one thing that pisses me off about this hydracap bullshit that nick spencer is trying to push is the fact that he’s trying to push it as the ultimate canon. here’s WHY that pisses me off:
nick spencer has pretty much admitted that hydracap was done purely for shock factor:
So I started asking, who’s the worst person it could possibly be? It was really obvious straight away that there’s nobody who could do more damage and nobody that could be a more valuable Hydra plant than Steve Rogers. That was really the genesis.
even with this confession he’s really trying to play it off like this is the ultimate canon (even though he pretty much had to alter steve rogers’ canon childhood experience for his shitty idea to work)
next, trying to push it as the ultimate canon shows COMPLETE AND UTTER disrespect to the original origin and creators of captain america because nick spencer is pretty much saying “this character that was created during WW2 by Jewish writers as a symbol of hope for Jewish people? yea he’s actually been a nazi all along”
really? of all the stories to push as the ultimate canon you think the one that grossly mischaracterizes steve rogers is the best one? the one that is beyond disrespectful to the original creators and to Jewish fans? are you fucking serious?
shit at least all the other comic book series in the captain america franchise gave steve rogers the characterization he deserved
stop fucking trying to turn one of the most beloved and most realistically human superheroes into a supervillain and trying to make it so that no one ever had the right to love him in the first place because “he’s been hydra all along”
stop acting like your sorry excuse for writing is the ultimate canon and stop acting like steve rogers was never the little guy from brooklyn who fought against injustice even when he was too sick and skinny and weak to win
in conclusion i hope Captain America: Steve Rogers flops so fucking badly that Marvel and the writers have to issue a public apology also nick spencer is antisemitic
TLDR: nick spencer trying to push his atrocious mischaracterization of steve rogers as ultimate canon is a problem because it’s beyond disrespectful to Joe Simon and Jack Kirby and to Jewish fans, to non-Jewish fans (for different reasons), to Steve Rogers as a character, and to the Captain America franchise as a whole, ESPECIALLY since it was all done for shock factor
I know the timing of the whole “give Captain America a boyfriend”/”nah, we’ll make him a Nazi instead” thing was accidental, but I do think it highlights a pretty huge problem with Marvel that’s been building for a while.
Namely – why was this necessary?
Nick Spencer and his eminently punchable face are going around bragging that he’s the most hated man in America for his big idea. And Marvel is letting him. Which tells me that they agree that this is *~game changing~* and *~revolutionary~* for reasons that aren’t the worst possible reasons.
Why did Marvel need something “game changing” like this?
This was what their big push for diversity was supposed to be. Something to bring them up to speed with the way the world really was. They were so proud of themselves for giving the mantle of Captain America to a black man and letting a woman wield Mjolnir.
And now this.
Now, people more knowledgeable than me have pointed out how broken the comics industry is. That $3 – $4 USD for less than 30 pages and 10 minutes of reading once a month (usually whether you pay for the digital or physical version) is seven kinds of bullshit. And yet it’s those 30 physical pages that determine whether a series you love lives or dies. Digital sales generally don’t count, for some ungodly reason.
Comic sales are generally down across the board, just because the vast majority of people cannot afford that nonsense. We want to support these series. We genuinely cannot, or at least we can’t support them according to the metric that Marvel has set, a metric that should really go the way of the Nielson ratings.
But since it hasn’t, I’m starting to wonder if Marvel really has decided that oh noez, diversity doesn’t sell despite years upon years of evidence to the contrary, especially in movies, a.k.a the industry that’s making them more money than God.
I wonder if this isn’t a calculated effort on their part to appeal to the one demographic that’s pretty much universally in a position to see this as a *~brilliant, shocking twist~* rather than a betrayal and a slap in the face, simply because they’ve generally never known what it’s like to have someone you thought was a friend turn out to be an oppressive, bigoted monster. The demographic that can read the writer saying that he slapped people in the face and applaud him for it. And, coincidentally, the one demographic that has all the disposable income.
Marvel is deliberately trying to appeal to straight white men at the expense of minorities and marginalized groups. Their hands aren’t tied by this. This isn’t one rogue creator. This was calculated and condoned. They had to know that this would hurt and upset people and cost them readers – primarily minority readers, and especially Jewish readers. They decided that those readers didn’t matter, because white men have always been there to pad their bottom line before.
We are being punished for our poorness with Captain America as a goddamn Nazi.
[SPOILERS FOR CAPTAIN AMERICA: STEVE ROGERS #1 BELOW]
Yesterday, Marvel released the first issue of Captain America: Steve Rogers by Nick Spencer, Jesus Saiz, and Joe Caramagna. It’s a pretty boilerplate (albeit beautifully depicted) story of a rejuvenated Steve Rogers back in the field…right up until he tosses an ally to his death and declares “Hail Hydra” in a final page splash. The whole thing is intercut with flashbacks to his childhood of a neighbor inviting Steve’s mother to a Hydra meeting, thus implying that Steve was indoctrinated as a child and has been a sleeper agent of Hydra all along.
