Not sure if I’m alluding to the South or Jesus there, or if there’s really a difference, but anyway, what I’m really talking about is the pulp myth known as Captain America, shot down dead on the courthouse steps as he prepared to fight for civil liberties, the boring legal way. As American resurrection myths go, superheroes are in a distant third place behind the South and the savior, but that’s not bad — the death of a hero, even an imaginary one, probably resonates longer and in more subtle ways than the decline or departure of any baseball franchise but the Brooklyn Dodgers. Captain America killed? That’s news, and The New York Times thinks so, too: “Captain America Dead: National Hero Since 1941.”
Of course, the paper of record is a little too smart to for the funny books. They’re suspicious of a storyline that has a villain named Dr. Faustus using Cap’s own girlfriend to kill him. Too bad their spidy sense wasn’t on when Judith Miller used their own column inches to land a blow against truth, justice, and the incredible shrinking American newspaper. Well, they won’t get fooled again — the paper’s betting that Captain America will rise from the grave, and cynics and sense say they’re probably on the money.
But that doesn’t mean he isn’t dead right now, or that the Pulp Oracle has not spoken. It has. Unlike Frank Miller’s canonical Dark Knight graphic novels of the 1980s, in which an aging, libertarian Batman battles Ronald Reagan’s proxy — Superman, that gullible tool — and wins a victory for the little guy through pluck and dirty tricks, the latest round of comics commentary demands a martyr, and he’s not a Muslim. Captain America’s death comes at the end of a series called “Civil War,” played out in most of Marvel’s titles, in which Captain America defies a U.S. government that wants to register, monitor, and control superheroes. It’s not a clearcut case of principle vs. politics, though — the government is represented by Iron Man, another good guy who believes that the troubled times demand a rollback of civil liberties (vigilantism being defined as such in superhero land). So it’s one of those “there are no winners here” kind of stories. You know the one — where a man-god of perfect purity refuses to defend himself and dies for our sins.
Of course, it’s just a story. In real life, there are no martyrs whose deaths can undo the mistakes Captain America — I mean the United States of America — has made since 9/11, which, even more than Jeebus Himself, is what this story is really about. What’s done is done, and the dead are dead. Which is why maybe, if Oracle of Pulp is really trying to tell us something, Captain America will stay that way.
–Jeff Sharlet