The Comics Professor

On Captain America: Steve Rogers #1: Why I'm optimistic (spoilers)

Wow, people haven't been this angry about a Captain America book since he was killed in 2007. And understandably so, because in today's Captain America: Steve Rogers #1, something even worse happens to the Sentinel of Liberty: he is revealed at the end of the comic to be a Hydra agent, and apparently has been so for some time.

Before I give my feelings on that, let me say the rest of the comic was fantastic. Steve back in action, Sharon Carter and Rick Jones guiding him from afar, Free Spirit and Jack Flag back at Cap's side... just wonderful. Steve back in action, being the hero, taking too many risks, and especially Steve and Sharon's loving and mutually admiring relationship, all depicted wonderfully in both Nick Spencer's dialogue and Jesus Saiz's artwork.

But, of course, that's not what the furor is about. In flashbacks, we see young Steve and his mother Sarah befriend a mysterious woman who lures them into a Hydra meeting, a seed which bears fruit in the final page reveal: Steve saying "Hail Hydra."

Shocking. Disturbing. Revolting. Antithetical to the character. An insult to his Jewish creators.

All this is true.

So why aren't I more upset?

Because I'm confident this WTF ending is setting up a storyline for the ages. Let me explain...

I read a lot about writing fiction—definitely more than I actually write fiction—and one of the most frequent tips to motivate your story is "torture your babies." In other words, imagine the worst thing you can do to your beloved main character and then make him or her face it.

One of my Twitter friends said Cap's main virtue is his integrity, without which he's nothing. I would agree: that's basically chapter 4 of my book.

So what's the worst thing you can do to Cap? Worse than killing him (which has been done... ahem... to death), worse perhaps than even killing his loved ones? Make him compromise his integrity. Make him into the opposite of what he is, an agent of tyranny instead of its tireless opponent.

That's how you really hurt him. Whoever did this to him in the story—the Red Skull, Baron Zemo, Doctor Faustus, Kobik the Cutest Cosmic Cube Evah, take your pick—knows that. And Nick Spencer, Jesus Saiz, and their editors Tom Breevort and Alanna Smith know that too. They're making Cap face his greatest internal threat yet: a danger to his own identity. The fact that this goes against everything Captain America stands for isn't a problem—it's the point.

And that's how you set up an epic redemption story, which is what I hope Spencer and Saiz are going to give us. And when Steve recovers from the brainwashing, false memories, hypnosis, or Cosmic Cube shenanigans, even though he shouldn't hold himself responsible, he will. He tortures himself much more than anyone else could when he is forced to compromise his principles, even if he could not control it, because he feels he should have been able to control it.

I'm not upset by this comic because I see it as Steve Rogers' greatest test ever, a test I'm confident he'll pass, but not without going through hell first. And that could be a truly amazing story.

Watch out... nuanced discussion of moral perspectives in Captain America: Sam Wilson #2

I clearly remember seeing the internet headlines on a Wednesday morning several weeks ago when the first issue of Nick Spencer and Daniel Acuña's Captain America: Sam Wilson was published, screaming about "Captain Socialism," which were joined later that day (naturally) by Fox News. The irony, of course, was that the alarm was completely unfounded, that all Sam Wilson said in the comics was that he planned to get more involved in politics than his predecessor Steve Rogers did (with all details given off-panel), and it was the press and the American public in the comic book that overreacted by accusing Sam of being anti-American, socialist, traitorous, etc. Were Spencer and Acuña engaging in a bit of playful trolling based on a too easily predictable real-world media reaction which they actually predicted in the same comic? (I hope so.)

Beneath the hype and hysteria, though, it remains that Sam Wilson is a different Captain America, forging a new path that diverges in some important ways from the one tread for decades by Steve Rogers. And even more impressive, Spencer and Acuña have achieved this distinction while staying true to Rogers' well-established characterization. (This contrasts with comments made by a previous creative team who, in the process of explaining the difference between Sam and Steve, oversimplified Steve's views to obscure the fact that Sam was going to be little more than a carbon-copy Cap with wings and a bird.)

Along the way to pointing out Sam and Steve's subtle differences, Spencer and Acuña also toy a bit with the segment of modern comics readership who like to jump to conclusions based on a handful of preview pages and solicitation text and fueled by internet speculation (and, in no small part, the marketing efforts of the comics publishers). Our creative team does so not only with Sam's internal dialogue but also in his exchanges with the dudebros seated on either side of him on an airplane, who take everything they read on Twitter to be the whole story and refuse to listen to Sam's mroe elaborate explanations. As Sam thinks to himself, "it's a complicated, messy story"—and Spencer and Acuña do a masterful job of peeling back the layers to this story (with many more still to be revealed, I'm sure).

The complicated and messy part I was most pleased to see dealt with the difference in Sam and Steve's moral perspectives, a difference which is nowhere near as simple or stark as the final scene of the first issue (or the cover of the second one) would have us believe.

Two scenes in Captain America: Sam Wilson #2 show this very well:

1. In these panels, a reporter asks Steve what he thinks about Sam's new political stance:

He simply nails it: Sam is his own Captain America and he can choose how to play that role, whether or not it's how Steve played it in his heyday or how he would play it now. Steve also struggled with the call to political activism in the past, such as when he wanted to support Andrew Bolt's congressional campaign (early in Mark Waid's Heroes Return run). His solution was to remain neutral as Captain America but work for the campaign as Steve Rogers (regardless of whether people knew they were one and the same—recall that he also made a big fuss about surrendering at the end of the Civil War as Steve Rogers, not Cap). Would Sam make that same decision? Perhaps not, but Sam is not Steve, and it was great to see Steve acknowledge that for the press (in the Marvel Universe as well as ours).