This is comics, right? Unleash a shocking twist to get readers to pick up the next issue! Make everything All-New All-Different for a few months until things settle back into the status quo! Have a character behave so incongruously that fans just have to know why!
Except.
Except this is different than having Superman be a jackass to Lois and Jimmy on the cover of some Silver Age issue of Action. This is different than a kiss or a death or a resurrection. This is even different than the usual “wildly out of character” stunts that would normally have readers up in arms, like Batman using a gun.
Quick comics history lesson: Captain America was created in 1941 by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby as a superpowered, super-patriotic soldier fighting the Axis forces. He was famously depicted punching out Adolf Hitler on the cover of his first appearance, inCaptain America Comics #1—which hit stands in December 1940, a full year before Pearl Harbor and before the United States joined World War II, making that cover a bold political statement.
You probably already knew that, but I’d invite you to think about it for a minute. In early 1941, a significant percentage of the American population was still staunchly isolationist. Yet more Americans were pro-Axis. The Nazi Party was not the unquestionably evil cartoon villains we’re familiar with today; coming out in strong opposition to them was not a given. It was a risky choice.
And Simon and Kirby—born Hymie Simon and Jacob Kurtzberg—were not making it lightly. Like most of the biggest names in the Golden Age of comics, they were Jewish. They had family and friends back in Europe who were losing their homes, their freedom, and eventually their lives to the Holocaust. The creation of Captain America was deeply personal and deeply political.
Ever since, Steve Rogers has stood in opposition to tyranny, prejudice, and genocide. While other characters have their backstories rolled up behind them as the decades march on to keep them young and relevant, Cap is never removed from his original context. He can’t be. To do so would empty the character of all meaning.
But yesterday, that’s what Marvel did.
Look, this isn’t my first rodeo. I know how comics work. He’s a Skrull, or a triple agent, or these are implanted memories, or it’s a time travel switcheroo, or, or, or. There’s a thousand ways Marvel can undo this reveal—and they will, of course, because they’re not about to just throw away a multi-billion dollar piece of IP. Steve Rogers is not going to stay Hydra any more than Superman stayed dead.
But Nazis (yes, yes, I know 616 Hydra doesn’t have the same 1:1 relationship with Nazism that MCU Hydra does) are not a wacky pretend bad guy, something I think geek media and pop culture too often forgets. They were a very real threat that existed in living memory. They are the reason I can’t go back to the villages my great-grandparents are from, because those communities were murdered. They are the reason I find my family name on Holocaust memorials. They are the perpetrators of unspeakable, uncountable, very real atrocities.
But writer Nick Spencer and editor Tom Brevoort are more concerned with making this “something new and unexpected”; with having “fun” and getting readers “invested in Hydra characters.” Because what’s more fun than downplaying genocide?
I’m not going to pretend to be cool here. I’m emotional. This is emotional. Captain America isn’t even my usual guy to get incandescently angry over the erasure of his coded Jewish history— that’s Kal-El, the Moses of Krypton—but reading this comic made me feel sick to my stomach. Reading the flippant responses of many non-Jewish readers—including friends—has brought me to tears. Somehow a community that gets up in arms about whether or not Batman has a yellow circle behind his logo seems to think that being angry about this is stupid, or indicative of a lack of experience with comics.
So let me be very clear: I don’t care if this gets undone next year, next month, next week. I know it’s clickbait disguised as storytelling. I am not angry because omg how dare you ruin Steve Rogers forever.
I am angry because how dare you use eleven million deaths as clickbait.
I am angry because Steve Rogers’s Jewish creators literally fought in a war against the organization Marvel has made him a part of to grab headlines.
I am angry because the very real pain of the Jewish community has been dismissed since this news leaked on Tuesday night as “Twitter outrage.”
If this story doesn’t hurt you? Good. I’m genuinely glad. I don’t want anyone else to have the gorge rise in their throat when they read the entertainment news. I love comics. I don’t want them to make people feel angry and betrayed. But understand that not feeling that way comes from a place of privilege, and don’t dismiss the concerns of those of us who are upset just because you have the luxury not to be.
I’ve been trying to think of how to finish this post, but I don’t think I can say it better than my friend and fellow Panelteer Sigrid Ellis did here:
And knowing that this wound is temporary, that it’s for the sake of sales and money and a story beat, that just makes it hurt more, not less. How little we must matter, the people who needed Steve to be the defender of the underdog and the weak, how little we must matter if betraying us for a story beat is so easy.
How little must we matter. The people who created Captain America, and Superman, and countless other heroes like them. The people who need him. The people whose history and suffering and hope, as we stood on the brink of annihilation, gave you your weekly entertainment and your fun thought experiment, 75 years later.
