LUDIC LOG

Here's what I hate about Captain America: he wears a chainmail belly shirt and has wings on his head, even though he can't fly.

No, no, I kid. Just a little levity before we get to the serious topic of the day, which is: why Captain America sucks tailpipe. Let's start again, shall we? Okay.

Here's what I hate about Captain America: he was drawn through much of the 1980s by Mike Zeck, who gave him a chin the size of Kentucky and wrists and ankles the width of a bobby pin.

No, seriously. I kid because I love, Cap! I love you dearly, in that special way that I love only a few select comic book heroes -- Wonder Woman, the Punisher, the Vision, Thor -- in other words, a love best defined as not actually love at all, but rather hatred. Or, well...maybe not  hatred, but rather frustration. My main problem with all these characters is that they all had origins, characters or concepts that were incredibly promising, and yet, in the hands of almost every writer who tackled them, they were written as flat and dull as the third-world-recycled newsprint they were slathered onto.

Captain America coulda been somebody. As the four-color embodiment of everything America stood for -- indeed, as the superhero version of the nation itself -- he could have been something wonderful or something terrible. He could have embodied everything right and everything wrong about this adorable little superpower we live in (well, "we" meaning "me and all the people reading this who aren't crazy foreigners"). But instead, he was always played as this generic, vaguely paternal chump. In the Marvel Comics of the 1960s -- filled with groundbreaking superheroes who resonated with readers because they were realistically neurotic and human, from the geeky teenager Peter Parker to the dysfunctional family unit of the Fantastic Four to the recovering prick Dr. Strange -- Cap stood out like a sore thumb by remaining an atavistic throwback, a big-chinned schlub with no personality like Superman, only without any powers. And at least Supes, the ultimate immigrant, chose to embody America; Steve Rogers was America. But he never acted like it. He was about as American as Ozzie Nelson, who, as it happened, wasn't very typically American at all.

Part of this is an accident of history. Captain America first appeared in World War II, at a time when everybody knew exactly what it meant to be an American: it meant smashing the totalitarian fuck out of some Nazis! It meant pounding those dirty Japs' heads in until they see slanted! Everyone could get behind that. But once the war was over, people got back to the ugly peacetime business of asking exactly what it meant to be an American. Could you be an American and still be a pinko? How about a beatnik? You can bet your sweet Zip-a-toned ass there were a whole bunch of black people in the late 1940s asking what it meant to be an American. But Cap was a uniter, not a divider. He got uncomfortable when people asked questions like that. He wanted to be everything that was America, and when we were all squabbling about what that meant, he got nervous and irritable. So he went away for a while.

Enter Stan Lee, who was never one to let a good character go to waste if it could make him some money. He yanked Captain America out of the glacier he had apparently fallen into 20 years prior and stuck him back in the Marvel universe -- where he went on to be spectacularly mishandled by a dazzling array of writers. In the time since Cap had last appeared in funnybooks, the Comics Code Authority had come into being, and everyone was still making an effort to dodge controversy, so Cap became a mega-bland symbol of an no-arguments-here status quo. He only fought foes everyone hated, like Russkies and HYDRA and the Red Skull, who provided a convenient Nazi punching bag decades after the actual Nazis had ceased to exist. This was all well and good, but if there's one thing America is not, it's uncontroversial. Captain America stayed miles away from any actual issue-driven storylines, while actual America confronted this stuff on a daily basis.

As time marched on and the writers got ever so slightly more daring, Captain America still remained a fluffy, all-for-one-and-one-for-all symbol of America Lite, who was presented as the universally beloved emblem of everything good and right in the United States -- at the same time that he was actually doing things that would have assured him of being widely despied in the time the comics were being written. One of the better Captain America storylines of the early 1970s concerned his attempt to rehabilitate his friend and partner, Sam "Snap" Wilson (a.k.a. the Falcon), a Harlem-dwelling black man who had become addicted to heroin. It was a pretty good plot arc, one I remember fondly as being realistically presented -- or, at least, as realistically as you could ask for out of a form of literature that featured density-altering robots. But it's interesting to consider that at the time, America was all gung-ho to imprison black heroin addicts in the inner city. Nixon's "southern strategy" was to demonize blacks, using them to anger southern voters and terrify northern ones -- and it worked shamefully well. America probably would have hated Cap for actually helping Snap Wilson instead of locking him in the joint. Similarly, the ret-conned 'fake Captain America' of the 1950s -- who didn't actually appear until the late 1970s -- is portrayed as a villain for his hyperactive Red-bashing; but in the 1950s, Red-bashing was all the rage. People would have expected no less from Captain America than that he cave in the heads of any commie he could find with the sharp end of his shield.

