Hitting the Wall II: Captain America

Recall, if you will, the movie "The Outlaw Josey Wales." It had a great deal going for it, as far as Nixon-era westerns went; it stands in Clint Eastwood's resume as one of his best pieces; I would speculate it does well in video rentals and video sales. Why, then, did we not see "The Outlaw Josey Wales II" or an entire series of Josey Wales movies?

To begin with, the definition of the character Josey Wales tied to his enemy, Redlegs, the scowling slaughterer of Confederate POWs and hapless civilians. Once Josey Wales sent Redlegs to his Maker - or, perhaps, The Bad Place - Josey Wales lost most of his purpose right there. Thereafter, he might define his mission primarily as surviving and avoiding folks like Pinkerton agents and Texas Rangers who might incline to take him in.

When the definition of a character includes a relationship to a specific enemy, it can cause trouble down the road if that character does not retire with the demise of that enemy. This problem has much plagued Marvel's iconic superhero Captain America almost since his reintroduction into comics in 1964, and would become particularly burdensome to writers in the early seventies.

The Original Formula

If one would create a perfect hero, one might well begin with a perfect enemy. Captain America had this, in the form of the goons of the Axis, an assemblage of monsters in the bodies of men, beasts who knew no limits, murderers (at the time) without compare, humans so debased by arrogance and hatred that they could plausibly play the role of the diabolical armies of the Antichrist of Nostradamus' prophesies.

Someone who stands up against, and ultimately prevails over, such an enemy must become the great hero indeed, and Captain America did this. As long as America had such an excellent enemy - a target for whom no one could feel much pity, yet whose great power inspired more fear than loathing among those at risk of becoming its food supply - an avatar of America would shine, not just to Americans, but to the world.

The loss of the Axis did terrible things to Captain America. In some ways writers even to the present day - the dawn of the third millennium - attempt to deny this loss by tossing this hero enemies who echo, but do not really replace, the real menace of Hitler. By now, Captain America has probably fought more Nazis than ever really existed, and ditto for cheap copies and proxies in the form of white supremacists and the like.

Cape rode tall against the Nazis, but began to dwindle with their passing. By the time he busied himself with campaigns against the Stalinist equivalent of his World War II enemies, superhero comics had largely failed, and Captain America himself would fade away in the fifties, until a wave of nostalgia inspired Stan Lee and Jack Kirby to bring him back in the sixties.

The Return of Captain America

Captain America, when he came back, spent much time dealing with Bucky trauma. The retconned end of Bucky Barnes - who, in the 1964 version, sacrificed his life attempting to stop a Nazi rocket - provided a number of stories to Captain America writers. Either Captain America might dive into despondency over the loss of a heroic young man who had deserved to grow to adulthood; or he might face the false promise of Bucky returned, only to discover that he faced a robot; or he might deal with the prospect of causing another partner to die by allowing Rick Jones to serve him as a sidekick.

When not failing to cope with the loss of his partner - and I don't know if Achilles ever emoted as much over the loss of his ally and lover Patroklos - Captain America spent a lot of the sixties reliving old and new stories of the war. Many Captain America stories took place in the same milieu as the early-sixties creation Sergeant Nick Fury. Many others saw Captain America cleaning up leftover garbage from the war, either original - like the Red Skull - or revisionist, like Baron Zemo.

By this time, Captain America had lost one enemy (Germany) to history and another enemy (Russia) to indifference or changing politics. Marvel therefore had to come up with some equivalent substitute, combining the moral loathesomeness of an enemy worthy of his attention with the colorful costuming of Silver Age Marvel comics and a suitably high-tech concept worthy of the espionage literature of the sixties. Thus we see HYDRA.

However, one can only fight the Nazis so many times before readers ask "Yeah, but now what?" And the same thing, more or less, happened with HYDRA after talents like Steranko and Kirby no longer infused vitality into the ongoing conflict. Then the problem returned. Captain America's definition depends too much on the choice of a perfect enemy, and one finds few enough enemies of the appropriate caliber.

Thumb's Down to the Bait-and-Switch

In the seventies, the Hard Continuity Principle and anti-anticommunism collided, sometimes with strange results, such as the schism of Captain America into two versions (and, by the late seventies, possibly two more.