SO SPOILER ALERT FOR Steve Rogers: Captain America #1…
What the ever loving god damn fuck… Yall took the brain child of two JEWISH men… one of whom changed his name to avoid Antisemitism and made him an actual NAZI. Captain America was created to pressure America to do something about the Shoah, and the deaths of 11 million innocent people. It is morally inexcusable to turn him into everything he was supposed to fight against, in order to tell a story. Especially as we enter an era where Xenophobia is as prevalent as it has ever been and Antisemitism has reached levels that have not been seen since WWII. Captain America was created to preach tolerance and fight for equality not hate. I understand the need to sell comics, but this has crossed the line.
a list of compromises offered by tony during cacw:
we agree to this now or it’ll be done to us later
we don’t have to follow shield or hydra, but we should follow the UN
i just want steve as part of the team, let’s come to an agreement and we can forget all this bad blood
wanda has to be in a prison or contained, and i’d rather put her up in a house where she can be comfortable and kept company by vision until i can have her reinstated
i’ll admit bucky to a psychiatric facility in the US where he can be cared for and kept safe
sign the accords now for show, and we can amend all the details later
i believe you that bucky is innocent and that zemo is behind this, and i’m coming to help you to fight him even though you didn’t trust me enough to explain any of this
a list of compromises offered by steve during cacw:
footage not found
A compromise is when each party makes a concession, and the other party agrees to that concession; it’s mutual middle ground in order to settle an argument. Or alternatively, it’s when a higher power accepts standards that are lower than it originally desired in order to meet an intended goal. Nothing you listed is a compromise by any definition.
“We agree to this now or it’ll be done to us later.” – This is not a compromise. This is a threat. “Do this now, or they will force you later,” is not any kind of concession.
“We don’t have to follow SHIELD or Hydra, but we should follow the UN.”– This is also not a compromise. This is a viewpoint of an argument. It’s also an opinion that has no basis; the UN, like SHIELD, is a high-level governing body operating on an agenda. Even without Hydra infiltrating SHIELD, that agenda was dangerous in SHIELD (remember those helicarriers approved by Fury?).
“I just want Steve as part of the team, let’s come to an agreement and we can forget all this bad blood.”– This is also not a compromise. This is a fact of the document. If Steve signs it, he’s no longer a ‘villain’ and will be part of Tony’s team. Just like Tony’s responsibility for the Sokovia disaster was waived away once he signed. Facts of the proposed system are not a compromise.
“Wanda has to be in a prison or contained, and I’d rather put her up in a house where she can be comfortable and kept company by Vision until I can have her reinstated.”–No. There cannot be compromise without choice. Tony has taken Wanda’s choice out of her hands, which is no compromise. He can only have her reinstated if she signs the Accords. It’s the equivalent of holding her in the Interrogation Room indefinitely, waiting for the confession, instead of just sending her to prison.
“I’ll admit Bucky to a psychiatric facility in the US where he can be cared for and kept safe.” – Nope, also not a compromise, because of one key detail: Tony actually says “Sign. We can make the last 24 hours legit. Barnes gets transferred to a psych center instead of a Wakandan prison.” He never says ‘I will do this for you,’ but instead is saying, ‘If you sign, this is what the Accords will do.’ Again, this statement is a fact of signing, not any kind of compromise.
“Sign the Accords now for show, and we can amend all the details later.”–This is not a compromise. This is a business manipulation. You don’t sign a binding contract and then negotiate the details. The entire point of a compromise is negotiating before you sign.
“I believe you that Bucky is innocent and that Zemo is behind this, and I’m coming to help you to fight him even though you didn’t trust me enough to explain any of this.”– …This is not a compromise. Tony realized he was 100% wrong about Bucky and went to help. It has nothing to do with the Accords, which Tony ignores here, so it’s not a compromise of them. It’s an apology to Steve… which Steve accepts, making this point even more moot. (Also, Steve literally says, ‘Hear me out,’ before the airport fight scene and tries to explain everything to Tony?)
Also: Steve literally can’t compromise in this situation, because he’s not in a position of power to compromise. The majority power (the UN) is telling him that he must sign or he’ll be forced to retire. Any document that constrains the use of power does not allow for compromise from the affected party – by its very existence. Steve’s concession is already the constraint of power the document will impose – that unequal power dynamic does not give him the ability of compromise. It’s only in Tony’s power to strike a compromise with Steve (and not really – he just thinks he can, but it’s only in the government’s power).
All Steve can do is ask, and he does. He picks up the pen and says, “I’m not saying it’s impossible, but there would have to be safeguards.” And Tony agrees. Thatis a compromise by Tony (…until he says, ‘We’ll amend it once you sign,’ immediately afterwards).
