CAPTAIN AMERICA #25-27
Cap fighting Nazis! What a surprise!

Writer: Dan Jurgens
Artists: Andy Kubert, Dan Green
Colors: Gregory Wright
Letterer: Todd Klein
Three-Issue Story Arc
Published by Marvel Comics 2000
#25/$2.99, #26-27/$1.99

Reviewed by Pindaros

I came up with the idea of reviewing Cap before I read Andrew Wheeler's ‘How 2B Captain America’ in last month's PopImage, so he kind of took the wind out of my sails. I was all set to continue my musings on Cap's role as the Marvel Universe's answer to George Washington's wooden teeth, but that would just be beating a dead icon.

Fortunately for me, when I read the ‘Twisted Tomorrows’ series that took the book into the new millenium, I found a lot to like. I mean, I am a big fan of the way Erik Larsen and Rob Liefeld redid Cap as the cyborg-zombie killing machine Superpatriot; that seems like the ideal way to really show Captain America’s original values have taken the US. But in spite of the hero’s cheesiness, I found myself really enjoying the story.

"But the real pleasure of the book is Andy Kubert's artwork."

One enjoyable contribution is the chemistry between Nick Fury and Cap in the story. Both of them are unrealistically healthy WWII veterans, but Dan Jurgens gets some good scenes out of the different attitudes toward the past of the terminally well-informed Fury and the sleeping-for-most-of-the-century Steve Rogers. It makes for a nice comment on nostalgia and popular culture to have Cap punctuate his life with big-band Jazz and references to radio shows. Even more fun is an emotionally moving gift that Fury has to give, a consequence of the paranoid information gathering of the American security state.

But the real pleasure of the book is Andy Kubert's artwork. Kubert is a wonderful choice for CAPTAIN AMERICA, in that the inevitable influence of his father's style on his own seems particularly apt. The elder Kubert's line always had a sense of weary masculinity to it that made it unforgettable on the covers of DC's war comics in the '60s and '70s. No one has ever done a five o'clock shadow as persuasively as he, and his fluency with perspective and the angles of shots (see his Enemy Ace stories for evidence) capture the chaotic flow of battle in a way that movies never manage.

The credibility of his drawing was particularly useful in the dying years of war comics, when the loss of credibility to both the Code and overuse of cliches made for some amazingly implausible stories. (A favorite of mine is one where the climax involves a Nazi learning to his chagrin that ‘a man with a wooden leg is never without a weapon.’ A consolation that is sure to warm the hearts of all the one-legged men forced to fight on the front lines.)

Credibility is in equally short supply in ‘Twisted Tomorrows,’ so the younger Kubert's patrimony is extremely welcome. Cap first appears on his motorcycle in mid-flight (although it is true that motorcycles fly better than cars) and the laws of physics lose ground from there. Cap's shield is the worst violator of these laws, especially those of conservation of motion. The most remarkable example is integral to the climax of the series, so I'll mention instead how Cap manages to cut through the rotor of a military helicopter with his shield and then catch it as it comes back down.

Mind you, I'm not complaining. But what really makes such excesses palatable is seeing Cap catch his shield one-handed with a patented Sgt. Rock, ‘been there, done that, whatever,’ expression on his face. Likewise, the Nazis that Cap fights are no misguided suburban wimps, but the earnest, grimy killing machines that opposed the Unknown Soldier and the Losers month after month.

But more than the elder Kubert, the depiction of the heroes in this story reflects the influence of Jack Kirby. The hulking, impermeable, irresistible object quality of Cap and Nick Fury, the animal-like imprisonment of the General Colin Powell figure, the Promethean bondage of the Falcon and the General across the heads of two missiles; these are ripped directly from the imagination of the King in his late-sixties, early-seventies heyday.

This latter aspect of the art I found particular pleasing, as it invoked my favorite era of CAPTAIN AMERICA, Kirby's short return to the title in the late '60s. While Cap is often heroic, he is most genuinely super-heroic when he becomes an overbulked spanner in the works of some faceless, hypertechnological organization like AIM. SHIELD vs. AIM, Captain America vs. the Red Skull, all those rocky secret weapons bases; it was just more fun to be an American in the '60s, at least if you were a kid. All those butch John Kennedy figures, whose eroticism was expressed as much in the technology around them as in their appeal to women. I'm talking pre-hairpiece William Shatner, all sweaty and breathless with the veins popping out on his forehead.

Still, any mention of Kirby brings us back to the fact that Cap's enemies in ‘Twisted Tomorrows’ aren't anonymous technocrats, but the Hatemonger and a crew of Nazis. In many respects, the Hatemonger was actually one of Kirby's first hypertechnocrats, introduced back in FANTASTIC FOUR #21 as a figure who drove people to acts of hate and violence by means of a mysterious ray, and who actually turned out to be Adolf Hitler himself. (A first tentative step on the road of parables that leads to the Silver Surfer for Stan and the Fourth World for Jack.)

