Captain America: White #2

Captain American: White, like Hulk: Gray, Spider-Man: Blue and Daredevil: Yellow, is a limited-run series by the dynamic duo of writer Jeph Loeb and artist Tim Sale that attempts to define the mythological essence of the character.

In the case of Captain America, Loeb defines the superhero mythos as loss, the loss of his World War Two sidekick Bucky in a fatal encounter with a drone. Bucky's death is also the event that leads to Cap's two decades of suspended animation. The drone explodes, killing Bucky and blowing Captain America into the icy waters of the North Atlantic and eventually into a block of ice worshiped by the Inuit.

All of this is from the Stan Lee/Jack Kirby Avengers #4 reintroduction of the character in the 1960s. None of it was actually from the WWII era when then Marvel precursor Timely Comics mothballed Captain America in 1949 due to a shift in popular appetites to true-crime and horror fare.

It is interesting that Lee and Kirby brought Cap back soon after the Kennedy assassination and just prior to a massive U.S. ramp up in its commitment to war in Vietnam; and that the reborn Captain America should be so heavily freighted with loss and alienation -- the loss of his boy partner and his own era. Captain America is "a walking anachronism," a man out of time in an age of protest and lost credibility.

What really shines through in the Loeb-Sale retelling of Captain America is the psychological dimension of lost childhood. It is downright Jungian. Captain America is constantly flagellating himself for not living up to his inner child, Bucky, who repeatedly put his life on the line for Cap during their WWII exploits.

This made me realize that what superhero comic books are all about is juveniles letting go of their childhood and acclimating to the ways of the adult world, which, as Freud says, is all about accepting loss.

But what makes Captain America particularly potent as a myth is the idea that man creates himself (autogenesis) and therefore man can heal himself. It has something to do with his relationship to his inner child. Most men end up going to women to maintain the inner child, and to my mind that is a Faustian bargain (Nietzsche's line about, "When you go to woman be sure to bring a whip"). But man need not go to woman to maintain the child. The child is there for the man, and the man the child. The relationship oscillates. That is the beauty of it, and its potent dynamism. You just have to think about it and not run to the nearest woman for coddling.

All of this is on wondrous display in Captain America: White #2. Below are ten scans. Captain America, Bucky and the Howling Commandos are headed for Nazi-occupied France on a secret mission when their transport plane is shot down and crashes into the sea. Bucky saves Cap but is unable to retrieve his iconic shield. The last page has Cap consoling Bucky in loving embrace, what every man must learn to do for himself if he is truly to stand alone and be a "tough guy" and independent.

Captain America #17

A telling indicator of the depth of distrust in government is how it is depicted in the pages of Marvel Comics. Invariably the forces of malignancy have co-opted the USG, and it is the role of the superhero to beat it back.

It is a tall order. And no superhero has a tougher pull than Captain America, the putative representative of an increasingly discredited global behemoth. The American Dream is now generally regarded as no longer operative. Income inequality (brought front and center thanks to the Occupy Wall Street movement) and a lack of remunerative employment are the new normal. Hand in hand with the economic stagnation of the Great Recession goes a commitment to perpetual war. This is on display currently with our Nobel Peace Prize winning president relaunching the Cold War and actively planning for another lengthy conflict in the Middle East.

But the latest run of Captain America could not be in finer hands. Writer Rick Remender is a true subversive. Marvel has the good sense to realize that the only way to keep Captain America alive is not to avoid reality. Below are seven scans of Captain America #17. The art is by Nic Klein; the colors, Dean White.

Captain America #17 opens with Nuke, a pill-popping Vietnam-era Super Soldier Program knockoff of the original Cap, reduced to a pile of charred meat as Dr. Mindbubble, a super-villain who owes his origin to a combination of self-administered LSD and Super Soldier serum, burbles soothingly to him:

There, there. A beautiful dream to help the passing. 

You should have been the prototype of the next species. But they twisted you up, old friend. And you let them. Let them take your beauty and burn it in effigy to a world ruled by religious and institutional fascism. 

Taught to lay your life on the line for their stubborn warfare  . . .

. . . Instead of interacting harmoniously with this joyful world. All just as I warned you, Nuke.

 But your test is over now, good spirit. I wish you a peaceful journey to whatever reward you've selected. 

Captain America #17 also features the anti-capitalist villain Ran Shen, The Iron Nail. The Iron Nail and Dr. Mindbubble, quite persuasively, break down the current deep state of our permanent government:

And what do we have here? A glittering dragon slithering from the sky.

Hello, Horace.

Ran Shen. What madness. I never imagined our paths to cross again.

I made you a promise.

That you did. How long had I been in there?

Fifty years.

Fifty years falling inward. It was a strange gift, Ran. I discovered complete tranquility within the core of my being.

While the world without fell to the fascist control of S.H.I.E.L.D.

Well, sure. Only possible outcome. A band of humans with so much power, and so little oversight, is destined to grow into a living organism -- with its own goals -- its own greed.

The more a thing grows, the more convinced it becomes that it is right. Why else would it have such success? And at a certain size, no one can control it -- no one can tell the swollen beast it is wrong!

And it falls on us to liberate humanity from S.H.I.E.L.D.'s secret dictatorship. What do you say, old friend? Up for a little civil disobedience? 