It’s not a threat. It’s a compromise the Avengers as a whole are being asked to make, because if they do not, worse things can and will be done after they have rejected any chance of control. As Natasha says, “One hand on the wheel still means we can steer.“
The UN is the compromise being offered, which would give the world what it wants (oversight for superhumans) and beholds the Avengers to no one government, as they would be accountable to the 117 countries demanding action and willing to give the Avengers and all other future signatories latitude in their sovereign borders. This is kind of the very definition of compromise.
On the face of things, it doesn’t look like a compromise, but it actually is. Steve at this point knows what he’s doing has been made illegal, and does it anyway. Tony is pulling every string he has to try and ensure that Captain America, his hero and the hero of millions, isn’t made into a villain. He’s directly opposed Tony at this point; the compromise of keeping the Avengers together necessitates that Tony forget how much of an asshole Steve is being, and that Steve acknowledges that perhaps he doesn’t know what’s best for the world and his team.
Funny thing you should mention, choice. Where was Wanda’s choice when Steve made the decision to bring her, green and inexperienced and not in full control of her powers, to hunt Brock Rumlow, a man who held his own against Steve in sparring? Where was Wanda’s choice when Clint showed up and guilt-tripped her into leaving the house which she didn’t even want to do to begin with? Wanda is not an American citizen, and as far as the US government is concerned, can be labeled a terrorist any time they see fit to do the paperwork. And here’s the compromise: if she wants to legally stay in the country and not be held responsible for her actions in enabling Ultron to not only be born but threaten the world, she needs to sign the Accords to be reinstated to the team. The compromise of keeping her at the Avengers compound lies in otherwise she will go to prison, perhaps even Gitmo, as an uncontrollable terrorist.
… You’ve got to be kidding me now. Bucky, despite being a victim, is at this point viewed by the general public as not only the terrorist responsible for killing King T’Chaka (for which he is actually innocent), but also as a HYDRA agent who has murdered his way across the decades (for which he might not be responsible, but as he says to Steve, “I know [I had no choice]. But I still did [those things].” So what’s the compromise? That he will get psychiatric assessment and help to begin to heal the damage done to him instead of rotting in a prison serving time for crimes he committed but isn’t responsible for because he was mentally compromised.
It’s not a binding contract. It’s legislation. Laws can and are amended all the goddamn time to make them more equitable and fair. It isn’t a business negotiation, it’s getting the framework in place and then tweaking it until all parties are at least satisfied with the terms and conditions.
“I’ll listen to whatever bullshit reason you’ve come up with for the twentieth time so far as to why you can’t do what literally half the people who love you are asking you to do in order to keep the family together if you respect the fact that we’re on a time crunch and I’ve stuck my neck out to make sure that Thunderbolt Ross, you know, the guy responsible for shelling half of Harlem when he wanted Bruce to get angry, doesn’t send out murder squads to take you out as an enemy of the state. I hope you can respect the fact that I’ve spent two thirds of my allotted time just looking for you, and half of what’s left is travel time, so if you want to tell me what you found out, Steve, I will listen, but we have less than twelve hours to ensure you and the idiots following you are not labeled rogue agents or terrorists and are declared kill-on-sight, you’ll get your ass in the quinjet and come with us because it’s us.” Compromise.
Steve has been repeatedly told by T’Challa, Sharon, Tony, Rhodey, Natasha and Vision that he is wrong and it will lead to catastrophic consequences. And he still uses his influence anyway to pull in a retired Avenger who should be waterskiing with his kids, a guy with literally zero clue about all this and is just there because Captain America needs him, and a woman who was guilted by the ex-retired Avenger into attacking her friend, you know the one who promised to use his godlike powers to protect her, and making herself a hunted criminal to satisfy his overblown ego that he’s on the only possible right path.
All he can do is ask? How’s about he tries listening to what half his team and a significant majority of the world are asking him to do? Don’t tell me he has no power to compromise. He’s Captain America, and people will fall all over themselves to help him out because he’s Captain America. And he damn well knows it, even if he never acknowledges it. You think Sam would be a holdout if Steve wasn’t? You think Clint would have come out of retirement? Clint didn’t even sign the Accords when Natasha asked him to, but there he is, geared and armored to help Cap.
Don’t tell me Steve has no ability to compromise. He could have solved everything in half a second by putting pen to paper, but he chose to be arrogant and egotistical and selfish, and the shit thing is, based on the way the movie ends, he’ll never realize how much of a fucking asshole he was, because Marvel loves him and him being in the wrong results in no long-term consequences, ever.
The point you’re missing is not that Tony was offering compromises. Tony was the mouthpiece. These are the compromises being offered to Steve by the majority of the world he has managed to terrify and piss off. He’s the one who chose to flip off everyone asking him to do the responsible thing, proving pretty much indisputably that the only thing he’s fighting for is himself, so he better stop pretending to be a hero.