Captain America’s Current Run Recaptures the Comic Book Icon’s Early Boldness

Supposedly, the movie business is suffering from “superhero fatigue” — that’s the only explanation why “The Marvels,” which is certainly one of the better recent Marvel releases, drastically underperformed at the boxoffice. Yet assuming that’s the case, the supreme puppet-master of the so-called Marvel Comic Universe, Kevin Feige, would do well to consider adapting the current run of Captain America into the next big budget Marvel adventure movie. J. Michael Straczynsk and Jesús Saiz have dreamed up a corker of a story that takes place simultaneously in two time periods. Story one: in the present day, Steve Rogers, better known as Captain America, has somehow taken over a semi-abandoned tenement building and is leading the charge to repair and restore it. While he does, Rogers reflects on his past, as well as the larger meaning of what it is to be Captain America. At the same time, a consortium of supervillains, serial killers, and demons from the underworld are gradually planning to use a combination of technology and evil mumbo-jumbo to take over the world — it’s what they do.The contemporary story is less interesting, however, than story number two, which depicts the young Rogers, well before he took the superserum — and before he was suspended in ice for all those decades — encountering American Nazis at 1936 New York.Messrs. Straczynsk and Saiz have rejuvenated the venerable superhero franchise by interjecting a lot of what Rachel Maddow has been talking about in her bestselling book, “Prequel,” and the accompanying podcast, “Ultra,” both of which delineate in disturbing detail the rise of fascists, Nazis, and antisemites in depression-era America. As it turns out, this move is very much true to the history of the character. Captain America was already fighting Nazi villains well before the American entry into WW2; the cover of the first issue, dated December 1940, shows him knocking out Hitler.Although Ms. Maddow doesn’t go into any of this in her works, there already was a strong anti-Nazi sentiment running through popular culture prior to Pearl Harbor. Not surprisingly, this was because the Jewish creators in the various fields were much more attuned to the dangers of the Third Reich earlier than their gentile colleagues. Warner Bros. produced “Confessions of a Nazi Spy,” starring Edward G. Robinson (born Emmanuel Goldberg) in 1939; Irving Berlin was writing songs in support of the Allied war effort at the same time. The beloved entertainer Eddie Cantor was directly challenging antisemite demagogue Father Edward Coughlin and Nazi propagandist George Sylvester Viereck on the radio. The pre-war anti-Hitler stance of Captain America was particularly bold, so much so that creators Hymie “Joe” Simon and Jack Kirby (born Jacob Kurtzberg) were harassed by actual American Nazis. Thankfully, they were protected by New York’s Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia — half-Jewish himself — who was a fan of the early superheroes but not the fascists. What makes the current run of Captain America so enthralling is that it recaptures that early boldness and reminds us why we love Captain America and Steve Rogers to begin with. Just as in his MCU debut, the 2011 “First Avenger,” Rogers proves himself a hero even when he’s still what they used to call a “99-pound weakling” by throwing himself on a bomb to protect his fellow soldiers, and in this current story, Rogers never backs down when he sees brown shirts attacking the defenseless. Issue two has a German agent explaining their plans in a way that seems directly transcribed from “Prequel” and “Ultra”: “We take a group that is too weak to defend themselves and say that they are strong, they are the enemy, they will destroy us unless we destroy them first.” There’s some of the usual comic book chicanery going on; Sue Storm and the Fantastic Four make a gratuitous guest appearance in issue one, and Spider-Man does the same in issue two, and all the while, there’s an occult whoosis running around, but we all know the real story is about the teenage Steve Rogers.The second issue ends with Rogers supporting a family of orthodox Jews who are attacked by a coven of swastika’d thugs. This would all make a great foundation for the next Marvel Comic Universe epic, but even if it doesn’t, here’s hoping Messrs. Straczynsk and Saiz can keep up the suspense and the thrills; this is the first time since I’m a kid that I can’t wait for the next issue to arrive.

Captain America’s Current Run Recaptures the Comic Book Icon’s Early Boldness

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