Wednesday, March 07, 2007

Too Much Reality Again

I’ve been out of the Marvel Comics universe for a little while now, so that’s why I had to brush up a bit on the latest storyline involving Captain America to understand what’s going on and why he has apparently been killed.

The series featuring Captain America and other Marvel Comics superheroes is titled “Civil Wars,” with a split among them all ensuing as a result of required registration with some agency over a catastrophe; one of the legion apparently does something bad by accident and they’re all getting rounded up. From what I can gather, Steve Rogers (the up-until-now-one-and-only Captain America) led the resistance to the superhero registration, but changed his mind before his death (this kind of reminds me of the “cure” in the X Men series).

Is it me, or is a simple contract killing an awfully mundane way to do away with an iconic superhero (of course, knowing these things as I do, I’m sure someone else will carry on in Rogers’ place). Maybe have him go out by rescuing people in a plane or a skyscraper or something.

Or maybe he could go to Iraq and meet his end over there (or is that really too much reality?).

But even though I’m still not sure this was the right thing to do with the character, I give Marvel credit for daring to bring some “shades of gray” to Captain America, which is a good because, if nothing else, it managed to get right-wing pseudo moralist Michael Medved annoyed enough to concoct this piece of drivel (a “deep cultural malaise afflicting the nation on the eve of war,” huh? – perhaps a deeper “malaise” would have saved a few more lives, maybe?).

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