Essential Captain America Vol. 3

I have done a previous blog post about the character Captain America and mentioned I was reading the Essential Vol. 3.  Finished it today and man was I impressed.  At over 600 pages this volume collects issues #127 to #156, an interesting point in the title.  You get runs by Gene Colon and Sal Buscema.  That should be a good selling point for many people.  There is also a couple of John Romita issues.  The years covered include 1970-1972, with student protests, the Vietnam war and race riots (are they still calling them that, I think they have a better term now).  Nixon also makes a brief appearance.  This volume also features the Falcon long term partnership.  In many ways the issues of the 2nd half of the collection, where the title had become Captain America and The Falcon, feature a triangle of the characters of CA, The Falcon and SHIELD agent cum CA’s girlfriend Sharon Carter.  Nick Fury makes occasional appearances, with his typical swagger.  These issues also feature the beginning of the storyline of CA’s secret double life as a NYC beat cop, which doesn’t really get too developed here but would later.

The triangle of CA, Falcon and Sharon Carter spend a lot of issues fighting HYDRA and The Red Skull (who was secretly running HYDRA).  Kingpin shows up, filling out a family drama that started in Daredevil.  The attempts at social commentary are clumsy at times, but as I wrote of in my previous post about the CA character, are all well intentioned.

The Essential series provides for a really nice package.  Many do not like the black and white art, but materials published in the 1960s and early 1970s are spared the at times terrible coloring.  Sure, you can get the omnibus or Masterworks with the remastered/recolored colors, but I like getting the black and white art.  It improves the reading experience for me and allows me to appreciate the work without the (at times) muddied colors.  The Essentials are also alot of bang for your buck, and many of the older ones are signifigantly below cover price on used sites like half.com.

Creepy Archive Vol. One

Creepy was one of the Warren horror magazines published in the 1960s that was intended to bring back the EC Comics fun yet disturbing stories (such as found in Tales From The Crypt) that had been made impossible to publish by the comics code.  By publishing this content in black and white magazine format Creepy was not required to comply with the comics code (which comics were not required to comply with since it was an in-house agreement among the comics companies with some concerns from distributors).  Creepy took on the role of short horror stories with a twist ending that were in much the same format, some would even say derivative, of the EC titles.

I had never really heard about this magazine until Vince B. of 11 O’Clock Comics praised it to the Nth degree.  I tend to agree with him.  This is some great material, with excellent art from Frank Frazetta, Al Williamson, Joe Orlando and others that would become pretty spectacular contributors in their field.  Archie Goodwin was also the editor, which helped alot.  It did diverge from the EC comics it was based on by being less text heavy and more visual.  The black and white art is very effective in that setting, and all of the artists are rather expressive in this media.  The stories follow the EC short morality tale format.  There is a moral level, despite all complaints about the horror content, that you would see in the EC stories.  Really, if I had to chose between my ten year old reading this in comparison to what was going on in Superman at the same time of publication I would prefer this.  It has a higher moral content despite somewhat shocking images (for the time, it is pretty tame by modern standards).

The first volume is published by Dark Horse and containst the first 5 issues in a nice hardcover.  It is pricy at 50 dollars, but I got a copy for 15 dollars from ebay.  They have published 2 more volumes as of this writing, plus 2 volumes of the companion magazine Eerie.  At 50 dollars a pop they can be rather expensive.  They reprint the letter pages and some of the ads, which may annoy some readers who are parsing page count to cost (they are around 240 pages each volume).  The oversized format is great, but a cheap guy like me would love to see them published in those thick newsprint volumes ala Dark Horse’s Savage Sword of Conan collections.  All in all a great reprint project that, though pricey, is an excellent choice if you are into horror comics.

Cultural Icons: Edited by Keyan Tomaselli and David Scott

Cultural Icons is an edited volume recently released from Left Coast Press.  I had the opportunity to review the book for the ARD website (Anthropology Review Database) and that should be up in a few weeks.

