Once again, I’m forced to push back my Zootopia review, but I think this is just cause. In hindsight, I should have gotten the ACEN post up on Sunday and put this up on Wednesday, but what can you do?

WARNING: SPOILERS FOR ‘STEVE ROGERS: CAPTAIN AMERICA  ISSUE 1’

If you’re a comic fan, and especially a Marvel one, unless you’ve been living under a rock the past few days, you know what happened at the end of the new first issue of Steve Rogers’s new comic as a returned Captain America, which he now shares with Sam Wilson because if there can be two Spider Mans and two Hawkeyes there can be two Captain Americas.

Steven Rogers proclaimed “Hail HYDRA.”

All this time Captain America has been a deep deep DEEP undercover HYDRA sleeper agent. Our nation’s greatest hero, long time member and mainstay of the Avengers, one of Marvel’s first and most iconic super heroes, the most enduring patriotic themed character of the 1940s, and a symbol of America’s ideals for the past 75 years was in reality one of our greatest enemies, a Nazi, all along. ……………………………………………………………

I. CALL. BULLSHIT!!!!!!

The whole point of Steve getting the Captain America powers in the first place is because he wasn’t the strongest, the toughest, or anything that was considered masculine in the 1940s. He was a small, frail, skinny, scrawny, sickly artist. He was chosen for his courage and passion to help despite his handicaps. He was meant to be everything Hitler wanted, blue eyed, blond, strong, loyal to his country, etc, but American.

Plus, if Cap wasn’t the good guy we all thought, how could he have lifted Mjolnir? TWICE! I’m not sure if this is a thing they’re doing to contrast Steve with the more liberal Sam or as a metaphor for the two different sides of America in the currently ongoing elections, but come on, do it in a way that doesn’t make people want to kill you.

…I’m serious, the writer’s been getting death threats. It’s scary.

Also, did Marvel just forget what’s considered one of the best of their movies and whose film just came out in theatres not even a month ago? Captain America! They’ve basically turned the hero of some of their greatest movies evil. ….Who does that? I know DC doesn’t really seem to care about comics anymore, at least that’s what I keep hearing from Linkara though they’re apparently fixing that, but Marvel, for the most part I haven’t read all their new comics particularly if they mainly have to do with the X-Men, does. They even adjust things in their comics to make them more accessible to people who watch their films. It’s why, and also because they want to gain traction in the rights problem with FOX, they changed Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver’s backstory so that they’re no longer mutants and no longer Magneto’s kids.

So why would they take the main character of some of their best films and turn him evil?

Though I’m more pissed off that they’re doing this shit again and will probably end the same as the last one did. See, my problem is that Marvel tried this sort of shit, hero becoming a villain, about a year or so ago and have for the most part ignored it and pretended like it never happened. No, I’m not talking about a character being taken over by another character and being evil, like ‘Superior Spider Man’. I mean the character themself becoming evil.

The book was called ‘Superior Iron Man’.

See, after an event in the comics called ‘AXIS’ which flipped the moralities of the characters, good guys became bad and bad guys became good, Iron Man was left as one of the three characters who never turned back to normal. The result was a rebranding of his comic entitled ‘Superior Iron Man’. The main plot involved Pepper getting fed up with Tony’s new behaviour and activating a digital copy of Tony’s consciousness made years earlier to change him back. In the end, they fail, the copy is destroyed, all of Tony’s friends leave him, and he’s still evil. That’s how the series ends.

Now, after that was ‘Secret Wars’ and once that was done Tony was good again and the events of the last series have pretty much been ignored and it’s unclear if it was wiped from existence or if any of the characters actually remember it. Pepper’s not around anymore and she and Tony don’t seem to be speaking to each other. I’m of the theory that either they were going to turn him back and then ‘Secret Wars’ happened or they knew ‘Secret Wars’ was coming and they needed something to shove into the 9 months they had left so there would still be an Iron Man comic as Iron Man is now a really popular character thanks to the movies.

I like that he’s good again and that he has a writer like Brian Michael Bendis who’s actually tackling the issue of Tony’s birth parents rather than ignoring them like the last writer in favour of the return of Tony’s alcoholism, but it does annoy me that they’ve pretty much resorted to retconning it out of existence. I never understood the decision to turn Tony evil especially since it happened around the same time Sam Wilson became Captain America and Jane Foster became Thor, though we didn’t know it at the time. Cap being Black I understand. Thor being a woman I understand. …Tony being evil? At least the other two were a diversity change. This was just silly.

I want a good explanation for HYDRA Cap and hope it’s not something done for shock value that will be retconned next year or something. I want a good story to come out of this, I want long standing consequences…or I want this to be Kobik’s fault. If you’ve read the ‘Standoff’ storyline, you know who I’m talking about. Also, I want other heroes to have to deal with the eventual revelation. Specifically, I want a reaction from three people: Bucky, Sam, and Tony, arguably 3 of Cap’s best friends, plus some reactions from Sharon and Rick as well. I especially want to see Bucky’s reaction since he’s known Cap the longest.

While I am annoyed by this whole hero turns out to be a bad guy the whole time thing, especially since it’s Captain Freaking America, I am interested to see how this goes and hope that Marvel has learned from the mistakes of ‘Superior Iron Man’ and won’t do what they did with that here. …I also hope to get some resolution for ‘Superior Iron Man’, but that’s probably too much to hope for.

In addition, I hope Marvel realizes what effect this could have on how some people see the movies considering not everyone seems to get that the movies and comics are completely different universes. I highly doubt that Cap in the movies is HYDRA, especially seeing as they added in First Avenger that the serum additionally makes the good greater and the bad worse which would be quite a big retcon if Movie Cap turns out to be HYDRA that I don’t think fans could deal with. If they plan on revealing that in Phase Four, you know it’s coming, I expect Chris Evans to get on his hands and knees in front of whatever Marvel executive is doing the mandates for the films and ask, no beg, them to please not make him a Nazi.

Whatever way this goes, I still prefer Marvel to DC and therefore Marvel still gets my money.

P.S. I don’t know anything about ‘Superior Spider Man’ other than Doc Ock took over Peter’s body. I don’t read Peter Parker’s comics.

(Photo via Marvel Comics)