I'm not arguing here that Captain America should be some kind of Neanderthal hyperconservative lunatic; I'm not Warren Ellis. I love a good ol' truth-justice-and-the- American Way hero as much as the next guy. It's just that one of the great things about this country is that its entire history has been an ongoing debate about what it means to be an American -- in other words, a political struggle. And yet, throughout his entire history, Captain America has been the most apolitical hero imaginable. We could have had a Captain America in the 1950s hashing out whether he thought it was fair to wreck a red screenwriter's career, a Captain America in the 1960s deciding which side to fight on in Selma, a Captain America in the 1970s wondering how come he was hanging out with all these countercultural types when his comrades in law enforcement were busy putting them away, or a Captain America in the 1980s contemplating how he got from fighting dictators in Asia and Europe to coddling them in Central America and the Middle East. Instead, what we got was the most lifeless, disinterested character of all the major Marvel heroes (yes, even more dull than Cyclops) -- a man who seemed not to represent the idea of America, whatever that happened to be at the moment, but the flag, the geography, the name. Everything except what makes this country interesting.

This all came to a head in the late 1980s, when a major plot arc started involving a character called the Flag-Smasher. Best described as a supervillainous embodiment of the United Nations, FS was an evil grad student -- no, really -- who wanted to eliminate nationalism because it had caused so much bloodshed and horror in the 20th century. Now, to some readers -- say, me -- this seemed pretty sensible, but because he had a black mask and a mace and tried to whomp Captain America, we were asked to believe he was a bad guy. Cap, for his part, seemed to fear the Flag-Smasher because he jeopardized the franchise: without an America, how could there be a Captain America? The answer -- that Captain America wasn't about the country, but about the concepts it stood for, like freedom and equality and justice, which could continue to be fought for in the absence of the actual country -- didn't seem to occur to him.

This all led to one of the most ridiculous plot twists in comic book history -- Cap, in the process of foiling one of Flag-Smasher's plots, is forced to gun down a terrorist in order to save innocent lives, and the act of killing so traumatizes him, emotionally and morally, that he stops being Captain America for a while. Leaving aside the fact that it's a bit hard to detect a moral quandary here -- who wouldn't shoot a terrorist to save innocents? even I would do that, and I'm worse than Hitler -- this flies in the face of everything we know about Captain America. He was so gung-ho to go to war and kill Japs that he actually volunteered for a potentially lethal medical experiment so he could do it! Are we supposed to believe that Cap went through the duration of WWII without killing a single Axis soldier? If so, then he, the most celebrated hero of the war, was significantly less useful to the war effort than thousands of unheralded buck privates and more than a few nurses. Or is the lesson here that terrorists deserve better treatment than Nazis? The whole thing seemed so ridiculous that I just quit paying attention to Captain America for years.

Of course, I came back. I had to come back. As mishandled as he was all those years -- the only sophisticated treatment of him I ever read was in Daredevil, for Christ's sake -- he's an icon, a towering figure who you have to love no matter how badly the writers botch him (see also: Superman). So, in the 1990s, I returned. I was going to give Cap another chance. He deserved no less -- he was Captain America, damn it. I owed him. So I walked into the comic shop right next to the unemployment office where I was hanging out at the time, and picked up an issue. Maybe, I thought, this new guy they brought in will be sophisticated, intelligent, someone who can get Cap right, who can make him really be about America, and not just from America.

That new guy's name, as it happened, was Rob Liefeld. As another great American put it, "another theory shot to shit".