2. After SHIELD catches a man who released secret files describing a proposal to use Cosmic Cube fragments to make subtle changes to reality, Maria Hill makes clear she relishes the thought of submitting him to military tribunal. While Sam and Steve both oppose this project and personally make sure SHIELD scraps any plans to pursue it, they disagree on what should be done with the whistleblower (let's call him "Snedward Owden"), with Sam much more concerned about Hill's plans than Steve is.

Here we see Steve and Sam differ in terms of their confidence that the whistleblower will receive fair treatment and impartial justice at the hands of SHIELD and/or the military, and also their roles regarding the law (on which more below). Sam describes their essential difference of opinion the following page, an important yet nuanced disagreement that feels natural within the context of the two characters' backgrounds and which could lead to some fascinating character beats in future issues:

I could quibble a bit with Steve's statement above that "we don't get to put ourselves above" the law, especially after admitting his past civil disobedience to Sam (and emphasizing his willingness to be held accountable for it). Perhaps this is a result of Steve's official SHIELD role as chief of civilian oversight, just as his appointment as head of global security following the Siege of Asgard made him more assertive regarding Tony's exclusive use of the Iron Man armor (as seen in the first issue of Avengers Prime). Or maybe he feels it's his responsibility as chief of civilian oversight to monitor the tribunal, requiring a certain degree of faith in a process he'll be involved in. After all, unlike the registration act (and earlier government policies he regarded as unjust), he does not see any problem with military tribunals per se that warrants disobedience—especially if he's on the scene. Even if this does signal a shift in Steve's views, it is not a shocking or abrupt one. (This, of course, assumes that this is the same Steve Rogers we know from the 616 Marvel Universe, and not some New 52-style slight-of-hand where, post-Secret Wars, he's "basically the same character but different—just keep reading!" That remains to be seen.)

Only two issues into their run, Spencer and Acuña have fulfilled the hopes I had for Sam Wilson as Captain America since his "appointment" was announced. They've begun to give Sam a unique perspective on serving as Captain America that represents an interesting alternative view on the role that offers endless story possibilities, without watering down or stretching the concept of Cap itself beyond recognition. As well as further discussion with Steve, I hope we get to see some of Sam's internal struggles with his new stance, in which he questions how far Captain America can and should go in support of a particular position. This is not to say he shouldn't be more political than Steve was, but I would like to see him acknowledge and confront the fact that it is a different role for Captain America (rather than simply defending it to others).

Personally, this is the most excited I'm been about the Captain America title since Steve took up the shield after Bucky "died" during Fear Itself. (It's worth mentioning at this point that young James was a different sort of Cap too.) While a part of me longs to see Steve "enyouthened" and back in the star-and-stripes at some point, the rest of me looks forward to a long, insightful, and enjoyable run of Captain America: Sam Wilson from Spencer and Acuña.

-----

If you're interested, I discuss judgment and compromise, principle versus politics, and civil disobedience in chapters 5 and 6 of The Virtues of Captain America: Modern-Day Lessons on Character from a World War II Superhero.

A problem with Marvel's AXIS: The difficulty of inverting complex characters.

Marvel's current crossover event, AXIS, involves various characters having their ethical orientation "inverted": heroes become villians and vice versa. A deceptively simple premise that has been used throughout the history of superhero comics—but rarely on this scale—it has potential for interesting stories (as well as culminating in "things will never be the same" changes to the status quo).

Ironically, however, it is precisely the aspect of Marvel's characters that makes them unique—their moral complexity and nuance—that confounds efforts to "flip" them from good to evil or from evil to good, resulting in strange adn confusing choices in storytelling and characterization.

There are very few characters in the Marvel Universe who are unambiguously good or evil: Captain America (that is, Steve Rogers) and the Red Skull, who are not among the inverted, are the two obvious exceptions. (There could be others too: for instance, I'd throw in Spider-Man, pure of heart but imperfect in execution, who interestingly was also not inverted.) The vast majority of the Marvel heroes and villains, however, are more complex, the heroes struggling against their more base natures and the villains striving to some degree to find redemption or achieve noble ends. But this complexity, a hallmark of Marvel Comics since the firm of Lee, Kirby, Ditko, and Associates dreamed them up in the 1960s, makes it diffiult to simply "flip" their moral characters. As a result, in AXIS we see a wildly inconsistent approach to inversions, especially regarding several heroes and one villain in particular.

Throughout this series and its tie-ins, I've been fascinated and frustrated by two characters in particular, Iron Man and Doctor Doom, whom I've long found to be very similar in their moral characters. Essentially utilitarian in their ethics, both pursue their personal visions of "the good" while believing that the ends justify the means. This leads Iron Man, for example, to take the controversial actions he took during Civil War in order to protect the superhero community, and leads Doom to try to take over the world, time and time again, because—as shown well in the miniseries Doomwar—he believes in his heart that only his rule can save humanity. Of course, both also have massive egos which serve to enable their extreme actions in pursuit of their singular visions, granting each the perception of entitlement, even the duty, to use their superior intelligence to save the world, damn the costs (as well as indulge personal vendettas and grudges along the way), and it is this arrogance which often foils their greatest ambitions (especially in Doom's case).

