough of them do this, it works its way through to the radio hosts, and if it gets play there it finally surfaces into the Fox News circuit. If it still has legs, it will go on to all those mouthpiece shows Fox has clogging its broadcast schedule. The fundamental narrative is always one of conservative victimization.

It’s an amazing system with a slick and efficient beauty. To use the jargon, the Republicans have figured out how to crowdsource their propaganda machine. I have to admire it. But it is horrible, too, because it’s all sound and fury with no real thought or analysis. Everyone grabbed on and started whacking without much care to check the validity of the initial complaint. Indeed, the bit of the original post that had some merit (the supposed subtext of racism to the IRS agent scene) fell by the wayside immediately. The story just became about that one picture of the tea party rally, evaluated solely in the context of frothing blog posts. Such is the nature of this machine – it generates noise and anger and emails and phone calls, but it doesn’t generate anything remotely like understanding.

Which has been to the amusement of those who’ve followed the Captain America character, whose writers have an unsurprising history of making none-too-subtle political points with their work. In his first ever appearance, he was punching out Hitler on the cover of his new comic – which was remarkable because the U.S.A. wasn’t even in the war at that stage.

And then (as the Slog notes) there was the time Cap found out Richard Nixon was involved in a criminal conspiracy, and watched as Nixon shot himself in the Oval Office.

Or the time Ronald Reagan turned into an evil snake-man.

5 thoughts on “Captain America #602”

  1. Not to mention Mark Millar’s contribution to things, the post-9/11 “What do you think this “A” on my forehead stands for – France?”

    For as long as I’ve been aware of this character I’ve genuinely never understood – do I have to be an Amurrikin to ‘get’ him?

  2. Picky point, but I think you have the culmination of the process the wrong way round. The impression I have is that Fox like to present their *news* shows as factual (“we report, you decide”). So the right-wing tossycock du jour is first presented on the mouthpiece shows, the Hannity and O’Reilly things that are acknowledged as being opinion. This then gives the news shows the figleaf of “it’s being reported that…” or “claims are growing that…” or “there’s outrage that…” — i.e. reporting the nonsense by purporting the report the *controversy* over the nonsense — conveniently ignoring that the alleged controversy was manufactured in the next studio down the hall.

    The end result is, of course, the same — I just find it an interesting sidelight on how the Wurlitzer works.

    Also, I don’t actually follow US right-wing media, so I’m kinda going by secondary sources here. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if I’ve got the wrong end of the stick.

  3. Jets: Yeah, I think you do. I have a lot of love for Captain America because he’s so obviously a tool for playing around with imagery of nationalism, patriotism, etc. Writers never stop at the superficial level – at least, not since the 60s – so Cap’s always embroiled in symbolic explorations of these ideas. There was a great 70s issue where a disillusioned Cap did battle with a giant statue of Abraham Lincoln, and it was goofy supers antics at the same time as being a cool symbolic game. That said, I think his comic has only rarely been *good*, but it always tries a bit harder than other comics. Mostly, even the failures are noble.

    Millar’s “A is for France” was an hysterical line, especially because Millar is Scottish with (as I understand it) very left-wing politics. His Cap was a mix of satire and playing-to-the-galleries, both things Millar excels at.

    Ivan: I think we’re both right – I’m presenting one version of how stories rise, but there are others. You’re dead right that those mouthpieces shows often take the lead and the news shows follow along in the manner you say, but it can also work the way described here. The whole thing is massively dispiriting, except for the occasional blessed moment of schadenfreude like when Obama was elected and Fox had to report it in great detail.

  4. I’m thinking I should maybe start reading Captain America for political tips… seeing is how he is such a subversive lefty and all 🙂

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