Marvel recently announced that their heroes would start acting like heroes again. So what were they doing, running crack houses?

After seven years of grim and grimmer story lines, including a superhero “civil war” that pitted Iron Man against Spider-Man and the death of Captain America, Marvel Comics will usher in a more optimistic “Heroic Age” approach in May.

“Heroes will be heroes again,” says Marvel editor in chief Joe Quesada. “They’ve gone through hell and they’re back to being good guys — a throwback to the early days of the Marvel Universe, with more of a swashbuckling feel.”

What does “swashbuckling,” which refers to pirates, have to do with heroism? Quesada went on to explain that Captain America, Iron Man and Thor would be working together again instead of acting like foes. Suddenly, WTF? appears over the scene like the Batsignal. How does working together make them heroes exactly? In the “Dark Reign” series of stories at Marvel last year, a bunch of Super-villains led by Norman (Green Goblin) Osborn had taken over the Avengers and were “working together,” trying to kill off the real heroes. Under the guise of helping people. How progressive. But that’s not very heroic.

The problem is, Marvel, like DC to a large extent, is run by and largely created by Progs these days. People who mostly adhere to the “progressive” worldview. There isn’t much diversity of political thought over at these companies. Progs tend to exclude those who don’t follow the party line. They feel more comfortable in a groupthink environment. And this leads to a kind of “bubble mentality” that comes with living in an echo chamber. In the case of Marvel it sometimes becomes unintentionally rank — with a lot of Obama worship — from Spider-Man teaming up with the Prez to Captain America saluting and praising him in the “Who Will Wield the Shield.” There sure wasn’t too much positive being said about Bush during his administration in comics, when they mentioned him at all. But Obama has been praised and venerated from the get go. Like his Nobel prize for just showing up, the comic world’s been awfully uncritical of a president who’s sinking faster in the polls than any president since Eisenhower.

But coincidentally or not, Obama’s first year in office is also the year of the Dark Reign, where villains took over as “protectors” of America and increased the corruption in all the government agencies. Isn’t that ironic, as Alanis might sing? The heroes were on the run, but now there’s a new battle called Seige where the heroes are fighting back against the ersatz heroes of Dark Reign. Hopefully, that will reset things back to “normalcy” in the Marvel Universe.

But that doesn’t get around the fact that ugly politics occasionally show up in their books.

Disclosure time: I know Brian Michael Bendis, the architect of the current Marvel plot-lines like Dark Reign and Seige, very well. I also know Captain America writer Ed Brubaker fairly well, having known him almost since he was a teenager (and Bendis from back when he had hair). I like them, so I’m not going to bash them or anything. But I do need to point out where their politics can be a problem. Bendis is pretty smart about keeping his on the down low. From what I’ve read of his work, and I’ve read a lot, it generally doesn’t creep in that much. Just a dot here and there like you’d expect from a Hollywood writer. Brubaker lives in the San Francisco Bay area. And occasionally he’s thrown in some lefty views in his work. He generally doesn’t as a rule. But his latest Captain America crosses the line and it needs addressing.

Captain America #602, the latest issue, features a stand in for Cap, who was once his sidekick, Bucky Barnes. Bucky was “dead,” but has been revived from being a long term Soviet sleeper agent. He’s supposedly on our side again. Bucky/Cap and his sidekick, the Falcon, head to Idaho to stop a rogue version of Captain America from the 1950s (uh oh: 1950s = evil!) who’s allied himself with extremists, apparently. (The ’50s Captain America is from a classic 1970s story by Steve Englehart.) So what do they see when they go to Boise to find him? Why, marching “teabaggers,” of course.

As the Falcon (a black character) describes it: “A bunch of angry white folk.” And they’re carrying signs protesting high taxes and socialism. So naturally, they’re a bunch of evil rednecks, right? I mean, there are no “black faces there” not even the minstrel kind. Here is how Brubaker explains the story.