But after they are inverted during AXIS, these two similar characters are spun in completely opposite directions. Iron Man is portrayed as a mustache-twirling Snidely, teasing the citizens of San Francisco with an Extremis app that can make them "perfect" and then charging them $100 per day to maintain it. (This could be seen merely as leveraging an extremely attractive—and presumably legal—product for maximum revenue, but that sort of behavior often represents evil in popular fiction, and in any case is quite a departure from Tony's recent corporate altruism.) In other words, whatever restraints Tony Stark once felt on his pursuit of the good, for himself or for the world, have been removed. But this is not Tony "inverted"—this is Tony squared, Tony unleashed, his buffers removed, all second-guessing forgotten, resulting in even more of a caricature of himself than (according to some) in Civil War.

On the other hand, Doom has been all but neutered, now positively apoplectic about all the pain he caused his beloved citizens of Latveria, on whom he bestows democracy (by fiat, natch) before embarking on a program of making amends like a charter member of Villains Anonymous. The once proud and noble Doom simpers to Valeria Richards (daughter of Sue and Reed, currently living with Dad's greatest enemy in a delightful act of childhood defiance) about his need to right his past wrongs and also protect himself Latveria from an inverted Scarlet Witch who wants revenge for the events of Avengers Disassembled, House of M, and her wimple. (He had nothing to do with last one, but she could be understandably pissed about it all the same.) He even admits to Valeria—brace yourself, true believers—that Reed Richards has "always been right."

While Iron Man's "inversion" magnified his worse impulses, Doom's robbed him of his best. He either no longer seems to want to save humanity—a change that, in itself, hardly seems heroic—or he no longer feels he can do it and that the way he was doing it was incorrect—which is not an ethical change but an empirical one about methods. The thing that was evil about Doom was the steps he was willing to take to serve his goal of saving the world, but his nobility came from his sense of purpose and the moral lines he was not willing to cross (matters of honor such as truthfulness and keeping promises). Where he was once a fascinating man of extremes, now he's been reduced in both his ambition and his arrogance.

How interesting it would have been if, instead, Doom had been inverted into a traditional one-dimensional villain instead, using his brilliance to rob banks. Then, at least, the reader would have been led to ponder the true complexity of Doom's character and wonder if he was really a villain to begin with, and in what ways he was different from a hero like Iron Man. (At least they didn't make him an angry blogger.)

It seems that what the inversions did was not to flip the overall ethical orientation of the affected heroes—except in the most simplistic way possible, turning nuanced moral characters into one-dimensional caricatures—but merely flip the degree to which they perceived limits on their activity: for example, Iron Man sees fewer limits and Doom sees more. Apart from Tony and Vic, the Scarlet Witch indulges her desire for revenge against Doom; the all-new Captain America (Sam Wilson) still fights crime, but more like the Punisher than he did as the Falcon; and the X-Men become very pro-active against humanity (making Cyclops look like Gandhi). None of them has become a villain per se, but simply less traditionally heroic by virtue of crossing lines that once they refused to cross.

The main idea of AXIS is to flip heroes and villains along the "axis" of good and evil. But given the complexity granted to most of the Marvel characters by their creators, and maintained over the years out of dedication to that vision, there is no simple axis to be found. Most Marvel characters express their heroism or villainy in nuanced and multifaceted ways, so there are many axes along with they can be inverted. For example, they can be flipped in one aspect of them (such as what remained of Tony's restraints on his pursuit of goals), flipped along more than one of them (such as Doom's loss of ambition and arrogance), or reduced to a simple black-and-white caricature (such as the Scarlet Witch of Vengeance).

Of course, the "fuzzy" method of inversion in AXIS may have been part of the creators' plan—it did result from a magical spell, after all, and magic is known for its unpredictability. But I think some great story possibilities were missed by not considering what truly makes the various Marvel characters heroes or villains—or both.

New book: The Virtues of Captain America: Modern-Day Lessons on Character from a World War II Superhero

Well, it's time to let the Cap out of the bag... I'm very pleased to announce my next book, The Virtues of Captain America: Modern-Day Lessons on Character from a World War II Superhero, which will be published by Wiley-Blackwell next March ahead of the film sequel Captain America 2: The Winter Soldier. (If you're so inclined, you can pre-order it now from Amazon.)

Unlike the books I edited or co-edited for the Blackwell Philosophy and Popular Culture series (such as Batman and Philosophy), this one is written solely by me—for better or for worse! Also, rather than presenting a survey of philosophical ideas presented through the lens of its topic, The Virtues of Captain America has a specific focus: showing how the "old-fashioned" ethical code of Steve Rogers is just as essential today as it was in the past, not only as a role model for individual character but also as a way out of America's current political divisiveness.

I had several goals in mind as I wrote this book:

• Similar to the approach of the Blackwell Philosophy and Popular Culture series, in this book I introduce basic concepts of moral philosophy, especially virtue ethics, using examples drawn from decades of Captain America stories. In particular, I wanted to address the complexity of moral decision-making, for which simple rules, formulas, and virtues can be a guide but never the final answer. For this reason, judgment is a constant theme in the book (and takes up an entire chapter in itself).