Let's open their eyes.

In the final three scans, Steve Rogers, a.k.a., Captain America, and his new sidekick Jet Black mix it up with the Shaolin Scientist Squad:

Ultimate Comics: The Ultimates #3

For many months I have been accumulating issues of Marvel's Ultimate Comics: The Ultimates. I finally had the chance to dig in the weekend before last. So far -- I have just finished #8 -- I can report that writer Jonathan Hickman and artists Esad Ribic and Brandon Peterson deliver a complex, satisfying narrative that is simultaneously futuristic and thoroughly grounded in time present. Here is a synopsis of the plot lifted from issue #6 when Nick Fury travels to the New Mexico desert to try to recruit a disillusioned Steve Rogers, a.k.a, Captain America:

Our old friend Reed Richards created a Darwin bubble. He accelerated the evolution of generations of humans and brought a future city back to the past -- to the here and now . . . 

They destroyed Western Europe and we lost almost half of our fleet in an engagement with them. 

It's as bad as it gets. We have . . . no solutions.

Here are five scanned pages from Ultimate Comics: The Ultimates #3 that illustrate the Nick Fury quote regarding the defeat of S.H.I.E.L.D. and The Ultimates at the hands of Reed Richards and his Children of Tomorrow in The City. Note Thor's Kamikaze assault in the last two pages.

The Bourne Legacy

The studio apartment where I live has turned into a pizza oven. I am in a unit on the top floor of a 100-year-old building. For the most part it stays cool during the summer; only when the temperature reaches the mid-80s°F and above does it begin to bake.

It has been warm the past couple of days, warm and humid, and today it is forecast to be in the 80s°F again. Today the Gay Pride Parade takes place. Last night, the Saturday before the parade, I was expecting more noise -- the thudding base of dance music from the street party on Broadway -- but everything was surprisingly quiet. Festivities must be going on downtown.

Last night I finally got around to streaming The Bourne Legacy (2012), my first Hollywood blockbuster in several weeks. Recently there has been a marked reduction in new big Hollywood films available to stream from Amazon; that, and Amazon seems to be fiddling with their pricing. It used to be that pricing was very stable. All newly released big Hollywood movie rentals would be priced the same. Now it's all the over the map. Some, when first available, you cannot rent, only buy.

So I've grown tired with the process; hence, the three-week hiatus. But last night I was in the mood for a Saturday-night blockbuster, and I chose wisely.

The Bourne Legacy is directed and co-written by Tony Gilroy, who wrote and directed the refreshing thriller Michael Clayton (2007). Legacy is part of the high-quality Bourne franchise.

In Legacy we have Aaron Cross, played by Jeremy Renner, instead of Matt Damon as Jason Bourne. The secret government program is also different. The one Cross is member of is Operation Outcome, not Treadstone and Blackbriar, which were the black ops programs in the first three Bourne movies.

Outcome is a supersoldier pilot project. Through a combination of drugs and viruses, Operation Outcome engineers genetic enhancements -- an increase in cellular efficiency -- making its operatives faster, stronger, smarter. Think an updated version of the Captain America origin tale. In this case instead of earnest scientists working to discover a supersoldier serum to combat the Axis powers, we have a sprawling, opaque national security state with overlapping secret programs spewing out beta versions of super-assassins. (The idea of a warrior made superior by increased energy production at the the cellular level can be found in another Marvel comic book character, the villain Zeke Stane from the pages of Matt Fraction's Invincible Iron Man.)

This movie has everything. It is a Call of the Wild with missile-firing drones. It is a timely expose of our nefarious corporate national security state (Big Pharma in bed with high-ranking government intelligence officials). And it has a stupendous motorcycle chase in Manila. You even get the James Bond final scene -- the stud ends up with a beautiful, devoted woman on a boat on some exotic body of water. Cue the Moby theme song. Roll credits.

Indestructible Hulk #6

In Indestructible Hulk #6 the legendary Walt Simonson replaces Leinil Francis Yu. Mark Waid continues to script an interesting Bannercentric narrative. Below is a scan of the final page of Indestructible Hulk #6 where Hulk improbably wields Thor's mythic hammer, Mjölnir:

I have to say for the purposes of Waid's science-heavy storyline I much prefer the artwork of Yu. The recent work of both Neal Adams, another legendary artist, and Simonson is too cereal box cartoon sweet for me. Penciling must be a young man's profession. I think back to when Kirby returned to Marvel in the late 1970's and worked on Captain America and The Invaders. As a kid in junior high school I couldn't stand the stuff. It was too flat and blocky. I stopped reading anything that Kirby did, which is truly shameful on my part.

Recently, last October, the day after going door to door trolling for labor votes prior to the election, I read the 1999 trade paperback Manhunter: The Special Edition which collects the Manhunter 8-page backups that appeared in the "100-Page Super Spectacular" Detective Comics of the early 1970's. Written by Archie Goodwin with art by a young Walt Simonson, Manhunter blew me away as a kid. It seemed real and gigantic, a perfect reflection of the rottenness of Watergate America. Below is the cover, by the great Jim Aparo, of the issue where the Goodwin-Simonson Manhunter bites the dust: