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by Peter Sanderson
#348 and #349 feature the return of the Flag-Smasher, who's not been seen since *Captain America* #322. It's Flag-Smasher with a slight difference; he has turned against his ULTIMATUM terrorist organization. He took it over and renamed it, but the organization existed before he got there, and he has just learned that the organization has been, and is funded by, a certain National Socialist. Since Flag-Smasher is anti-nationalistic and anti-patriotic, this shocked him. Flag-Smasher is, in his own way, as big an idealist as Captain America, but his ideals are a lot different from Captain America's. So, when he found out that someone whom he considers evil, that is, someone who believes in nationalism, is funding his organization, he tried to put a stop to it, and that turned the organization against him. They are just on the eve of launching their most audacious plot yet, which will use an electromagnet pulse generator to stop the world's technology from functioning. So, he tries to stop the plans . . . it doesn't work, and they go after him. He needs help in order to stop the organization and save his own life, and there's only one person that this anti-terrorist can trust — a man of ideals, a man who can be trusted to keep his word, and that's the original Captain America, his greatest enemy. He doesn't know there's been a replacement.
So, #348 features John Walker going to bag Flag-Smasher not knowing what it's all about. #349 spotlights Steve Rogers [the original Captain America], who is asked by Battle Star, to bail Walker out of the deep water he's gotten himself into.
In #345 Steve Rogers surrendered himself to the Commission, and he's kept in one of their holding cells until issue #348, in which he's set free due to some high level intervention. So, in #349 Steve Rogers has two strange decisions to make. First, when Battle Star asks him to help, he realizes that Battle Star is the guy who degraded [the original] Bucky's memory and is in league with the guy who replaced him. ‘What do I owe this guy? Do I want to help him?’ So he's got to make that decision, and [later] he's got to make the decision whether to help an even worse guy: Flag-Smasher, who, even if he has not murdered people in the past, has been part of an organization that has murdered people.
#350 will feature the ultimate confrontation between Steve Rogers and John Walker, who, despite the fact that they're real, real close in issue 349, never quite meet. They're on opposite sides of the same ice fortress. This is a double-sized issue that will also feature the premiere of Captain America's newest and greatest villain, the one man he'll never be able to beat. It will also resolve Steve Rogers's harassment by the Commission. That doesn't mean the Commission will pack up its tent and go away. It will also resolve the question of who wears the red, white, and blue. With luck, the answer will be surprising.
It was just a shame, since Captain America is Marvel Comics to me. So I said, I've got to do something. I think I'm doing good, solid, interesting mainstream material, but if people are just not in the habit of picking up the book, we've got to do something to attract their attention. The most immediate thing you can do is get a new art team, and if it's a hot art team or a soon-to-be-hot art team, that can give sales a boost. [Apart from that] you've got to manufacture an Event. And I'd discovered in my ten years of being up here that there are certain sure-fire things you can do to get the book looked at. There are such things as high-concept gimmicks that work; they worked this time. The gimmick will not get them to buy issue after issue. only good stories will do that. But a gimmick will at least get you looked at.
These are the only gimmicks I know of that seem sure-fire and work. Number one, kill somebody important in the book, preferably the lead character *[chuckles]*. That'll get the book looked at. Short of that, change the character dramatically. A new uniform might do it. Or get him out of uniform and replace him. Or change his life in some other major way: get him married off or whatever.
So, I did three of the above. Steve Rogers got himself a different uniform. As far as I'm concerned, the original Captain America red, white, and blue uniform is one of the greatest costumes ever invented, and cannot be improved upon any more than Superman's can. And still we replaced it. The new one's grown on me. We also replaced the lead character. As of #350, since this storyline started in #332, it'll be a good eighteen issues so far that Steve Rogers has remained (1) not Cap and (2) in a strange uniform.
Why is the book being read by a fairly significant numbers of new readers? Once they started looking again, they must have liked something they'd seen, because they kept up with it.
I got some of the worst hate mail of my career *[laughs]*. I got more hate mail than I ever got in my life. How *dare* you replace Steve Rogers? And what was funny about a lot of this was they would say, “Dear Marvel, I'm not a regular reader of Captain America, but how dare you replace Steve Rogers as Captain America?” And I say if you're not a regular reader, that’s why we replaced him. Just so you'd be a regular reader. So many of these people admitted that they weren't regular readers, that they'd lost interest in the character, yet now they were up in arms because we were playing around with the status quo of someone they had lost interest in. That did not hold a lot of water.
What I predicted would happen and *has* happened is with each successive month, people were seeing what we were doing, why we were going in the direction that we did, when they discovered that by taking Captain America out of the uniform we could better define what Captain America the concept is. By seeing someone groping, trying to live up to it, trying to grasp all the facets of the concept, we made Steve Rogers look even better by the misfortune that has befallen him. So with each successive issue the fan mail got a little bit better *[laughs]*.
The more surprising thing is that John Walker has actually attracted a following. See, I've got other reasons why this storyline came about. The best-selling cover I had [on *Captain America*] up until this point is the one in which Captain America had a machine gun and was blowing somebody away. That was issue #321 [during the previous Flag-Smasher storyline]. Some of the fans seemed to want me to Rambo-ize Cap, make him tougher, more Punisher-like, more Wolverine-like.
And the other thing was that I get this fan letter that was very well-written and thought out asking me a lot of questions about Steve Rogers's personal life. Among them, he asked if Steve Rogers supports the views of every given political administration. This letter-writer just assumed that Captain America must be a good Republican. Here's a guy who grew up during FDR's Democratic administration; why would anyone think he'd be a Republican? I figured, ‘I have to do a storyline that clearly delineates the difference between Cap's ideas and America's political reality. We've got to show that he is not a tool of the administration, that he transcends the specific political administration, every political administration.’ The only way I could do that, of course, was to have him at odds with it.