• I wanted to address the perception that Captain America's ethical code is anachronistic, simplistic, and "black and white." As I argue throughout the book, none of these could be farther from the truth. The ideals that ground Cap's ethics are timeless, and while his core principles may be simple, the process of using judgment to balance them to make moral decisions in specific circumstances is anything but black-and-white, as Cap shows time and time again in the comics.

• More ambitiously, I wanted to show that Captain America's relationship to his country—in particular, the way he emphasizes principle over politics—can help Americans in the real world to start to heal our radical political divisions. If we focus, as Cap does, on the core ideals of justice, equality, and liberty that Americans share, we can better put into context our differences of opinion regarding how best to put these ideals into practice.

• And, most personally, I wanted to share my love of this classic superhero character through his decades of stories in comics such as Captain America, Avengers, and the countless other titles in which he's appeared over the years (hundreds of which are cited in the book). In the process, I also pay tribute to the dozens of talented creators who have crafted his stories, starting with Joe Simon, Jack Kirby, and Stan Lee, and continung with legends such as Jim Sternako, J.M. DeMatteis, Mark Waid, Ed Brubaker, and Paul Jenkins (just to name a few).

I'm sure to bombard you with more details and sneak peeks as the book approaches publication, but for the time being, you might like the following articles and blog posts I've written about Cap in the past (many of which laid the groundwork for the book):

• My Captain America op-ed from 2011, published in both The San Diego Union-Tribune and The Washington Times (PDF of print version), which serves well as an abstract of the book. (In fact, it was a large part of the proposal for it.)
• "Can Captain America Heal a Divided Nation?", at The Good Men Project (as well as here), which uses a storyline from the Ultimate Marvel Universe (not covered in my book) to address the issue of principle versus politics.
• "Are Captain America's Ethics Too Old-Fashioned for the 21st Century?", a blog post at Psychology Today that addresses the anachronist and "black-and-white" issues about Cap's moral code.
• "Can Captain America Show Us How to Be More Cosmopolitan?", a more recent Psychology Today blog post addressing Cap's worldly brand of patriotism.
• Another piece from The Good Men Project extolling several of Cap's virtues, along with my GMP review of the first Cap movie.
• A piece from this very blog discussing Cap's sense of authority in the context of Stoic thought. (You can also click on Captain America at the right to see more posts on him, not all of which are worth listing here.)

Finally, I discussed Captain America, directly or indirectly, in a number of chapters in the Blackwell Philosophy and Popular Culture series:

• "Captain America and the Virtue of Modesty," in Superheroes: The Best of Philosophy and Pop Culture, edited by William Irwin, a free e-book collecting chapters from superhero-themed books in the series along with exclusive chapters on Cap and Thor.
• "Superhuman Ethics Class with the Avengers Prime," a survey of the three main schools of ethics using Thor, Iron Man, and Cap, from my edited volume The Avengers and Philosophy: Earth's Mightiest Thinkers. (Note that here, Cap is cast as the deontologist while Thor is the virtuous one; in The Virtues of Captain America I explain why virtue ethics and deontology both help to characterize Cap's ethics.)
• "Did Iron Man Kill Captain America?", an essay addressing Tony Stark's role in the Marvel "Civil War," particularly in contrast to Cap (another recurring theme in my new book), from my edited volume Iron Man and Philosophy: Facing the Stark Reality.
• "'My Name is Peter Parker': Unmasking the Right and the Good," in which I cast Peter Parker as the prize in Iron Man and Cap's moral tug-of-war during the Civil War, from J.J. Sanford's edited volume Spider-Man and Philosophy: The Web of Inquiry. (I revisit this theme in this blog post.)

Grant Morrison tells a story of Nazi Superman—and so does Superman and Philosophy!

As Zap2It reported early this morning, part of Grant Morrison's sprawling DC Comics series Multiversity will tell the story of a stranger from another planet landing in Nazi Germany rather than Smallville, Kansas:

"Imagine you're Superman and for the first 25 [years] of your life you were working for Hitler," Morrison says, "And then you realize, 'Oh my god, it's Hitler!'" Morrison further explains, "Not only is he a Nazi Superman, he's a Nazi Superman that knows his entire society, though it looks utopian, was built on the bones of the dead. Ultimately it's wrong and it must be destroyed." The issue will see the caped hero going up against enemies he knows are right, as he comes to terms with the fact that the principles he was raised with are wrong.

As it happens, Robert Sharp explored this possibility in his chapter "Could Superman Have Joined the Third Reich? The Importance and Shortcomings of Moral Upbringing" in Superman and Philosophy: What Would the Man of Steel Do?. His tale starts like so:

It’s 1926, and on a small farm with a few fields of wheat, a meteorite has just charred its way through a good bit of the crop. The farmer who owns the land is dismayed. His life has been hard since the Great War, even though prices for his food have skyrocketed, at least in terms of the actual bills carried around. In fact, one of his neighbors joked that he needed a wheelbarrow to carry around the cash to buy a loaf of bread, given how worthless the money had become. He and his wife are barely scraping by. Perhaps it is just as well that they had not been able to have children. Where would they find the money? His wife is fond of saying, “God will provide,” but sometimes he has doubts. And now a large part of his best field has been destroyed by a rock from space!

