The First (Nation) Captain America

I grew up with Marvel comics, and always found Captain America one of their most boring characters, a Wartime Superman only good at kicking foreign ass. Frankly, this poster won't help me change my mind:

Now if Marvel went back to the drawing board today, they could come up with something more sustainable, like, who knows, this genuine Captain America:

Meet the first Captain America, complete with the shield. Okay, it might not sell well in the Bible Belt, where they fancy blond, blue-eyed versions of Jesus (BTW not the most likely combo for a Palestinian Jew around 0 B.C.).

Marvel did create an Apache superhero / war hero, but Thunderbird got quickly MIA for the X-Men.

Adding insult to injury (and death): the fact that Thunderbird was killed soon after having been created also means that he got stuck in this 1975 wardrobe

blogules 2014
Since 2003, nonsensical posts about noncritical issues in nonenglish (get your blogules transfusion in French)
NEW: join blogules on Facebook!!! and Twitter (@stephanemot, @blogules)

Follow Us

Lobby Dick Tries To Retire, Fails To Retract

As the newly reformed League of Justice (D.C. Serious Comics) consider putting behind bars the Supervillains who disgraced America over the past 8 years, one of their most abject leaders resurfaces.

Last time we saw The Evil Doctor Cheney, he was pitifully escaping with his master Victor von Dumb in an helicopter. Their lair had just been raided by Captain America, who even humiliated von Dumb in public with his most powerful weapon ; a loud and concise X-ray speech exposing the imposter. The hero then threw this protective shield over the nation : "We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals".

It's hard to tell whether von Dumb will ever recover from his wounds. Somewhere deep into the darkest swamps of Amerika, The Rover is probably trying to revive his creature. D.C. Serious Comics declined to comment, but a sequel could be in the making under the title "Amerika Doomed : The Legacy".

We do know for sure the man known as Lobby Dick is still alive. Yesterday, he even rose from his armchair to deliver a "State of the Union with John King" address on CNN.

The Anchorman's hulk of a body was protected by a 8-inch adamantium-reinforced glass table, but for good measure King cast a few spells on The Creepy Veep, using quick hand gestures on his Magic Screen : as some of the Supervillain's most shameless moments were instantly brought back to life, there was no chance anyone in the audience could misinterpret his snarl for a friendly smile.

King first asked Doc Dick what he thought about Captain America's first weeks in power :
- "This League of Justice is dangerous : they are changing the very definitions of democracy, justice, freedom, science... cancelling all the much needed reforms we brought to the dictionnary over the last eight years. Next thing you know, even listening to Rush Limbaugh will be considered cruel and unusual punishment".
- "Well... isn't it already, I mean technically ? And what do you think about the use or abuse of the new superpower called Stimulus ?"
- "You sometimes do need a stimulus to get things going. For instance, when I don't get an answer or when I get an answer that I don't like, electroshocks can prove useful. But this Stimulus is a joke. Let's be clear : this country needs bullets, not bullet trains. Tax cuts for the rich, ax cuts for the poor. And a nationwide pipeline network".
- "... connected with new oil fields in Alaska, I presume ?"
- "Nah... oil should keep circulating on trucks, gas-guzzling trucks doing circles, virtuous circles. This country needs pipelines for water."
- "Pardon me... did I hear "water" ?"
- "You did. Getting water all across the nation is a major challenge for this millenium : we want to democratize waterboarding - no child left behind."
- "But that's insane !"
- "Yeah. Look how poor John McCain lost his bearings... I'm sure he refuses to promote waterboarding because Arizona is too dry."
- "Wasn't it because he was tortured in Vietnam ?"
- "That's a question of vocabulary. There was no CNN at the Hanoi Hilton back then, talk about cruel and unusual punishment..."

King offered the criminal an opportunity to redeem himself : "come on, Doc, now that your ruling days are behind you, now that you have nothing to lose... why not confess that you could have done or said things a better way ?"

