So in the latest “shocking twist” Captain America is revealed to be and always have been a Hydra agent and sympathiser. And it’s not a hoax, not a dream, not an imaginary story:
SPENCER: Issue 2 will lay a lot of our cards on the table in terms of what the new status quo is, but the one thing we can say unequivocally is: This is not a clone, not an imposter, not mind control, not someone else acting through Steve. This really is Steve Rogers, Captain America himself.
And of course, this being comics, there’s a zillion ways all of this could be true yet the status quo restored inside of a year or whenever the twist loses its novelty. Everybody knows this is a ratings stunt with no real meaning behind it, just like when Sam Wilson got to be Cap for a while. But, you know, having Cap die for a while or having a different person behind the mask for a while or whatever other stunt you could think of is completely different from turning him into a goddamn nazi. A hero created by two Jewish kids from New York, who punched out Hitler in his very first appearance, a full year before America would join the war against the nazis. Even in an industry rife with shitty stunts, this is a particularly shitty stunt. It’s also exactly the sort of stunt you’d expect from a penny ante industry like comics, but you’d think Disney would be a bit more sensitive about such a stunt reflecting badly on the movies if too much mainstream media pay attention to it…
Daibhid C
May 28, 2016 at 3:43 pmMixed feelings. I haven’t read this (in about a year, it’ll be in Marvel UK’s Legends), but on Twitter, people are posting images from a Kirby story where Cap rants about “true Americans” with an actual swastika on his shield, so I dunno. I mean, I assume the Kirby story had an actual point to it, but it’s still possible this one might as well. Then again, I haven’t read the Kirby story either, and it’s entirely possible it isn’t really Cap, like the 1990s story where he was impersonated by the leader of Hydra who was also a Skrull.
Honestly, it’s hard for me to come up with a sensible reaction, because mostly I’m just surprised by the idea that HYDRA = Nazis. Despite their WWII origins (which I think have been retconned as a much older organisation which latched onto fascism temporarily) I always thought of them as Generic Terrorists with as much ideology as COBRA, SPECTRE, or KAOS. It was the Sons of the Serpent that were the MU’s Neo-Nazi group. (And they also had a fake Captain America, IIRC.)
So, yeah, mixed feelings. Apologies for the ramble.