    As the farmer heads toward the damaged area, he calls back to his wife to bring a shovel in case there are any scattered fires to smother. He can see the hot smoke from the house, though the meteor itself is buried. His wife is almost half way to him when he reaches the crater, his eyes widening. “Magda!” he shouts, with a mixture of awe and anxiety, “Magda, bring a blanket! There is … a child!” The words seemed distant from him, as though said by someone else. His wife, believing she has misheard, runs toward him, shovel in hand.

    “Jonas? What is it? What is wrong?” she asks, her hands trembling. As she nears her husband she can see him, just emerging from some sort of space pod—a small boy! A gift from God! Her prayers are finally answered. Here in the German heartland, a miracle occurs, one that will soon have profound consequences for the world at large. The small child that had landed on Jonas and Magda Kuhn’s farm was the Übermensch himself, a “super man.” The Übermensch would vindicate Hitler’s claim that the New World Order would arise in Germany and prove that nation’s superiority.

    Only three years later, young Karl Kuhn, as he was named in the adoption papers, would join the Hitler Youth. Indoctrinated into the cause, his character was formed by the Nazi Party. He never knew any other life, and when the war finally came, Hitler used his young prodigy as the ultimate super-weapon. The war was over before it had begun, as the Allies had no counter to such raw power. A farm boy from the middle of nowhere had helped the Nazis take over the world.

"...Or Not" is the title of the following section, and through the rest of the chapter Sharp explains the different ways this story could go and how moral character and develop influence it. (See also the four other chapters in the book on Superman and Nietzsche for more on the Übermensch—and why the true Übermensch may be named Lex.)

As countless others do, I look forward to seeing Grant Morrison's version of this "what if" story in Multiversity—and in the meantime, be sure to pick up Superman and Philosophy!

Can Captain America Fix America in Marvel's Ultimate Comics Universe--and Ours?

As you might have heard by now, in today's Ultimate Comics: Ultimates #15, Captain America is elected president of the United States in a special election. (He takes the oath in #16, shown to the right.) America is the real world may be divided ideologically, but the Ultimate version is divided physically, with various grouping of states separated from the union and under various forms of government or rule.

(MILD SPOILERS AHEAD)

One of these is the West Coast, which has begun protecting its borders from refugees from the warlike southwest region using drones developed by the late Hank Pym (and called, naturally, Wasps). After the drones go offline and starts killing indiscriminately, Cap defies orders to stay out of the West Coast and leads the Ultimates into California to battle the Wasps. Americans across the country are so impressed and inspired by the TV images of Cap that they vote for him as a write-in candidate in the special election, and at the end of the issue, Carol Danvers calls him on a payphone to tell him he won.

In a press release, Marvel Comics released three pages from Ultimate Comics: Ultimates #16, written by Sam Humphries and pencilled by Luke Ross, showing Cap's acceptance speech (courtesy of Bleeding Cool)--click to enlarge.

Whatever the differences in character or politics between the Captain America in the Ultimate Universe and the more familiar one from the mainstream Marvel Universe, this is Captain America who we know, love, and admire. As he says, "America is deep in crisis--we're divided, mistrustful, nervous, and scared." Appropriately for such times, Cap strikes a inspiring tone: "This crisis calls us all to do our best. To rebuild our fragile unity. To find the strength equal to our challenges." This is not a partisan message--it is a universal message, and one we hear all too seldom from our elected leaders or candidates for office.

Can Captain America heal the once United States of America in the Ultimate Universe--can he be Abraham Lincoln, as Humphries said to the Washington Post? I think it's a fairly good bet he will, but since this is the Marvel Ultimate Universe, there's no way to tell what the country will look like when it's over. The Ultimate line gives Marvel creators leeway to stretch the realism the mainstream Marvel Universe is known for, so the usual fan assumption of "things will always go back to the status quo" doesn't always hold.

What about America in the real world? As outlandish as it may seem, I think the character of Captain America, whether in the mainstream Marvel Universe, the Ultimate Universe, or the movies and animated series, can help bring the fractured interests in our country back together. As I've written before, he provides an example of principle over politics, exemplifying the founding virtues of justice and equality that all Americans can embrace in general, even if we disagree on how to understand or implement them. His ethics, so often caricatured as black-and-white, show us how we can and should act towards each other with both care and respect, so that each of us can pursue his or her own interests and dreams consistent with the rest of us doing the same.

It is interesting to note that Captain America dealt with presidential politics once before, as a candidate for a populist third party. This was also during an election year in the real world, in Captain America (vol. 1) #250 (October 1980), written by Roger Stern and co-plotted and pencilled by John Byrne. After an entire issue of deliberation and advice from half the Marvel Universe, in the end he declined:

In this case, he turned down the candidacy to maintain his idealism and avoid the compromises that come with any position of political leadership. He makes a terrific point: any leader must find a way to balance the myriad interests within society, and in order to do that, he or she always risks disappointing or alienating one group or another. Cap wanted to stay above that so he can remain a symbol of the American dream for all.

Why did the Captain America in the Ultimate Universe make a different choice? Perhaps he felt that if he didn't accept the position of president of the United States of America out of a desire to avoid political compromise, all Americans would lose given their advanced state of national decay. Perhaps he felt that serving as president was the only way he could preserve the American dream in that reality, both through his actions and his example. The Cap in the mainstream Marvel Universe was not "ready to negotiate... to preserve the republic at all costs," but the Ultimate Cap did not feel he had that option, and "decided to answer the call of the people" in a time of near-collapse of that republic.