Hissing and shrugging, von Dumb's sidekick refused to retract :
- the collapse of the Twin Towers ? "The DemoTeam did it, we tried to save Freddie and Fannie, but this infamous gang deliberately refused to strip them from their most dangerous powers when it was still possible"
- the Deficit ? "yet another creature from the DemoTeam - we found the fingerprints of The Dude all over it. Plus we had to reprint all procedure manuals... and by the way, do you know how much it costs to build a soundproof torture chamber ?"
- the Big Bang ? "We were caught in a global tempest and had to cope with the same crisis as our allies - rumors that the crisis originated from our own labs, our very homes, are bold lies"
- Shock and Awe ? "My only regret : the CIA didn't do their job and provided us with poor intel... but luckily enough, I was there to correct them and forge the case for the invasion of Iraq. Going at a Supervillain was the right thing to do. Everybody is definitely better off now, don't you think ? Iraq has ceased to exist as a united nation, Persia has recovered its Superpower status, new enemies keep popping up from all over the planet... more than ever, this World needs Amerika."

- "And how about The Scoot ?"

The Dark Lord's face turned even more somber as The Anchorman mentioned the case that almost tore the Doc Cheney - von Dumb couple apart in the last throes of their assault on democracy : "Victor and I slightly disagreed on that one, granted. I think it has something to do with my partner's hypocrisy. That's probably the reason why he keeps hiding his true fundamentalist face behind a mask of compassion. But make no mistake : he is as dangerous as I am."

Watchmen and the nature of Alan Moore's power

As the screens get filled with spectacular images of Zack Snyder's action movie sharing the same title as Alan Moore's delicate masterpiece, I welcomed Salon's interview of 'The wizard of "Watchmen"' (Andrew Firestone - Salon - 20090305).

At last ! The only person who could say something relevant and intelligent about his own work (which once again, has nothing to do with a recently released popcorn byproduct*).

In very deed, Watchmen is not about comics and superheroes. ""Watchmen" is an intelligent meditation on the nature of power".

Intelligence and power ? Alan Moore knows something about those, alright. As well as he knows something about human nature, its beautiful as well as its lighter and - preferably, I reckon - darker sides.

To stay with Watchmen characters, I think the darkest side of Alan Moore resides not in Rorschach, but in Dr Manhattan : the systems he designs are as perfect, but the key difference is that they are meant for planet Earth, perfectly human and humanly flawed, a tribute to intelligence**. Not the boring, dull, sterile Ozymandias kind of intelligence - the sparkling, stimulating kind.

If Stan Lee revolutionized super heroes and the comics industry, Alan Moore revolutionized comics as a medium*** for human intelligence and creativity. And in that extent, there is something fictionally autobiographical in Watchmen, "an intelligent meditation on the nature of Moore's power".

I was not surprised to learn that Moore produces several pages of script for each final page. The edifice requires an incredible concentration from its author, and there is just no way one could add, move or retrieve any single piece without ruining the work and provoquing its collapse****. The movie, any movie, was doomed to fail from the start.

Moore knows how to lift existing characters to new dimensions, and he changed the Swamp Thing or Batman forever, reinvented actual or virtual figures from the past, but he can do much more than that, lift the burden of all existing rules, build his own universes, bend space and time, explore fiction beyond Pynchon or Borges. How's that for superpowers ?

His best moments ? When he starts from scratch. And even then, he must always move on before it gets boring to him... which happens much earlier than it does to us. This author simply cannot stick to one thing, even from a dark swamp.

Yeah, the man's back to "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen" - not my favorite. But he's a human being, remember ? And his "Lost Girls" will probably expose new weaknesses.

I probably won't read those two, but I'd love to have a peek at his scripts.

Which, I know for sure, will be a delight for scholars decades from now.

PS: I also committed three blogules in French about Alan Moore : two lamenting about the disastrous choices of filmmakers ("Watchmen - Le Film" - 20081210 / "V for Vendetta - c'est Alan Moore qu'on assassine" - 20060323), one pointing out how "V" became IRL when, following the 2005 terror attacks, London authorities lauded their surveillance systems as their "Ears" and "Eyes" ("V for Vendetta. V : c'est arrive en 2005" - 20050724).

* Haven't watched it yet (who watches the Watchmen anyway?), but I will. Eventually.

** What's in a Worldsmith ? This Blue Man Group Of One would build with "materials" (please don't nuke me Doc, I know I'm being utterly reductive and classically / quantumly wrong) where the Bard Wordsmith mindnipulates "immaterials".

*** I'm not saying "a" as "one" : in Watchmen, Moore mixes all kinds of media (comic strips, novels, radio, cinema, press, TV, sketches and paintings...).

**** see (in French also) "Watchmen - Frappes chirurgicales et hommages collatéraux".