Tom Spurgeon reviews Captain America: the Truth:
While this move/development/whatever takes away the juice of creating Captain America himself from the Tuskegee Experiment-style set-up, it also places the spotlight even more directly on the treatment of African-American soldiers during that period, with the American upper-class embrace of eugenics as a minor undercurrent. History tells us the treatment of black soldiers was routinely abominable, and in The Truth those abuses become the relentless, dour drumbeat of the narrative. In other words, Marvel traded an imaginary story that might have made a black man the first Captain America for an in-continuity one that super-sizes some of the worst behavior of the US government in its long history. Captain America is safe, but the government for which he works has a truckload of explaining to do. The better and more observant histories tell us the real-world abuses were horrible, but I don’t think they were quite as over-the-top horrifying as the exploding bodies and entire units massacred for the control of minor state secrets we see here.
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In the end, this is a hard story to parse because it’s really about the history involved — and the notion of retroactive continuity as it gets portrayed in the press — more than it is a tight, well-paced story of its own. It’s fun to read something this ruthlessly negative about American history coming out during the Bush years, and some of the ideas are enjoyable to mull over, but it’s not something I regret having missed the first time around. It’s admirably odd, that’s for sure.
There’s at least one thesis to be had in analysing Captain America in the Bush years, especially after 9/11. The Truth was one response, the other was seen in Ed Brubaker’s “realistic” approach, a third in the last story in Captain America – Red, White & Blue, tackling the aftermath of 9/11 directly. In general I’ve found Marvel to have become very rightwing post-Bush, the outcome of Civil War going against everything Marvel always stood for (in so far as a obviously commerce driven company universe could stand for anything of course) and Cap shoved up to the right as well. That pseudorealism, with its acceptance of the evil in the world, is a rightwing look at the world, even if the hero is shown as a shining knight in a corrupt world. It’s a far cry from the idealism of the premature anti-fascism of the original Cap…
Which is not the case with The Truth, where as Tom notices, the corruption in the background doesn’t infect Captain America himself. It respected what Captain America always stood for: the myth of America, rather than the sordid reality.