But in both cases, Cap emphasized that it is up to the American people to take care of themselves however they can, whether through private or public cooperation. In 1980 he told the American people, "you need to look within yourselves to find the people you need to keep this nation strong... and God willing, to help make the dream come true!" and in 2012 he told them, "America has asked me to lead them. I ask America to look within themselves."

In whatever form he takes, Captain America always stands ready to help, fight, and lead--but he demands that we all pitch in too. Ultimately (pun intended), perhaps that's the message we can take from this latest comics development and apply to the real world, especially when each of us votes in November for the person we think can best lead us out of our current economic malaise and identity crisis. In other words, who will be our Captain America?

On Spider-Man, torture, and character in comics

Inspired by my friend Colin Smith's post on his blog, Too Busy Thinking about My Comics, regarding our friendly neighborhood Spider-Man's questionable actions in Amazing Spider-Man #685, and then further spurred on by a vigorous debate with Spidey editor Stephen Wacker on Twitter this morning (joined by Colin and several other stalwart discussants), I need to put my thoughts on this matter down for whatever counts as posterity these days.

Although my comments will much be broader than this specific instance, here is the page-of-interest:

While Colin was firmly against what Spidey did in this issue, his larger concern (as I understand it) is with the lack of context and discussion of what Spidey did. No more reflection, no consideration of the principles or consequences involved--he just "did what he had to do." (Another concern of his was with the increasing proliferation of acts like this, one of which I mentioned in an earlier post, and is also related an another post on DC Comics' devolving views on killing.)

One issue that arose in the Twitter discussion this morning was selectivity when applying moral standards to characters. I was accused of sanctioning Batman's practice of child endangerment over the last 70 years, but not Spidey's recent transgression. I replied first that I wasn't sanctioning or condemning either hero's actions, and then elaborated on two points:

1) Batman's actions towards his various Robins have been discussed extensively in the comics--for instance, in Devin Grayson's wonderful Gotham Knights run, as well as Peter Tomasi's current Batman and Robin, which also deal with Damian's penchant for killing. (There is also a chapter titled "Is It Right to Make a Robin?" in Batman and Philosophy.) It is not the controversial nature of Spidey's actions, so much as lack of recognition of any controversy, that is distressing to me.

2) Batman and Spider-Man are different characters, with different moral codes, implying different limits and lines they won't cross, as well as different processes of judgment. The Punisher is different, as is Captain America, and Superman, and Daredevil. Even within the Batman family, we see Bruce, Dick, Tim, and Damian all making moral decisions differently--and the fact that we can read that in the comics, that the characters are so well-defined that these differences come out, is a testament to comics storytelling.

It is this second point about character on which I want to focus here: not only is the lack of reflection or context in Amazing Spider-Man #685 troublesome, but it seems out of character for Spidey to do what he did. (To be fair, he does acknowledge this briefly--see the panel in the lower right-hand corner in the image above--but then seems to dismiss such concerns.)

Despite this long legacy in the Marvel Universe, Spider-Man is perpetually represented as the kid among grown-ups, representing a still-developing moral idealism alongside the more solidified moral positions of Captain America and Iron Man. We see this when he sided first with Iron Man and then Cap during Civil War (which I described in my chapter "'My Name is Peter Parker': Unmasking the Right and the Good" in Spider-Man and Philosophy, edited by Jonathan J. Sanford, as well as in this blog post). He also serves as the point-of-view character for events like Civil War, and he has gained the status as the moral center of the Marvel Universe--not in the sense that he is always right, but rather that he hasn't got everything figured out, and therefore he considers his actions like a conscientious young person would. For example, he makes idealist pledges like "no one dies," which makes his all-too-easy acceptance of torture all the harder to reconcile with his character.

Torture is a hot button issue to be sure, and deservedly so. You could say it's the ultimate "trolley problem," in which grave consequences will follow if one adheres to cherished principles. Several years ago, I compared Batman's continued struggle over whether to kill the Joker to a trolley problem and to the contemporary torture debates. Among its other lessons, the trolley problem (which Spidey has also faced, of course) shows us the difficulty of adhering to moral absolutes. It is too easy to say "I will never kill" or "I will never torture," no matter how high the costs, until you're actually in a position--as a government official or superhero--to have to accept those costs on behalf of those who will bear them, in order to maintain your principles. (For a magnificant academic treatment of these issues, see Michael S. Moore's paper "Torture and the Balance of Evils" in his collection Placing Blame.)

For that reason, I am no moral absolutist when it comes to torture (or anything else). As a Kantian I am a strong devotee of moral duty and principle, but no matter how firmly we adhere to a moral principle, there can always be another moral principle can that be judged to be more important--and this importance can be based, in part, on consequences. But this is a decision that everyone has to make for himself or herself--including fictional characters like superheroes that find themselves in these situations much more often than the average Jane or Joe.

As much as I admire the character of Captain America, I find it more believable that he, compared to Spider-Man, would engage in torture, with a tremendous heavy heart, when he judged it to be necessary. Ideally, his struggle with such a decision would parellel America's struggle with it. It would rip him apart inside, representing a betrayal of his core principles of respect for human rights and dignity, and he would only do it if the costs of not doing it were unacceptably high, as in the "ticking time-bomb scenario." (He would not, however, be as flippant about it as he was in Secret Avengers #21, shown at the right.)