I’m trying not to put politics in the comics necessarily, but it’s hard when you’re doing a comic called Captain America not to reflect the world around you to some degree. I’d been planning this story for six months and suddenly there were all these tea parties everywhere. Since the tide has changed in government and the Democrats are in charge, the people who were in power for eight years are out in the wilderness, and they feel like they don’t have a voice anymore. And we’ve got this ’50s Cap who doesn’t know what he’s going to do. As I was planning this story, Obama won, and people start having tea parties and carrying signs that say “Obama is a Nazi” and it’s like “Oh God!” So I’m dealing a little with the disgruntled part of America in this storyline. It gets to both sides of it because I’m trying to be fair and balanced. [Laughs] I never set out to mock people…well, I do in life, but not in my work. I think whenever you’re writing a character you have to try and see their side of the story sympathetically. So this ’50s Cap as a character is someone who I’ve always seen sympathetically because his viewpoint is not mine, but I can get into his head and see where he’s coming from.

Well, first off he’s using the false premise so many Democrats have about the tea parties. That it’s specifically anti-Obama. That it’s all Republicans. All White people. Not surprising if Brubaker watched the usual MSM channels because that’s the narrative they’re selling. The truth is that many have left the Republican AND Democrats to become Independents because they’re sick of the way both parties have acted in the last decade. They’re tired of the games both parties have been playing. The tea party movement is Independent. And its anti-tax message is all about holding the government accountable for wasting our resources. Some tea partiers consider the wars a waste of money, some consider bureaucracy a waste. Many are sick of the nanny state. Many are sick of being pushed around and told that they’re stupid by media elites. But this comic has it that they’re all White (it’s set in Idaho, hello?). The Falcon goes into some redneck bar as a tax collector to get the attention of the ’50s Captain America and quickly gets pummeled by all the rednecks in Caterpillar hats — because that’s what they do to his kind around there, or something.

Needless to say, the scene is another classic lefty trope. But as #602 is part one, and the set up for part two, we’ll have to reserve judgement to see how he shows the “other side” in the next issue.

The subtext of this story is what’s the problem. Here we have Captain America going after people who are protesting government policies and taxation, which is not only their right, they’re doing it peacefully. But because they are protesting the government of Obama, that demands Captain America try to stop them? What kind of hero is this? OK, yes, he’s really there for the 50s Captain America who wants to be a “revolutionary.” But he’s somehow tied to the “tea baggers.” Again, tea party people aren’t violent. They cleaned up after their Washington DC protest site unlike the Obama inauguration people. But hey, any chance to stick it to the protesters. Because protest is wrong, man. When Democrats are in power, anyway.

So, let’s look at this in overview. The American government has put psychotic criminals in charge of the Avengers (still ongoing at the time of this story apparently), but the Bucky Captain America is trying to stop a peaceful protest of the government because that’s wrong? In other words, he is defending a fascist state and oppressing the little guy. That’s heroism, man! Stick it to those “teabaggers.”

Spider-Man co-creator Steve Ditko, an Objectivist, famously asked a bunch of comic pros if they could define what a hero was, and they couldn’t. You have to wonder if he would get the same response from the comics writers at Marvel and DC today.

It’s a problem if these companies really want readers. They’ve alienated a lot of them since their last heyday, the early 1990s. Considering that this is a center-right country it’s really not a great idea to keep pushing politics that are increasingly unpopular. Better to not get political at all, or at least know what you’re talking about.

And if you want to write about heroes, know what the word really stands for.

The 1970s showed the once-invincible comic book super-heroes to be losers, in attitude and sales. Watergate had disillusioned the super-patriot Captain America with a storyline implying Nixon was the head of a terrorist group. The Captain trashes his outfit and becomes Nomad, The Man without a Country. My 11-year-old mind thought this was ridiculous, as Cap was originally a Depression-era 98-pound weakling until given a Super Soldier serum to bulk up and fight Nazis. It was unlikely that one of the “Greatest Generation” would bail on his country so readily. Even then I realized that this development merely mirrored a hippie writer’s attitude more than staying true to a character’s origins. 