Before continuity became the all-important and central virtue of superhero comics for one influential branch of consumers, a reader might not care too much about whether a story printed in 1954 remained consistent with a story in 1964 and 1974. However, some continuity problems had developed by the early seventies about this flagship Timely hero.

When he returned in 1964, in the pages of Avengers, he claimed that his original career ended in 1945 in one last confrontation with the first generation of Nazi overlords, a conflict that took Bucky Barnes' life and left Captain America himself frozen in the waters of the Arctic.

Unfortunately - though really it doesn't matter all that much - Captain America stories had continued, somewhat intermittently, into the fifties, with a change of cast. Communist goons in the thrall of Uncle Joe Stalin took the place of fascist goons in the thrall of Herr Chancellor Schicklgrubr. Readers, not feeling that a Cold War could replace a World War in their imagination, nor seeing Stalinists as a fit replacement for National Socialists, did not keep the franchise going, and Captain America quietly expired.

By the seventies, the notion that Captain America had ever dabbled in anticommunism became a real embarrassment to those who depicted the character in the pages of Captain America and the Falcon, and thus Captain America's second major revision of continuity occurred. A paranoid and drug-addicted stand-in (a racist McCarthyite who blatantly represented every vice attributed to both Nixon and Agnew in the most vitriolic political hyperbole of the day) had fought with all those commies, not the good Captain America. The good Captain America, concerned about his own reputation and about the honor of the colors he wore, put this pathetic understudy in his place.

Dropping Out

Stripped first of his original, perfect enemy by the end of World War II, then again stripped of an enemy by an indifferent readership who didn't find a communist version of the Red Skull particularly frightening, and even later stripped even of this lukewarm campaign against the Bolshevik Menace, Captain America would suffer the final indignity: in a series of moving stories about pride and shame, Captain America abandoned his colors.

In a way, this makes a good deal of sense. Deprived of his natural enemy, Captain America lost a good portion of his purpose; and, decades later, when the term "patriotism" became pejorative, a regular feature of political invective rather than praise, the very idea of fighting crime draped in a flag became suspect.

Some pieces of this saga seem so surreal a quarter of a century later that one wonders if Kafka - or at least William R. Burroughs - didn't contribute to them. However, I suspect that Englehart meant them sincerely, even passionately, as bizarre as they might seem out of context. Roughly summarized, Captain America exposed a conspiracy at the highest level, leading to an unnamed figure intended for readers to recognize as President Nixon. Cornered, and possibly realizing the power of karma, this Marvel universe Nixon took his own life. Even so, he imposed upon Captain America an unwanted self-awareness, and inflicted upon him the notion that the America he represented had become a vile and diseased thing.

As the ultimate Boy Scout, Captain America chose not to wear tainted colors, and he therefore abandoned the name and the costume, though this meant leaving the Falcon on his own to face the dangers of various absurd Marvel goons in his absence. Yet the hero in Steve Rogers would not go away; and he therefore took the (thankfully) short-lived role of "Nomad," in order to live up somewhat to the duties that drew him into the Captain America role in the first place.

Naturally enough, it didn't last. He returned to his destined role as Captain America, even though occasional crises would later deprive him of the ability (though not the right) to bear the name; at least twice since Englehart's dramatic run would circumstances force Steve Rogers to adopt another costume.

The Eighties and Beyond

While Captain America can mark time - and, in the process, entertain - in butting heads with the same cast of enemies one might expect any costumed crimefighter to deal with - the problem still comes up from time to time. Fifty five years after the loss of his axiomatic enemy, how can Captain America define himself?

Frequently one sees Captain America define himself by contrast to pretenders to his role, such as the USAgent or the pill-popping Nuke.

Sometimes one sees Captain America practicing the form of patriotism through long-winded pontification, a particularly annoying vice of his early eighties incarnation.

And, again and again, one sees him go up against all the variant proxies for Nazis - those same racists and political cranks that evoke, but do not fulfill, his original legend.

In spite of this fundamental limitation, Captain America flourishes. As time passes, though, it becomes difficult to overlook that the original music no longer plays; the martial music only echoes the anthems of musicians who have moved on, and, in some cases, died.