Captain America, RIP
I’m a little surprised at how much coverage the assassination of Captain America is getting. He’s not the best-known comic-book character, and Marvel Comics is renowned for its revolving door of death. I remember around 1987 when they nuked the Hulk — that was pretty impressive to a nine-year-old Daniel McCarthy. They couldn’t possibly bring him back from that: he got nuked, there was nothing left but his shadow burned into the ground. (As it turned out, he was actually teleported away to another dimension at the last minute — lucky, that.) Still, I guess offing Cap in these dying days of the Bush administration does strike a chord with the national mood, or at least mood of the national press.
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March 13th, 2007 at 5:12 am
I think Cap was killed off during Marvel’s superhuman “civil war” , a civil war triggered by a federal Superhero Registration Act. Cap supported the resistance faction in the superhuman community to the SRA and Iron Man, now a federal agency chief, supported the pro-faction. Wikipedia has some of the details here. Cap seems to go through a makeover every few years. WW2 hero, anticommie, civil rights campaigner, you name it, he’s done it. I suspect the latest assassination is the prequel to a new incarnation of a younger replacement Captain America. Even biochemically enhanced WW2 experiments that get frozen in ice for a generation get old after a while. And they had substitutes play Iron Man for a while too. I suspect the new cap will be female.
March 14th, 2007 at 5:04 am
Putting someone new behind the mask was all the rage back in the ’80s. They replaced Iron Man for a couple of years, and there was a new Captain America for a while, too — the government fired Steve Rogers (the original Cap) because he didn’t pay back taxes on his earnings while he was frozen in a block of ice for a decade or two after the Second World War. The Red Skull couldn’t defeat Cap, but the IRS was a whole ‘nother matter. They replaced him with a neocon, too, from what I recall…
March 14th, 2007 at 8:49 am
So the recently departed Cap wasn’t Steve Rogers? Strewth!
March 16th, 2007 at 1:32 am
Is this the new cap? See image here
March 16th, 2007 at 1:34 am
That reminds me of this.