The book is comprised of some papers presented about the semiotic analysis of cultural/national icons.  It does this quite well, giving you the background information about the icons as well as the important information about how the icons have changed as national, international and social needs and experiences alter how the icons are framed in the culture.  Each of the papers cover an icon:  Nelson Mandela, The Eiffel Tower, The Little Mermaid, The Holy Lance, Britannia, etc.  What is nice is that once you finish this book, you have some idea how the theoretical applications of semiotic analysis can be brought to different icons and symbols.  That makes the book a very fine choice for students, who might learn alot of history of anthropological/culture studies/philosophical thinking but not learn how to apply such conceptual tools to the process of thinking about a subject.  That can be a very hard thing to teach.  For that reason I think the editors of Tomaselli and Scott have assembled a very good book.

Why Is One Of The Best New Bands I Have Learned About In The Past Coupla Years Called “Cattle Decapitation”?

Maybe because they are awesome.  They have a violent dystopia theme of overpopulation that makes a conceptual continuity fitting many of their songs.  What Frank Zappa was to sex toys and groupies they are to misanthropy.   I also like the original take on cannibalism.  Those vegetables were once humans…

Anthropological Reference In A Comic: Wow, I Found One?

Anthropology doesn’t come up much in comics, except in bizarre archaeology and biological/evolutionary concerns that are usually pretty bad.  But I found a reference to Mary Douglas in the cover to this Wonder Woman comic and had to imagine that Wonder Woman creator William Marston would have been familiar with many relevent anthropologists.  He would have also not gotten along with her, since she would not support Marston’s kinky ideas.  The other women listed on the front are prominent female academics.  Despite having some pretty mean political views, Douglas was a good anthropologists and her theories can be applied to situations she would have objected to (meaning her own political causes) and work quite well.

Lois Lane Needs More Spankings: Where Bizarre S&M Fans Got Their Kicks During The Silver Age

Found this at superdickery.com.  It is a reprint of a letter that is telling the editor that Lois Lane needs to be spanked more in the pages of Superman.  I like how the letter takes on a rather twisted tone of a mild S&M excitement.  This guy had to be a freak (not judging, just saying I sense a bit of deviance here).  When you think about it, there were probably lots of people in the 1950s who only had comic books to masterbate to.  I don’t know if that is a good thing or a bad thing, but it had to happen.

An Example Of The Wonderful Things at Superdickery.com

An example of the wonderful content over at www.superdickery.com, a site with lots of laughs and juvenile humor involving panels from classic comics that just aren’t right.  In some of them the fact that Superman is a dick is explored.  Elsewhere there are fine examples of things that were published in a comic book that probably shouldn’t have been but made it through somehow.  Anyway, it is good for some chuckles.

A Disturbing Batman Toy…Look At Where The Trigger Is

Captain America

I liked Captain America when I was 10 years old.  I don’t know why.  I think the costume, shield and moral stance he had was interesting.  I have the Captain America Essentials Vol. 1-4 and have been working my way through them.  Currently, I am almost done with the 3rd Vol.  My wife saw me reading it and joked a bit about it.  A conversation ensued.  Her, being a not much of a comic fan and certainly never having read an issue of Captain America saw in his image a branding of hyper-partiotism.  In today’s world, such an openly patriotic symbol screams republican conservatism.  But that is not the character of CA that I have seen through the comics I read.

What most people don’t understand is that under that red, white and blue outfit is an interesting character.  Steve Rogers was a sickly reject when he applied for the military in WWII.  He was given an opportunity to participate in an experiment with the super soldier serum.  It was a success, but Nazis attacked the secret lab and killed the inventor before he could replicate the serum, and all the info died with him.  There was only one super soldier, and that was CA.

Created by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby before WWII, he hit the ground running fighting Nazis.  Here is the thing.  He was created before Pearl Harbor, which created some very nasty letters and death threats from the American Nazi Party (look it up, there were several Nazis operating legally in the US before the country entered the war).  But the creation persevered, as did their creators.  When the US entered the war the character took on an incredible meaning on the home front.  These early issues showed CA in his duel identity, with his other identity being that of Private Steve Rogers – a bumbling army soldier that spent most of his time on KP duty with the company mascot Bucky Barnes.  Bucky would become his sidekick, and eventually died (only to resurrected in the 2000s as the Winter Soldier, later taking on the role of CA after his assissination a few years back.  CA as Steve Rogers will probably make a comeback, at least I hope.

