The Falcon, Casualty of Retcon

Other columns in the "Casualties of Retcon" series relate to characters who received a raking over the coals in order for DC Comics to revise its continuity during or after Crisis on Infinite Earths. If I followed the trail of bruised bodies left in the wake of DC's much-needed but ill-performed housecleaning, one might conclude that the crime of bad retroactive continuity changes only resulted from DC's visible attempts to integrate 61 years of superhero stories into a comprehensible whole.

However, Marvel has never remained completely innocent of this hobby. Although it spared itself much misery by starting from scratch in 1961 (and only occasionally trying to integrate its old Timely heroes into mainstream continuity), the junior stalwart of the Big Two companies still dabbled in revisionism. Before 1996, Marvel did this either to raise the dead or provide some kind of plot twist to shock readers (and revising the past can create a cheap passing kind of shock). With just such an end in mind - a disposable shock - Marvel took one of its characters and peeled away his essence, leaving behind a name, a costume, and little reason to go on.

Marvel really did a job on the Falcon, lowering from role model to stereotype in a very short span, and this smear job would first remove him from his regular place in a monthly title and then leave him adrift in obscurity for the rest of the century.

The Original Falcon

In Captain America #117, Marvel introduced a character who would, for several years, become a central element of that title. Captain America found himself stranded on a desert island, trapped in the Red Skull's body, as the Skull inhabited Captain America's form by virtue of the power of the Cosmic Cube. Shipwrecked and left to die on an island, Captain America found a fellow castaway, a man named Sam Wilson, and convinced this man to help him regain his body and defeat the Red Skull.

Thus appeared the Falcon, who originally swung on ropes dressed in a green and orange costume, accompanied by his pet falcon and his partner and mentor, Captain America. The character had begun, so the story went, as a social worker who returned to the Harlem neighborhoods that produced him in order to give something back to his community. The transition from social worker to crimefighter, for him, meant a change in methods and wardrobe, but not of purpose. His direction remained communitarian and principled, whether as the Falcon or as Wilson.

One sees here the exemplar of the high-minded and socially-conscious sixties man of an era before cynicism crippled the reformers of yesteryear into defenders of decadence and apologists for crimes of the self-designated progressive. Marvel promoted this ideal with the character and with others, like the Black Panther (who, rather unbelievably, stepped down from his throne in fictional "Wakanda" to teach in New York schools).

Perhaps the gloom of the seventies made the Marvel writers forget the kernel that they built this character around, or perhaps desperation led to the creation of an unfortunate tale in the mid-seventies that would strip away the Falcon's nobility and reduce him to a corrupt, though reforming, figure steeped in street crime and base morals. Someone might have fallen in love with the plot twist this story revealed. For whatever cause, though, Marvel would rework the character in 1975 as a disguised hoodlum turned into a tool against Captain America.

The Revised Falcon

One who read the Falcon's exploits circa 1970 would fail to recognize him when writers finished wringing out his lifesblood into a "secret past" story that revealed him as an unwitting pawn of the Red Skull and the Cosmic Cube. One moment, the familiar Falcon appears in character; the next, he attacks Captain America at the command of the Red Skull, who reveals that he had planted Wilson on the island where Captain America (then in the Skull's body) found him. One might expect something simple of this story, like a revelation about a long-deferred hypnotic suggestion that made the Falcon attack his mentor.

In Captain America and the Falcon #186, however, all but killed off the Falcon. Nothing that merciful followed. Instead, the Skull revealed that he took a common street hood, Sam "Snap" Wilson, as his tool, and imposed upon him, with the Cosmic Cube, a false memory set to conceal his origins. In other words, all of the Falcon's previous nobility of character represented a created memory that did not relate in any particular to the "real," criminal, overdressing, jive-talking racial caricature that the Falcon then became.

In some ways one might consider death a slight thing next to what happened to him in this story; the tale, picking up loose threads from the original Red Skull and Cosmic Cube story arc, managed to divest the Falcon of his dignity altogether and so marred the character that he soon found himself altogether absent from a title that bore his name for many years. If a subsequent writer had revised Captain American's origin to make him a reformed Nazi who took up the Captain America mantle to atone for his past, one would have found a similar betrayal of concept, yet Marvel crassly unbalanced and denigrated this character with this irresponsible and insensitive treatment.

If the Falcon originally represented a sixties ideal of a moral and humane man dedicated to the betterment of his fellows, then the Falcon that left the title in the mid-seventies represented his demotion from an idealized figure to that of a typical period Blaxploitation character. After stripping away his original history as a concerned social worker travelling in what remained of the Harlem in which he had grown up, the writers of Captain America and the Falcon retroactively cast him as a gangster who travelled around in ludicrous pimp suits (perhaps they even intended him as a pimp). After reading any of this singularly unfortunate story arc, a reader could with some surety dismiss the notion that Sidney Poitier would ever play the character.

In the aftermath of this story, a number of comics observers took the whole "Snap" Wilson series as a piece of comics optimism, showing how Captain America would gladly give a good man with a bad past another chance, but that element only represents the spin placed on this regrettable tale. One may, with some justification, look upon the story as completely opposite to this conception: They took a character who had already demonstrated the notion that good men may come from hard places and dragged that good man through gutters and sleaze as a storytelling stunt. They undermined the original object lesson Sam Wilson once provided by (originally) showing a man better than his times and better than his circumstances.

In the seventies, though, people wanted to see the pimp suits, the shoot-outs, the hustlers, hookers, gamblers, and dope dealers, and the cinema of the period reflected this. Could the Blaxploitation genre have so impressed someone at the offices of Marvel Comics that someone felt reworking the Falcon within these parameters would actually appeal to fans? Or did someone say to himself, "he came from that place, so he must have lived like that?"

Two Decades Later

The Falcon vanished from both the Captain America title (and, before too many issues, its logo) and would enjoy little time on-panel in the decades that followed. He served, for a brief time, as a member of the Avengers (as a secondary character who eventually left that team because he objected to the government mandate that made him a token member rather than a peer); he enjoyed a brief miniseries; he cropped up occasionally in other titles; and he, like most of the Marvel line, perished at the end of the "Onslaught" stories, only to reappear after Marvel rebooted its key titles.

The fact that so many recall the "reformed criminal" element of his revised origin (without the reprehensible circumstances in which it appeared) suggests that his later appearances did rehash his second, revised origin and try to spin some optimism out of it. However, this aspect of his reworked character does, sometimes, enjoy some admirable downplaying; some writers, it seems, recognize within it a rather dubious bit of racial stereotyping.

In 1996, Captain America v. 2 appeared, and, in the general abortive rebooting of the Marvel universe which these books attempted to accomplish, a revised Falcon appeared; this time, he had no past as a social worker or as a pimp-suit wearing gangster. Instead, this Sam Wilson had flown planes in the Air Force and took to superheroing after a blood transfusion from Captain America saved his life (and presumably gave him some slight physical boost as well). This Falcon did not survive the return to the original Marvel continuity.

One can see the shame here, because one of the few characters to enjoy a demonstrably better version in Marvel's Year of Lee and Liefeld (after Liefeld had left Captain America) went back to his own demeaningly written personal history. Marvel might well have kept these changes, because they would have given the character back a very precious element he had before 1976: his dignity.