The Big, um, #695: Captain America

Boy howdy does this issue have some serious work to do. Nick Spencer's run and the terrible fascism-flavoured crossover that it spawned left a terrible taste in a lot of people's mouths. Secret Empire was, according to some industry pundits, the second worst selling event in recent memory. It put a lot of people off the character, some of them off of Marvel entirely, and series that were launched as spin-offs debuted at below the sales level where series usually get cancelled.

The event didn't do what it was meant to do in financial terms, pissed off a lot of the hardcore fanbase that Marvel relies on for sales and word of mouth advertising (the only sort the comicbook industry can afford nowadays).

So now we have Mark Waid and Chris Samnee, both creators whose work I've adored in the past, coming along to try and save Steve Rogers from recent bad creative decisions by taking him on a soul searching road trip across the country whose best self-image he's meant to represent.

So how does it go?

The answer is “okay” with a side order of “oddly business as usual”. The story is absolutely a reaction to Secret Empire and Hydra!Cap but its also not that far afield from the sort of standard issue character primer sort of story you'd usually get at the beginning of a run like this. There's one mention of the events of Secret Empire that sets up the excuse for why people still trust Steve (Hydra!Cap was an impostor pretending to be Steve but we know better, don't we?) and that's your lot.

Except it isn't. The plot of this issue is that Cap is revisiting a town in Nebraska he visited shortly after being pulled from the ice. Back then he fought a small and pretty crap bunch of neo-fascists called Rampart and now he's returned because he's heard they're back and planning to do bad things at the site of their original humiliation and they're more organised and better equipped than they were when he last saw them.

Oh, its getting all political up in those comicbooks, isn't it?

My reaction is this: good. This is exactly the sort of story that should be written with Captain America in an era where fascism is getting horribly fashionable again. He beat them in the Second World War, he beat them when they were crap a decade ago and he'll beat them now. Nice message, I like it. Add to that some heartwarming scenes of people rushing to help others in the aftermath of the attack and we're back to this being a series about the best aspects of people, the aspirational side of the character and the ideals he's meant to represent.

Captain America punches Nazis so nice people can continue to be nice to each other. It might seem a bit basic but a) that's exactly the sort of soft reboot the series needed after banking up so damn much bad publicity in the last couple of years and b) a sentiment that surprisingly needs a lot of explanation in a world where Wolfenstein is considered a risky, politically charged and grossly insensitive computer game for having you kill Nazis.

Nazis. Fuck 'em. Glad to see Captain America's on my side in this again. 

The Big #1: Marvel Legacy

Yesterday's manic ranting about Klingon foreheads and anachronistic holograms was probably triggered by the fact this very issue was sitting in my read pile for the afternoon. Marvel Legacy is, by design, fan wank. Its the event born of that executive who stated to a retailers meeting that nostalgia, not diversity, was the major selling point of comics.

[Insert well-worn, frothing rant about how that's obviously true in a medium that makes no moves towards accessibility to new readers here, I'm too tired to go over that again.]

And the fact is I'm quite looking forward to this. I fear it, as well. Recent issues of Mighty Thor have out and out stated that Jane Foster is going to die soon, which in and of itself is probably not a bad thing. The character has had terminal cancer for some time and given how she's been written in this run I don't think the character would see dying as Thor having saved so many lives at the expense of her own as a “bad death”. If she does out actively bettering the world, well, that's an ending I can get behind.

Simiarly, I do want the real Tony Stark back in some capacity. I love Riri Williams but I miss the dynamic the two had before Tony's Civil War II-induced coma and their Generations issue certainly foreshadowed how good it would be to have them interacting again now Riri has some proper hero time under belt.

Still, I fear...

I fear the fan wank aspect; I fear the collapse of all the interesting new characters that have taken up legacies over the last couple of years, especially in light of how quickly Unstoppable Wasp was cancelled; I fear the further shrinking of the medium in service to fandom-friendly nostalgia over even fractional innovation (because, let's face it, a healthy medium would have been able to introduce Nadia, Riri, Miles, Kamala, Amadeus!Hulk and all those others in their own identities instead of hand-me-downs).

Anyway, that's enough self-indulgent self-analysis. What was the first issue like?

Well, mostly it was bite-sized trailers for the tie-in series which is par for the course for event series first issues these days. Its really just a question of which ones interest me. There does seem to be a thread that actually sets up this series involving Starbrand and one of the many Ghost Riders, neither of which are characters I'm terribly interested in. There's also some business with a Celestial, again not a part of the Marvel Universe I've ever been that keen on.

There's a lot of good art but the many, many different art teams working on this issue just makes it feel even more like a collection of teaser trailers than it already did. The Fantastic Four-related teases are the most interested to me and I hope this means that Perlmutter has been forced to take his head out of his arse by Disney and we're getting a new FF comic sometime soon.

There's also some business with Odin, the Phoenix and some pre-historic Avengers that holds some promise as well as a short scene in which Norman Osborn retreats in shame from Doctor Strange's shrubbery.

Its bitty and sets up a lot of questions that will probably not be addressed in this series itself. Again, basically the format that these event series take nowadays but I find it tests my patience a bit more every year.

Still, a pleasing lack of Nazis so I'm inclined to give this one a chance.