The Essentials I have been reading begin with the CA material following his revival in the early 1960s, found in the pages of Avengers #4.  The character was relaunched by Stan Lee and original creator Jack Kirby as part of the emerging Marvel universe as a character in the Avengers as well as the pages of Tales Of Suspense.  After Tales of Suspense #99 the title changed name to Captain America 100.  The series was published more or less continously, with some renumbering and changes until issue 600 came out a few months ago.  Check out the wikipedia entry for more info on the issue numbering mess.

The character of CA?  Well, I should get back to that.  It is interesting because, despite his often associated image of war propaganda, he is a very interesting character.  After he was unfrozen from being in a block of ice in the 1960s he had to deal with the death of his partner Bucky in the same events that froze him.  Despite being frozen for over 20 years he was haunted by that death, reacting to it as soon as he came out of the unscientific cryogenesis.  Add to that the fact that he was a man raised in the depression, an old man in a young man’s body and with a mind set that was from a different page of history.  In many ways the character created a dialogue between the WWII generation and the times his story was set.  CA had a grand optimism (one only a serious war can create) as well as a moral code that was often at odds with how his fellow Avengers, superheroes and (especially) his government operated.

Interestingly, he did not carry over 1940s attitudes about race and gender (though his stories were only as empowering as the climate that they were written in).  His partner in the 1970s, starting in Essentials Vol. 3, was the Harlem native Falcon.  Falcon was a black superhero that dealt with social problems relevent to the African-American community.  The title would be named Captain America and the Falcon for several issues.  He was written into many stories based around the social issues of racism and poverty that were in the minds of many people in the 1970s.

His attitude towards women could sometimes be a bit worse.  The sexism present in comics book often caused CA to question the value of women, but he was usually framed against the occasional outbursts against women by Nick Fury.  As the years progressed he would come to idealize many of the better ideas of what America could be.  Throughout the years one of his most frequent enemies would be the US government and corrupt influences within it, all the way up until the Civil War event in the 2000s.  CA also was in many ways the best example of the patriot as Jeffersonian Democrat, a champion of Freedom of Speech and open dissent when necessary.  He also opposed unnecessary violence and killing enemies, which in the 1980s caused him tension with many of the darker Marvel characters such as the Punisher.

When we think of the current political climate, especially with overt displays of patriotism, we are bound to connect CA with partisan politics, possibly conservative themes that have arisen around that patriotism (country music anyone?) and other aspects.  Sure, CA is words on paper and an artistic concept that has been interpreted by a string of many minds with their own opinions and experiences.  But I think when CA is done best his core remains a symbol of patriotism that is transcendent, something that is lost in the cultural wars that have turned words like liberal and conservative into slanders used to attack instead of meaningful terms.  CA does represent something that seems lost in the world today, a deeply disturbing inability to seperate politics from any discourse about the nation.  Maybe it is reductionist or simplistic to think about things that way, and maybe CA is also just as simplistic.  But in a certain way that is where his beauty lies – he is above many of the inescapable parts of American citizenship today.  When he puts forth an opinion in a comic, he tends towards a rational and sane answer…which is more than I can say for much of our way of interpreting patriotism and patriotic symbols in relation to our own political views…and maybe I am doing that with CA – seeing in him my own Jeffersonian Democrat ideals, but if these Essentials are any measure I am probably right.  CA was not willing to accept the necessary evils of government and also forwarded some Depression Era ideas about civility and fraternity that are also a far from what the reality was, but they can provide us with something to strive for.

All in all what I like about CA is that he forwards a progressive idea about what America should be and not a compromised acceptance of the system.  He is against blind faith in leadership, he is against corruption.  But he is also against blind rebellion and has demonstrated time and again the problems with blind protest.  He is for the rights of the individual but the individuals responsibilities to society and his fellow human.  Right now, looking at the current state of America (at least through the news) there has never been a time when protest in this country has been so blind or the rights of the individual been so irresponsibly preached to the detriment of society while at the same time individual freedom being progressively contained in the interests of an established and completely corrupt elite.

Conservatives all over are protesting Obama, and Obama’s greatest victory was to convince us that he was a liberal.  The whole thing is just as stupid as it looks.  But CA?  He was a real liberal.

Don’t bother commenting with political stuff, I won’t OK any comment about that.  I am not interested in your political opinions, write them somewhere else.