A few months back, before The Avengers movie came out, I had a pre-movie open thread in which I discussed why the Captain America movie made me a little bit uncomfortable.
Behind the cut, I’m going to explore a little bit of that discussion again and then recommend a Captain American comic to you all: Captain America: Truth
Here’s an excerpt from that thread:
Setting *THAT* aside, there was the four-color treatment of other, smaller, ugly parts of the past. Captain America’s multicultural crack team of commandos would not have been in the same unit nor would they have been allowed to drink together. They had a Japanese guy come out and say “I’m from Fresno” which, immediately, made me think of the Japanese internment camps. Googling tells me that Fresno *HAD* a Japanese internment camp. This yanked me out of the movie once more.
(You should check out the comments in that post as well… as usual, you guys are a lot more interesting than I am.)
Well, I spoke about this with my friend Parker at work and he told me “Jaybird, there’s a comic I think you should read.” He got me a copy of Captain America: Truth
Whoa.
This is one of those little retconny things that, when you hear about it, it immediately blows your mind and, even as you know that these stories are silly fake stories about silly fake heroes who live in a silly romantic world where violence is always the answer… you find yourself saying “of course they did.”
The art for the comic reminded me of the art for the old Sad Sack comics published by Harvey. Heavy caricatures of everybody, much more emphasis on facial expressions than on backgrounds… but there’s something terribly disconcerting about seeing these familiar caricatures discussing how they’d die before they’d accept a negro transfusion, or seeing them beating up a black NCO behind the latrine for being uppity… or testing failed recipes for the Super Soldier Serum on a handful of black soldiers that had their families told that they had died in combat.
The art, which put me off at first, actually brought me back in whenever I found myself wondering “is this a little heavy-handed?” because, hey, then I’d remember that, yes, the military was not integrated at this point. Yes, Tuskagee was going on at the same time as this comic… I mean, could you describe these things without coming across as heavy-handed? Well, the art helped me acknowledge how deft a touch the writers were actually employing.
Strangely, this comic helped me feel better about the white-washing (no pun intended, seriously) done in the Captain America movie because, while this is a tough topic, it’s not something that everyone has ignored. It’s not swept under the rug. Someone who felt bugged by the treatment in the movie of the various things winked at but never explored could, indeed, go out and find a book like this one to see how Marvel was, in fact, willing to sit down and seriously discuss a lot of the ugly things that don’t make for good summer action movie conversation.
It’s not a fun read, but it is a good read. If you were troubled by those things in the Captain America movie, you should pick this book up.
I agree on every account. I am at once uncomfortable with the whitewashing and also glad that they did it. I haven’t read Truth, mostly because I’m not a Marvel guy and though I was aware of the Captain Tuskegee experiments*, I never knew where that was established. I have issues with some of the ways that Cap has been used to advance a political agenda, but this isn’t one of them.
* – My reaction was the same as yours: makes sense. Interestingly, one of the (many, many) thoughts I had after reading Watchmen was wondering how many Russians died as they tried to create Dr. Moscow.Report
The US must have retried the experiment until it became clear that the Osterman effect wasn’t reproducible. Five times, maybe? Ten? The most we can hope is that they were volunteers.Report
Do you need two of them, though? Especially given that Jon wasn’t viewed as unreliable until later on. When he went off to Mars, then maybe it was a bad time to be a good candidate.
On the other hand, I doubt it would be anything but volunteers on either side. I mean, would you want to create a Dr. Manhattan that is mad at you?Report
No, not again we never did get those stains out the carpet.Report
Do you need two of them, though?
I presume that Jon discovered how great his powers were gradually, as time went on, so at first he seemed to be just a powerful weapon, not a god-like being, and the military would have wanted as many of those as it could get. Good point about volunteers, though.Report
“I have issues with some of the ways that Cap has been used to advance a political agenda, but this isn’t one of them.”
*Looks at publication date.*
2003? Yeah, that’s about right.Report
As much as I hate Joe Q (and I hate him with the hate of one thousand Khans), I don’t know that this story should fall under the same umbrella of him assassinating Captain America whenever Republicans win an election and bringing him back to life when the Democrats do.Report
I kinda think it should because:
-Joe Q was not the first one to have Cap hang up the shield or die under Republican Presidents. That’s just a Captain America/Marvel thing. Even in the What Ifs for the first series run which ran in the 70s, Captain America has been a soapbox against right-wingers. It’s really not just a Joe Q thing.
-This story would have neatly dovetailed into the Florida voting. It probably didn’t come out sooner because, after 9/11, there was a period where we had to show shots of Doom crying and Juggernaut looking for a chicken sandwich. That’s why I said that 2003 was about right for this mini-series to come out.Report
The problem with that, however, is that if we look at who had what policies in, oh, 1942, we find ourselves saying “wait, that’s doesn’t fit the narrative”.
I think it’s more likely that the story came out in 2003 because, crunching the numbers, it couldn’t have come out much sooner (see, for example, Milestone Comics).Report
Who was in office in 1942 is far less relevant than who was being disenfranchised in 1942 in terms of making a political point for a Captain America story published in 2003.Report
I don’t know. This particular story could have played out a hundred ways… and, yes, it’s true that many of those ways could easily be interpreted as an anti-Bush story about an evil Government that does evil things.
It didn’t feel that way to me, though (and I looked for stuff like that). I think it did more of a job of communicating a lot of things that were, sadly, historically accurate.
To be sure, I read the book when Obama was in office… but I can’t imagine the experience of reading the story would be *THAT* different had I read it back when “Bend It Like Beckham” was still in theaters.Report
“…seriously discuss a lot of the ugly things that don’t make for good summer action movie conversation.” Part of the problem is that the vast majority of us are always going to pick the summer action blockbuster over the serious conversation. Which is one reason we continue to have the same old serious problems.Report
credit where credit is due. someone walked the path of thorns.Report