Super-heroes became bleaker and even homicidal in the 1980s. The Punisher, a murderous vigilante, has become a top Marvel character. The Dark Knight Returns, a re-imagining of Batman, introduced an elderly caped crusader fighting the corrupt U.S. government represented by a stoogish Superman. Watchmen was set in a dystopic alternate reality where Nixon is still president and the super-group is made up of, among other miscreants, a rapist and mass murderer. It was a transmutation of established super-heroes from the 60s with Steve Ditko’s Objectivist hero The Question recast as the psychotic Rorschach. 

Ironically, while super-heroes have become leaders in the Hollywood box office, these films don’t help comics’ diminishing sales. In the 1940s, if a comic didn’t sell over a million copies it was cancelled. By the 80s, the cut-off point was 100,000 copies. Now companies are extremely happy selling 10,000 copies. The only time sales increase is when the publishers appeal to diehard collectors by releasing a title with multiple variant covers, and they gotta have ‘em all, or a new first issue of a popular character. Comic sales are at an all-time low and basically kept alive as merchandise-generators for film and other products. Time-Warner recently moved DC Comics from their publishing stable to the film division. Disney has bought Marvel Comics and it wasn’t for the stellar sales of their publications. 

One reason comic sales in general have dropped is because it is a one-genre medium (though there’s still Archie!). It’s as if the movie industry only made westerns and not comedies, science fiction, romance or other types of films. The industry has also ghettoized itself with the advent of the direct sales system. As sales withered on the newsstand (along with newsstands themselves), comic stores popped up with a new distribution paradigm. Copies that weren’t sold on the newsstand were sent back to the distributor for credit. With direct sales the books are non-returnable. They sell a lot less but they’re guaranteed sales. At first a supplement to newsstand distribution, like subscriptions, they are now the main source of revenue. 

Lower print runs have been blamed on the usual suspects; television, video games and the Internet. In fact publishers are marketing to the hard-core fanboy, an increasingly shrinking demographic. Stan Lee had introduced on-going storylines and continuity throughout his books. Earlier stories rarely continued and various super-heroes almost never interacted. Anyone could pick up a comic and read a self-contained story with a beginning and end. Now Stan’s continuity has mutated into ridiculous proportions with plot lines crossing over multiple issues and titles. The casual reader cannot pick up a singular issue and enjoy it, let alone understand it. One has to know the convoluted backgrounds of hundreds of characters or it won’t make any sense. There are obviously more people who might want to read comics than just comic geeks, but they can’t begin to unravel the catechism of modern super-heroes. Still more can’t find comics outside of comic book specialty shops and may not dare enter a place festooned with images of veiny, muscled goons lugging weapons and dripping blood. 

Super hero movies are popular for the same reason comics used to be attractive. They take you to a world of stunning visuals, exciting situations and heroic characters… unfortunately, the films are now beginning to fall in the same trap as comics. The most recent Batman and Spider-Man films featured the characters as darker, borderline evil, individuals and Marvel plans to introduce continuity to their movies. They will release new films with Captain America, Thor, Ant Man and others and then mush them all together with Iron Man and Hulk in an Avengers film. People who may have missed an earlier episode may not bother to see a later one where you’re expected to know all the characters’ baggage. 

Most disappointing in the superhero film trend was Superman Returns. The quintessential American super-hero becomes a metrosexual who ditches his baby mama Lois Lane for an outer space road trip to find himself and it tanked at the box office. The film pointedly refers to him fighting for truth and justice, but it’s not cool to mention the American way. Even the fabled Justice League of America is now termed the Justice League in a nod to one-worldness. 

It’s nearly impossible to find a comic that doesn’t star an angst-ridden anti-hero. The end of exceptional American super-heroes is here.

