Though Captain America is getting major love thanks to the Chris Evans rendition in Captain America: Civil War II, the new reality of the situation is quite sobering for comic book heads. As it turns out, after all these years, the Sentinel of Liberty has been a Hydra secret agent. Yep, you can pick your jaw up off the floor right now if this is the first time you’re reading this.
But it all jumped off in new offering, Steve Rogers: Captain America #1. Marvel executive Tom Brevoort tried to explain during an interview with Time Magazine.
Tom Brevoort: “Nick Spencer, who is the writer of the series, pitched us the story as part and parcel of restoring Steve to his youth and vigor. In the comics, hes been old for awhile. The super soldier serum that was keeping him young had been broken down, so for the 75th anniversary, Nick had this notion that we were going to restore him. But then we went into this other story about Hydra, and this is only the tip of the iceberg. If readers go back and look at older comics, will this hold up? It will. Issue 2 kind of winds the clock back a little bit and lays out exactly how and why things are the way they are.”
“And it lays out a road map for where things are headed in the future. At this point, I dont want to say too much definitively because I want people to read the comic books. But people will be able to connect the dots and follow the trail of breadcrumbs.”
That means, from now on, Captain America is a deep-cover Hydra Agent. This is known only to the reader and to Cap himself. It’s either going to be genius or the waste of an icon of Americana.
Around this time last year I wrote a glowing piece titled Why Do Black People Love Captain America?. Just a sappy, syrupy, sing-a-long about how brothers related to Cap because we knew that, at least in comic books, there was a marker that our childhood selves clung to.
A marker of ideal fairness, good over evil, yadda, yadda, yadda, is now revealed to be completely the opposite. But it’s fitting, really.
Fitting that the comic book icon indicative of American glory is revealed to be in partnership with pure evil. Well, that sounds about right.
As a black man living in America today, I’d say this reveal was right on the money. It is a bit disheartening, but I must admit, the possibilities of where you can go with the character are very intriguing.
Steve Rogers: Captain America #1 is on newsstands now.
