Look At That Captain America Jack Kirby Drew There

Scroll down a bit -- go to the site first if you're not there -- and look at that Captain America his creator, Jack Kirby, drew for the cover of his publication. Can you imagine such a weak-looking Captain America making the cover of anything now? Can you imagine a little dose of blindness keeping Our Man down, even for a second, let alone forcing him to make that face?

I usually track the idea of a specific kind of fan service that's worked its way into superhero comics the last quarter-century through Wolverine. The idea is -- and you can skip this post if you've read me blather on about this before -- that a big chunk of fans won't let a favorite character show weakness because it somehow reflects on them in a way they don't like. Captain America might be an even better example. A lot of Captain America's classic depictions since his return to comics in the early 1960s engages this idea that he's not in the same power class as some of the other superheroes. The Avengers he led -- a team for which he served as de facto muscle until the oddly overpowered-for-his-concept Goliath showed back up -- was a "weaker" Avengers. I also seem to remember a plotline in the 1970s Avengers comic about Captain America maybe not being up to snuff in terms of his function within that by-then-much-stronger team. A lot of Captain America's big victories over the years have been done with a kind of nudge-nudge wink-wink in the direction of him being one of the weaker characters: his fighting spirit was enough to let this relatively weak guy chase down a multi-segmented, killer Nazi robot on a motorcycle or go toe-to-toe with Korvac for a few seconds or whatever.

I don't think that's true of his depiction these days, at least not in the comics with which I'm familiar, except maybe how I hear he was treated in the Avengers movie. Mostly, though, he has that post-Grant Morrison JLA Batman thing going on, where they play against the character's relative lack of god-destroying juice by making him a hyper-competent badass. That makes a lot of sense given the character's general concept, and I know that there are fans that love it. Yet I also think there's something to characters showing weakness that gets readers past a really fragile set of demands about proper behavior. Once you lose a few fights, you don't have to carry around an entire record of not-losing every time out. It makes the current fight that much more important.
 
posted 8:00 am PST | Permalink
 

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