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I’m told that it would be considered ‘controversial’ for such a pop icon to take on today’s jihadists, but the controversy to me is that the most patriotic superhero of all time is still MIA against Jihad. For a time after 9/11, I was naive enough to believe I could write and draw a Captain America story where the jihadist’s get what’s coming to them, with no apology and with full fury. I stopped cold when I realized there’d be no chance in hell of Marvel Comics allowing Cap to say and do what had to be said and done against this enemy. I wised up and created the perfect enemy against Jihad. For more on that, please visit my blog.

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Any resemblance?

This week’s special edition profile features someone who took part in the first ever Road 2 Recovery event and is the exact image of what you would hope your son or daughter could grow up to be, We hope you read this story and remember what makes America great. 

One of the greatest characters in the comics is Captain America. Captain America had superhuman power and saved the US from any evil. Meet a real life version: Kent Solheim. 

On July 27, 2007, Captain Kent Solheim, participated in an operation designed to capture a senior leader of the infamous Mahdi Army (High Value Target) in the city of Karbala, Iraq. 

Solheim’s team “fast roped” from helicopters into the area. The insurgents attacked the American forces from three sides with rocket-propelled grenades and AK-47s. 

With the insurgents targeting one of the American positions, Solheim aggressively maneuvered his men to reinforce the beleaguered soldiers. It was then that he noticed an insurgent armed with an RPG, less than ten meters away from his position. Disregarding any concern for himself, he bravely charged forward, shot and killed the insurgent, saving the Americans in the nick of time.

Realizing that the US forces in the building were in grave danger, Solheim exposed himself to enemy fire in order to gain a better position to cover the other soldiers in his unit. From this location, he managed to limit the insurgent fire on his team. In the final moments of the engagement he rounded a corner and he found himself face to face with an AK-47-wielding Mahdi fighter. Solheim made a split second decision, firing at and killing the insurgent. However, as the terrorist fell to the ground fatally wounded, he let loose one last burst from his AK-47, which wounded Solheim in the legs and back.

Solheim with Ferris Butler

Despite being wounded in both legs and his back, Solheim shot three enemy soldiers in the encounter and his actions earned him the Silver Star. He has also been awarded a Bronze Star Medal with two Oak Leaf Clusters, Purple Heart Medal, Meritorious Service Medal, Army Commendation Medal with three Oak Leaf Clusters.

Thanks to Captain Solheim’s heroic actions, dozens of American lives were saved.

 
On the way to Lowes Motor Speedway

Solheim suffered severe nerve damage to his right leg that made him wheelchair bound. Solheim was not one to sit still and once fitted with a special brace, he decided that cycling would be a great way to get back in shape and realize his goal of going back on active duty. Initially using a special crank adapter to allow him to pedal smoothly, Solheim was soon able to regain enough range of motion to allow him to join the R2R Challenge last May that finished with a lap around Lowes Motor Speedway prior to the Coca-Cola 600. 

Capt. America made it back to Bragg and was assigned to Headquarters Company, Support Battalion, 1st Special Warfare Training Group (Airborne) at the U.S. Army John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School, where he served as the company commander. 

Riding with Mike McNaughton 

He was very happy to be back riding on a regular basis and enjoying being able to use his knowledge and experience to help those that will follow him to Iraq and Afghanistan. 

Today, March 2, Solheim, promoted to Major last week, will have his leg amputated below the knee at Walter Reed due to pain and loss of function from his encounter more than 17 months after that mission on July 27. While he will be out of action while undergoing rehab, he knows that he will be back in action soon and is already talking about going for a bike ride. In fact, he brought his bike in the truck of his car waiting for the day he gets to ride. 

Despite this temporary setback, he plans to participate in the Road 2 Recovery Memorial Challenge in May from Washington DC to Virginia Beach. The ride will end with a concert by American Idol winner David Cook. 

In the comics, Captain America was the alter ego of Steve Rogers, a sickly young man who was enhanced to the peak of perfection. In real life, Capt. Solheim, now Major Solheim, will be enhanced back to perfection with a new limb.

For more Info see: TheRoad2Recovery.org, and join us on Facebook