Captain America: Steve Rogers #1 (Marvel)

This is the comic that revealed the big bad secret about Steve Rogers.  I figured I should read it for myself.

Now, I've read Nick Spencer before.  This is the guy who famously gave Jimmy Olsen his bowtie back.  (Trust me, people talked about it.)  True, I lost track of Spencer for a few years, but I never forgot about him.  Now I'm wondering if that was a good thing.

The Nick Spencer who shows up in the pages of this comic has either been neutered, or has willingly embraced the Marvel ideology of putting in as many irreverent elements as possible.  Baron Zemo is made into a joke.  I have no affinity for Baron Zemo, but it makes little sense for him to have been relegated to comedic beats in the issue.

But what bothers me more is that to get Steve Rogers to the point where he ends the issue uttering, "Hail Hydra!," Spencer uses a series of flashbacks to find out what his parents were like.  Now, for a DC guy, family background can usually be depended on to have played a pretty important part in a character's moral development.  In Marvel comics, the only such character is Uncle Ben, who is famously sacrificed in Spider-Man's origin story to flesh out the "great powers, great responsibility" mandate.  Otherwise, families don't mean much for Marvel.  It's a superhero clubhouse where you either get along, or don't (Civil War).

Spencer's idea is that Rogers' little-seen parents do have a significant impact on him.  His father is a bum, and his mother is an overworked woman who finds solace in a friend who eventually introduces her to the wonders of Hydra.  It's implied, though not spelled out at this point, that she takes up the membership offer, and that Steve has thusly been an agent of Hydra the entire time we've known him.

It's not even the Hydra twist that bothers me, but how Spencer runs roughshod over the Rogers family to reach that point.  The Steve Rogers we've always known has had a stronger-than-average morality, which is the while reason he was chosen for the Super Soldier program in the first place.  I know they make a big deal out of this in Captain America: The First Avenger, anyway.

The Hydra presented by Spencer is a movement geared toward the terrible economy of today, and those willing to exploit it for their own ends.  He trots out Red Skull (the sad part about Captain America is that he seems to inspire an incredibly limited rogues gallery, one that invariably trots out Nazis, because that's who the bad guys were when he first became a superhero) as a recruiter in the present day.  If this were a DC comic, the Rogers family status as immigrants would have been relevant.  I mean, DC is full of immigrants.  DC wouldn't have missed that.  Spencer ignores this, however, and looks for shortcuts like what he does to Steve's dad.

I know all this sounds like I'm merely reiterating that I'm a DC guy and not a Marvel guy, and playing into my own prejudices.  And maybe it is.  But this is a whole story about prejudices, that completely ignores the role prejudice plays in it.  You can see how Hydra ended up inspiring Cobra in the G.I. Joe comics.  But even Cobra has better characterization than Hydra these days.

It's simplistic storytelling.  That's what bothers me.  It speaks to fans who like simplistic storytelling.  That's the only reason why Marvel would tell stories like this.  It focuses on the big twist, and ignores any other calls for subtlety.  Marvel is a place where you'll find a comic for every reader (and there are some for me), but it presses hard for the hardcore fan, the one who will unquestioningly accept anything, and so to shock these fans, they have to do truly outrageous things.

Well, one would be to ask their writers to hold themselves to a higher standard.