This is the man who broke Black Panther’s perfect Rotten Tomatoes score. That’s a shame.
You might think it weird that a person who gets paid to have opinions about art would gig a movie for an insufficient number of jumpings and beatings, but I draw strange comfort from knowing that such unique musings came from a man named Ed Power.
Tom King wrote the hell out of The Vision. It's a lovely and terrible story that's three parts surburban desperation and one part straight-up horror. It has one of the most poignant and unexpected applications of Chekhov's gun I have ever seen.
Comics fans have been happy for a while now to see our favorite characters mainstreamed onto screens big and small. Such is our delight that we have quietly tolerated those movies and shows lagging about two decades behind the kinds of stories even mainstream commercial comics are willing to tell.
Every superhero movie's third act is essentially "now we punch robots". Tom gave us a robot who makes the compromises he must to protect his family, who does everything he knows to be right and still loses. Who might be willing to burn the world to keep them safe.
76 years ago, two Jewish men from New York who worked for a major comics publisher decided to create a new hero that would be an advocate for the US entering the war against racism, fascism, and anti-semitism.
They created the Aryan ideal, dressed him up in the stars and stripes, and drew him punching Hitler in the goddamn face. It was not subtle.
The only good Nazi is a punched Nazi.
That character caught on, and his legacy expanded until his real superpower became that he was the moral center of his storytelling universe. Captain America is essentially an avatar for goodness and protection of the weak. His most recognizable element is a shield.
Then Nick Spencer and Marvel turned him into a Nazi. And, worse, revealed that that entire three-quarters-of-a-century legacy didn't actually happen, not really. Not in the really real Marvel universe.
Now, and it's hard to find images of this because Marvel's whacking them down as they come up, they're going to validate Nazi Cap by showing him effortlessly lifting Mjolnir, Thor's hammer. Which Thor is currently unworthy to lift because he's going through a bit of a personal crisis. But Nazis are worthy. If they're good Nazis.
Oh. I should probably stress that Thor's hammer is one of many Norse mythological symbols treasured by real-world Nazis. So Nazi Cap is being morally validated by a symbol co-opted by white supremacists. A hammer, no less. They are overjoyed.
Will a reversal happen? Of course. But the damage to Kirby and Simon's legacy is done and cannot be undone. And one gets the feeling that Nick Spencer dumped all over that legacy for no better reasons than to be provocative and mess with his critics. He has the luxury of doing this because he doesn't have any ancestors who were rounded up and put into camps, of course. He's gonna do a great toldjuhso dance, you guys.
Does it matter? Yep. There are Nazis in the White House as we speak. Nazis and robber barons looking to line their own pockets by starving the poor. Literal comic book villains. It matters.
The only thing we can do to this turd taco is point out that the taco is in fact full of turds. Or make fun of it. Which Skottie Young has managed to do, on the cover of an actual Marvel comic book:
Probably should have put him in charge of Cap.
So I saw “The Avengers” last Sunday. Hella good fun. As I twooted on the Twatter, it was refreshing to see someone who understood that yes, yes, Bruce Banner’s got a demon in him and it’s all very serious and Freudian….
…and yet there’s a big green monster punching people in the taste hole, and this, like church, is supposed to be a joyous occasion. Let us turn to the book of Concussions, chapter 3, verses 6–9.
There was a nice little relationship build-up between Tony Stark and Bruce Banner that I vaguely got but didn’t consciously behold whose analysis John Hodgman preserved here on his excellent Tumblr, and if you are at all fond of superheroes, you should read it. Spoilers, if you have not seen the movie.
I’ve been mostly a DC Comics man for most of my life, because I have a fondness for the Gods and never quite let go of childhood power fantasies (there’s a post there, I think), but of course the more human heroes are more interesting. As Batman is the anti-Superman (and therefore more popular), so is Tony the anti-Hulk, but far more subtly.
Banner, in turn, is far more interesting than Clark Kent. He has the same near-godlike power and invulnerability, and yet he is so much more damaged, and his writers (unlike most who have handled Superman) understand that he probably should not be allowed to exist. But we can’t kill him.
Maybe Lex Luthor was right.
It’s a curious thing to cheer and laugh as throbbing, green, unbridled id unleashes biblical destruction in front of us. That’s Bruce’s appeal, of course: he, unlike we, can mostly control that raging bile duct of loathing and smallness and hate that we all have. Mostly. And then there is the smashing, which is glorious.