As I understand the character of Spider-Man, he would be far less accepting of the "inevitability" of torture in whatever few circumstances Cap would. Spidey would want to look for another way, not stopping until he found it, no matter what the costs to himself (as with his "no one dies" pledge). If anything, he may be guilty of ignoring the costs to others of sticking to his own principles in the face of the "Ends of the Earth," and a thought process like this may in fact explain why he resorted to torture in Amazing Spider-Man #685. But we don't know this, because it wasn't fleshed out (at least not yet). As it stands, it appears that Spidey adopted this morally extreme course of action too easily, and that seems out of character.

Why does this matter? (This question was at the core of much of the Twitter discussion this morning, and is a point I explored in my other chapter in Spider-Man and Philosophy, "The Sound of Fury Behind 'One More Day.'") It matters because the character of Spider-Man has been around for 50 years now, and for the most part has been defined very precisely, to the credit of the dozens of writers that have told his stories over the years. He has changed and he has grown, but organically within the stories, not suddenly or abruptly--except in cases like the deal with Mephisto in One More Day or the incident that prompted all this hubbub.

That rare cases like these stand out is because they are exceptions to the "rule," or in this case, the character that is Spider-Man. If you've read his stories long enough, you feel you know him and you come to care about him, despite his being a fictional character. (This is the problem with the ciphers walking around in familiar costumes in DC Comics' New 52.) Just as we call out our friends for doing this that are out of character ("this isn't you, Jimmy, it's not who you are!"), we can think of our fictional characters' action the same way--even moreso, actually, because fictional characters, no matter how complex, are much simpler and well-defined than people in the real world.

If comics publishers and creators want our loyalty to their characters, they have a responsibility to portray the characters consistently--and if they choose to have a character do something surprisingly, they should deal with it in-story so it feels organic. The backlash against One More Day is a obvious example of readers' feelings of betrayal at out-of-character writing based on editorial fiat. On the other hand, the frequent back-and-forth between Cap and Iron Man since Civil War, each calling out the other's hypocrisies, is fantastic, because it deals with issues of character and consistency in-story--between the characters themselves, even!

To me, and to many other readers, Spider-Man never seemed like a character that would accept torture as an acceptable means to an end. If that is a true representation of the character as he's evolved, then I hope the creators will draw that out--that could make for some thoughtful and enjoyable superhero comics. But I also wonder what other lines he refuses to cross, and that fills me with despair.

Two-Face shows us both sides of the virtue ethics/situationism debate

In the back-up feature to last week's Detective Comics #8, written by Tony S. Daniel and illsutrated by Szymon Kudranski, Harvey Dent, aka Two-Face, appropriately adopts both sides of the recent philosophical and psychological debate over character traits.

First, Harvey shows us the situationist position:

Situationists such as John M. Doris, author of Lack of Character: Personality and Moral Behavior, argue that people do not have general character traits like honesty and courage, but rather that their moral behavior depends very strongly on the circumstances of any particular situaiton. This work is based on psychological research showing that, for instance, people are much more likely to help a stranger after finding a coin in a phone booth (or other seemingly irrelevant and trivial cues).

This is widely seen as a criticism of virtue ethics, which claims that people do have robust character traits or dispositions that correspond to the virtues. Luckily for us, Two-Face also represents this position:

Virtue ethicists respond to the situationist critique in a number of ways. For instance, they argue that they never claimed that character traits and action were correlated precisely, so there is no problem with observing some situational variation in behavior. Also, they argue that the experiments don't show that circumstances change any particular person's behavior; they simply separate those with robust character traits from those without. (Showing his own professional virtue, Doris lists much of his critics' work here; Gopal Sreenivasan's "Errors about Errors: Virtue Theory and Trait Attribution" is particularly good.)

Mourning the death of character in the DC New 52

I hadn't planned to write any more about the DC relaunch--every month I drop a couple more titles, and I fear it won't be long before I'm buying little more than the Batman and Green Lantern families of books. (Even Earth 2 is sounding more like a new Tangent Earth: the names are the same but most else is different.) But then I read something from Marvel that I truly enjoyed, and part of the reason I enjoyed it is also the reason the DC relaunch has left me flat.

The book is Avengers: The Children's Crusade, a nine-issue bimonthy series by Allan Heinberg and Jim Chueng, the creators of the Young Avengers series. It was recently collected in hardcover (very soon after the last issue hit the stands), and I spent a leisurely afternoon and evening last week reading it--with pleasure. The series recounts the efforts of Young Avengers Wiccan and Speed to find Wanda Maximoff, the Scarlet Witch, whom they believe to be their mother. They are aided in this by Magneto (Wanda's father), and along the way they have run-ins with the Avengers and the X-Men. (This series is a prelude to a certain event, Avengers vs. X-Men, that you may have heard of, despite Marvel's famous promotional subtlety.)

Besides being exceptionally well-written and superbly rendered, the series is steeped in Marvel history--much of which is succinctly recapped along the way for the benefit of the new reader. The rest is inessential to following the story, but adds immeasurably to the enjoyment of it. I don't think it's revealing too much to say the series touches on the relationship between Wanda, her brother Pietro (Quicksilver), and their father Magneto; Wanda's relationship with the Vision (which bore two sons, an epic tale in itself); the three mutants' relationships with the X-Men, the Avengers, and society in general; the Avengers Disassembled and House of M storylines, as well as more recent Avengers, X-Men, and Young Avengers stories. (And many of the Young Avengers' histories are wrapped up in Avengers lore as well, of course.)