Someone wrote in noticing that many of the characters I'd been doing, mostly villains, had symbolic resonances that had something to do with America today. Flag-Smasher is an anarchist. The Serpent Society represents corporate crime and trade unions. Scourge represents vigilantism, ULTIMATUM terrorism, Mad-cap represented the purposelessness of youth. The Slug was drug-running. The Watchdogs are my idea about censorship and self-appointed moral arbiters. Nomad I turned into a figure of justice untempered by mercy. A lot of people have not liked my handling of Nomad, forgetting that he was the Bucky of the 50s, and this guy was not exactly Mr. Goody Two-Shoes. This was a guy who was beating up on blacks and Communists and he liked it.
I don't think it's enough for Captain America, who is a walking symbol, to be hassling with garden-variety super-villains. I think that to do justice to the concept of the character, he's got to fight [people with some conceptual basis, some symbolic meaning]. The Red Skull was one of his greatest enemies, because he's got a good look and a good name, he's got a lot of gimmicks, and he tapped into the Nazi mentality. But I was getting a little tired of Nazism as the only kind of idealistic threat that Captain America would go up against, and it seemed a little bit outdated. I wanted to find all the other forces of oppression that are more prevalent today. I wanted to create characters who could be to these forces of oppression what the Red Skull was to Nazism and totalitarianism. This is not to say that any of the characters I've created have approached the Red Skull in terms of excellence as a character, but at least I'm in there trying.
So, I invented the Super-Patriot character [Walker's original costumed identity] to show that even though Captain America represented patriotism, patriotism was not always a good concept. I was going to show the dark side of patriotism, and thought the way to do that was to have another character who in his own way was just as patriotic as Captain America, but who embodied the dark side of the American dream.
When I invented Super-Patriot, I did not dream he would become Captain America. That was a later idea. So his approach to patriotism is “My country, right or wrong,” and whatever the admistration says is the way it plays, and his interpretation of the American dream is profit-oriented. A lot of people believe the American dream is coming here to America and making a lot of money. That's not how I see it at all, and it's certainly not how I see Steve Rogers seeing the American dream. To Steve Rogers, America is a land where you have the opportunity to live up to your potential, to acquire all the things you want out of life provided that you don't step on other people's American dreams to do it. For Steve Rogers, money is not a major concern. Instead, it's having the freedom and opportunity to right the country's wrongs, to help his fellow man, and to promote the American dream in its true essence.
John Walker is different.
He believes the American dream is to make a mint and then retire. He says, “Yeah, I'm looking after number one. Why is my country so good? Because it's given me the opportunity to make a lot of money.” That its [the American dream's] corrupted essence.
That's why he got into it [being Super-Patriot], because he felt there was room in the marketplace for more than one patriotic figure, and he saw it as a competition between himself and the original Captain America. He thought he was younger and stronger and able to meet the challenge. He was trying to compete in this select market for this franchise of being America's premiere patriotic hero.
I guess there are similarities between John Walker's attitude and Ollie North's attitude. But the main difference is that John Walker gets things done *[laughs]*. He's closer to Rambo than to Ollie North in certain ways. The similarities are there, but I wasn't inspired by the Iran-Contra affair because I started the storyline before that [became news], and I haven't really altered the storyline in any way while it's ongoing. I did have Bernie, Captain America's ex-girl friend, say “Don't be sure what the President does or doesn't know,” when Steve was saying the President must know of his situation.
I got a lot of letters saying, “Captain America's a fighter. I just can't believe he would knuckle under to anybody, including the government.” At first, Steve Rogers was not interested in actively opposing members of his government when he figured he bore the whole brunt of their discrimination. If he perceived the Commission as evil, of course he would fight them tooth and nail. But he actually felt that in certain respects they were within their rights to do what they were doing. They were just asking for the reinstatement of the conditions under which he originally was Cap during wartime, for his activities to be coordinated from a central office.
As time has gone by, he's beginning to realize there must have been other psychological reasons for his deciding not to fight it at that particular time. One of them goes back to his battle with Super-Patriot five issues before [he quit as Captain America]. That battle was the first time an opponent of his stopped a fight when he could have won; Super-Patriot had a chance to see Bruce Springsteen instead. Even the world's greatest athlete, which is what Captain America is, can have a bad day. The greatest athletes can't perform to their greatest capacity every single time that they're up. A fighter can't win every single fight, or he can't win every single fight by the same margin. My point is that Captain America, who never loses, can have just the worst day. Maybe he didn't get quite enough sleep. That day the natural edge he has over everyone else is just a little bit less, because he can't be perfect all the time. So, it was one of those days, and he happened to fight Super-Patriot that day.
Steve Rogers has harbored some self-doubts from that fight, thinking maybe this one he would have lost if this guy hadn't gone away to see his pop idol. And I think Steve Rogers now sees this entire series of events, his losing the advantage of being such a well-known hero, as something he's deliberately done to toughen himself, to purposely give himself some handicaps to overcome in case he was getting at all soft. He sees it as something he's done to test himself, to see if he has what it takes without having the legend backing him up. One can't underestimate the power of walking into a place as Captain America. Most people would give up as soon as you walked into the room. If he walks into the room as the Captain, most people will say, “Who's this guy?” He doesn't have that legend, so that's going to make it harder. Psychologically, he wanted that. In his head maybe he had lost this edge, and this is the way to get it back, by giving himself a series of trials.
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Article © 1987 Fantagraphics Books, Inc.
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