It’s like somebody looked into my brain and made a blog especially for me: Captain America’s Been Torn Apart, devoted to reading and commenting on Mark Gruenwald’s entire ten year run on Captain America. David Fiore is a veteran comics blogger and he gets both Gruenwald:
One thing I do want to stress, re: Gruenwald, is how much I appreciate his refusal to join the “Comics Aren’t Just For Kids” sweepstakes of the mid-1980s. We can all agree how dumb that was, can’t we? What I love about these books (and about Squadron Supreme in particular) is the way they wade into the same contested super-political waters that Miller and Moore were then “braving,” without swaddling these ambitions in the cloak of the medium’s much-trumpeted “coming of age.” Basically, Gruenwald is saying that the genre was always concerned with these questions–damn the “prestige format,” full speed ahead!
And Captain America:
So… created by Jack Kirby and Joe Simon in late 1940, Cap was (and is) the preeminent symbol of “premature anti-fascism” (to use HUAC terminology) in the history of American literature. He is, quite simply, THE Popular Front (that’s a New Deal era coalition of communists, socialists and others leftists) icon. There cannot be any dispute about that. Punching out Hitler meant something very different in December 1940 than it means when today’s Neocons cum in their PJs while dreaming about it…
There have of course been quite a few writers attempting liberal superheroics: Steve Gerber, Don McGregor Mike Friedrich, Steve Englehart are examples that spring to mind, but Gruenwald is in a class apart. Nobody was as consistent in their approach as Gruenwald, whose favoured protagonists like Cap, or Quasar were liberal, friendly and approachable heroes whose politics were portrayed through their day to day adventures, rather than by doing Very Special Issues about the Klan or womens’ lib or whatever. Cap especially pays more than just lip service to the idea his opponents can be reformed, rather than are intrinsincly evil, and this during the Reagan Era when every other superhero title seemingly moved to the right, becoming “gritty” and “realistic” by depicting criminals as subhuman scum for the hero to blast away. It’s therefore great to see somebody willing to spent substained critical effort on showcasing Gruenwald’s run on Cap.