Thursday, March 08, 2007

Why I'm Not Up In Arms About Captain America

Now, we're dealing with real acid here. So I want to see SPOILERS, people, SPOILERS!

So my fellow blog-o-pimps are all a flutter about certain recent events. So why haven't I weighed in about this supposedly epic turn? Why am I not upset about The Death Of Captain America? I give unto you this, from the top of my head:

List of Marvel Comic Book Characters Who Have Died and Returned:

Jean Grey
Aunt May
Mary Jane
Norman Osborne
Captain Marv-El
Thor
Hawkeye
Bucky Barnes
Elektra
Wolverine
Spider-Man

And let us not forget -

CAPTAIN AMERICA.
TWICE.


During all this hoop-lah, people seem to forget that apparently dying and coming back to life is part of the man's Origin Story. He also seemed to die less than 10 years ago, and you can read an amazing issue dealing with his apparent death in issue #50 (pictured).

It's got work from Jim Mahfood, Kevin Maguire, and Evan Dorkin, and contains one of my favorite Doctor Doom moments ever captured in a single panel. But issues later Cap came back.

The reason all these characters come back to life is that they represent something larger than the toys and t-shirts they adorn. Super-Heroes like the ones mentioned are modern myth and they'll never really die.

But Marvel's got people talking again. They've got main-stream media outlets covering comics, and from what I've heard, Brubaker's got some great stories to tell.

So in the end, Steve Rogers will be back, but it'll at least be an interesting time until he does.

-casey-

2 comments:

Kevin Church said...

I wouldn't describe my reaction as a-flutter at all. Cynical, yes. The link provided by you is a reaction to a crazed reaction.

MovieBob said...

I'll admit to getting choked up reading it, quite literally. I honestly didn't see it coming, and had managed to avoid all the news and spoilers in the media between waking, work and the comic shop. Yes, of course he'll come back. NOT EVEN Bucky stays dead. But in the context of the story... yeah, color me the grown man tearing up a bit over a comic.

I think it's mainly because A.) Brubaker is a damn, DAMN good writer especially on this title, and B.) it really did hit me a shocker: I honestly figured that since Cap had survived the Civil War and since sending him to trial over it would've been a new sort of story to tell, the "bigness" here would be something like Cap pleading guilty, or the unveiling of a "new" pro-registration Cap.