It has been a while since I have written about comics. The primary reason for this is that I found it is not something I necessarily love writing about and for me writing needs to be a labor of love otherwise it is a chore. Recent issues, pun intended, have left me with the feeling that I have something to say thus you will be graced with another one of my screeds full of fan-boy raving. Shall we to it, then?
Captain America is easily one of my top five favorite Marvel characters therefore his “death” is the latest issue is a bit of a downer for me. As Kevin Church pointed out there is plenty of material out there, most of which I have not read, therefore my disappointment was not that I will not be able to spend “quality time” with Steve Rogers, my dejection at this development was more centered on the facts that the shock of his death was ruined for me by a combination that Marvel managed to stir up quite the tempest in the national media with the death and a few officemates felt the need to get my input on what the death of Captain America actually meant.
Since I have only been following Civil War, which I mistyped as Civil Wart, via the comicsblogoweb and I am NOTORIOUSLY slow in figuring out things in comic books (more on this later) I did not see this death coming. I am certain I lost some of my fan-boy cred in the office when I was surprised to hear about the demise of Captain America, and then displayed my cynical side when I pointed out that comic book death is, at least to the characters, a minor annoyance at best. I managed to recoup some cred when I rattled off a small list of characters which have gone to the great Long Box in the Sky only to be resurrected when convenient for the writers.
The reason this death upset me is the fact that it was spoiled by Marvel’s need to turn it in to a publicity stunt, which I imagine will only be complete once we get the inevitable “Death of Cap” issue of Wizard. On top of that I found most of the press coverage in rather poor taste, particularly as our service men and women are dying to promote the Bush Administration’s version of freedom and democracy.
All this comes to naught since I will continue to read Captain America. As someone, whom I am too lazy to try and track down right now, out on the comicsblogoweb pointed out, after the utter crap ending of Civil War this is about the only thing Ed Brubaker could do with the character. In the first two arcs of Daredevil Brubaker has already written a superhero in jail story followed by a superhero on the lam story. Additionally, in my humble opinion, a Captain America in jail story would not be that interesting, at least in terms of doing anything interesting with the character. That being said if it was to be done then of all the writers working for Marvel Ed Brubaker would be the one I would want to have at the helm.
Because I love you guys so much here is Stephen Colbert discussing the death of Captain America:
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