In this story, however, the Hatemonger only feeds on the hate of others, and is merely the brains for a group of Nazis who would undoubtedly be involved in crimes against humanity in some way or another even without him. What's the deal with Cap and Nazis? Is it the case, as Cap says, that the Nazis and their ideas just don't go away? This seems unlikely given that the Nazis in ‘Twisted Tomorrows’ lack the social realism that has characterized many of Cap's enemies. So perhaps Cap simply needs the Nazis, that ‘the good fight’ of WWII is really the only environment in which his blind patriotism makes all that much sense.

In the abstract, the simple fact of WWII offered a certain clarity to the notion of who a real American was, since hating the Nazis and the Japanese provided a simple test. On the other hand, the actual stories in the first issues of CAPTAIN AMERICA comics, in the forties, undermine this certainty, since they deal largely with espionage and sabotage, positing an enemy within that could undermine the US. Cap was a fantastic ideal for the American soldier, but the times were not so simple that people thought that a single human being, however strong, could take control of significant military objectives. The notion of superheroes in the trenches belongs far more to the paramilitary imagination of Liefeld and his disciples than to the comics of the Golden Age.

It is as a champion of wars within America itself that Cap has always had his place, in spite of his proclaimed affinity with soldiers. For Simon and Kirby the enemy were Nazis, but rather than the jackbooted fanatics of Germany, the Nazis Cap fought moved freely among other Americans as they carried out their dastardly plans. Industrialists, gangsters, intellectuals and ugly foreigners of no specified profession were Cap's true opponents, and it took a lot of detective work and violence to ferret them out.

To dramatize this imagined internal war, Simon and Kirby engaged in a lot of caricature. With the perspective of time, it may seem perfectly sensible to view these portrayals as relics of an unenlightened past. On the other hand, it is interesting to think of what it may have meant for two young Jews to spend their days depicting human monsters with thick European accents. While Captain America was, in his star-spangled glory, a novel creation, the spies and gangsters he fought reflected well-established images of the immigrant-ridden Lower East Side of New York. Many readers of Captain America would probably have viewed the violence-prone Kirby himself as hoodlum rather than hero.

All of this should remind us that Captain America served as one image of the promise that a war with Germany and Japan seemed to offer the young men of America; if they loyally served their country in uniform, they would be taken out of the narrow immigrant communities that seemed to be the extent of the world offered to them. They would go overseas as a name and an irrelevant past, win a war as Americans, and come back as the middle-class WASPs they saw at the movies.

In a sense, Simon and Kirby were living out their own version of the scene at the end of the third GODFATHER movie. When Michael Corleone tells his family that he has enlisted in the Army, they are aghast, sensing that by putting his life on the line for his country, he is turning his back on his obligations to his family. By sending the blond-haired, blue-eyed Captain America to fight stereotypical ethnic hoods, Simon and Kirby declared their antagonism toward ethnic community and their faith in a non-ethnic America that only the War could bring.

In ‘Twisted Tomorrows,’ Captain America remains a talisman for the American psyche against a sense of itself as resistant to this non-ethnic future. But in this case, the enemy within is a rural Western and Midwestern population that increasingly seems strangely fanatic to those living in cities and on the coasts. In my experience, cities are wilder than rural areas, where poverty is likely to limit the ability of the misguided to do anything really terrible. But of course urban guerillas are much less likely to own large guns and live in ‘compounds.’

It's taken me a while to realize that I've actually spent a fair amount of time in the kind of settlement called a ‘compound’ on TV these days, largely because my grandfather called his compound a ‘farm.’ The confusion seems indicative of a fundamental shift in how Americans think about the world these days. Living at a distance from any town, in buildings where you have enough food and fuel to live for months at a time without restocking, surrounded by acres and acres of uninhabited land that you try to keep people and animals from getting into, within a community where people share your beliefs and prejudices; this was, until the last century, the primary form of the American Dream, not a rejection of society.

I'm not entirely sure what to make of the fact that this now seems an obvious environment for Nazis in the same way that the urban immigrant community of New York seemed that for Simon and Kirby. But for better or worse, Jurgens and Kubert found themselves a good environment for Cap to fight in, with plenty of natural obstacles and well-armed enemies and imposing spaces for their battles. ‘Twisted Tomorrows’ is implausible on a lot of levels, but it works as a war, and Captain America at war makes for a pretty great comic.

Recommended (with reservations: contains good action but bizarre patriotism)

Pindaros is a regular contributor to PopImage.

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