Rather than weighing the series down, this tremendously rich and intertwined Marvel history provided essential background to the story, motivation and recognizability to all the characters involved, and emotional resonance to the events therein. These are all things that the DC Universe no longer has, since they erased most of their history, and have been evasive regarding which elements of it remain.

When I read the DC New 52 titles, even the more entertaining ones, I find myself numb to them. I don't know the characters anymore; I don't know what they've been through, how events affected them, and how it affects their behavior. The names are familiar, the costumes are similar (with a lot of redundant seams and armor-plating), and the powers are the same for the most part--but who are they? Without background and history, I have no context in which to understand their actions or care about them as characters. They're mere ciphers in familiar guises, frauds who play on our loyalties while betraying our treasured memories.

This problem is obvious in cases like Superman and Wonder Woman, who have been reinvented to a large degree. (Don't even get me started on Green Arrow.) Superman--perhaps the easiest DC superhero to define in terms of his character before the relaunch--now (ironically) seems completely alien to me. I can't say if any of his current behavior is out of character because I don't know what his character is anymore. Wonder Woman has always been harder to nail down in terms of her underlying character (an observation usually made to excuse low sales, but cause and effect are difficult to parse out), but now DC seems hellbent on upending everything we know about her origins, perhaps in the hopes that this will make her easier to define. (And that's being charitable.)

But the problem exists even for characters such as Batman and Green Lantern, who were left relatively untouched by Barry Allen's jog at the end of Flashpoint. (When I say Green Lantern I'm thinking primarily of Hal Jordan, but it applies to any of them.) We still don't know how much, or what parts, of their past history remains canon and still informs their personal character. DC dismisses these concerns, repeatedly saying that which stories remain in the New 52 continuity will be revealed as they become relevant. But they are relevant now: they are relevant to every character in every story, because they tell us who they are and what they've been through, and give us some basis to identify them as characters rather than simply talking heads in masks and capes.

To know who Batman is now, we need to know whether Jason Todd died, whether Bane broke his back, whether Darkseid "killed" him, and so on. To know who Hal Jordan is now, we need to know if he ever became Parallax, died, and became the Spectre, as well as the status of the more recent events of the Sinestro Corps War, Blackest Night, and Brightest Day. And then we have the various crises, deaths, and resurrections through the DCU, which inform the histories of all the characters in it.

If DC wants to leave all these details vague, or let them slip out little by little to tease the readers, that's their choice. But as long as we don't know what these characters have gone through, other than the broadest details, we don't know them as characters--we can't sympathize with them, we can't understand their behavior, and we have no connection to them. We will come to know them over time, as we do any new characters, and there's nothing wrong with that--unless we're supposed to retain our old loyalties and keep buying the books based on the "0ld" characters we used to know but who are now so much flotsam in the time stream.

Contrast this with Marvel, whose characters are more precisely defined than most of DC's (even before the relaunch). Captain America is noble, Iron Man is cocky and brilliant, Thor is chivalrous, Namor is regal and pompous, Daredevil is idealistic and compassionate, Spider-Man is naively pure, Hank Pym is insecure, and so on. We know who these people are, and when they say or do anything that seems "not like them," fan cry out--and justifiably so! Through decades of stories, even though crafted by a series of writers, these heroes' basic character traits have been defined so well (though not with perfect consistency) that any thing said or done out of the ordinary is immediately called out as out-of-character. Take Thor's calling the Hulk a "pain in the ass" in Fear Itself #5, for instance, which was widely derided by fans as something Thor simply would not say. The Thor they know, the Thor that has been written for so long even by so many, is so consistent in his speech, mannerisms, and behavior that this one phrase seemed horribly out of place. Could anyone justifiably call anything Superman says in the New DC Universe out of place? On what grounds could they say it?

Some may argue that Marvel's characters are too simplistic--especially compared to someone like Batman--but any such "simplicity" is based on well-established regularities of behavior that give them their stable, underlying character traits and that make them familiar to us. We know Spidey, we know Cap, we know Iron Man--and we know when they do something out of character. This is true of all serial fiction--ongoing TV series, movie franchises, book series--in which characters develop over time and establish clearly defined traits. New writers in these media have a responsibility to the fans to maintain the basic elements of the characters by writing them consistently with their past characterizations. And if they want the characters to change and grow--as they should, to an extent--they must do so organically and in a way that makes sense in the story, not present abrupt changes in character that make the fans doubt the writer knows about the character at all. (My chapter on "Brand New Day" in the forthcoming book Spider-Man and Philosophy presents this argument in the context of Peter Parker's deal with Mephisto, which was widely regarded as a bow to editorial fiat that flew in the face of Peter's basic goodness.)

I don't know the new Superman, the new Wonder Woman--or even the "new" Batman, even though he seems little changed from before the relaunch. There's no way I can know them. These "characters" have no definite history yet, and therefore no character to recognize. I suspect the powers-that-be at DC thought they could have their cake and eat it too, relying (as I said above) on longtime readers' loyalty to the characters they loved to keep them tethered to the books, while the creators crafted new characters beneath the surface to try to draw in the mythical "new reader." But speaking as a longtime fan, I don't think it's working on either front; and in the words of a fellow mourner, "I have no interest in the Emperor's new clothes when I can clearly see the Emperor's mucky behind."