The death of Captain America

Daily Kos has an interesting diary on the death of Marvel superhero Captain America, a fondly-recalled character from my boyhood. My friends and I spent many a happy hour using garbage can lids to emulate the Captain. A tossed dirt clod made a very satisfying explosion on the "shield" -- if you were sharp enough to see the assault coming. If not, chalk one up for the Red Skull.

The diary evinced this interesting response from a poster named gloriousbastard (with typos fixed):

I don't know if anybody has been following it, but for the last eight months the Marvel universe has been at war with itself, in an admitted allegory of the current situation. It's strange these things don't get more play.

Tony Stark represented the military industrial complex, orchestrating a war for his own financial gain, building a massive prison in a parallel universe to permanently detain heroes who refused to register their identity, and hiring some of Marvels most notorious villains to hunt down his former friends. Captain America represented the true spirit of America, unyielding to cede personal liberty for false promises of security. Spider-man, as the every-man, unmasked himself under Iron Man's tutelage, but realized the error of his ways and went fugitive. The whole thing was quite brilliant, and as would only be appropriate, the good guys have lost, at least for now.

There is definitely a diary to be written in the lowbrow medias response to this presidency.

Although I hadn't read comics for years (except for Alan Moore's occult masterwork Promethea), I did glimpse a few recent Marvels at the local library. I was a little sad to see that Tony "Iron Man" Stark has made the segue from good guy to bad guy. Even so, I must admit that the political allegory is quite striking.

In times of fear, artists will always find ways to speak to a mass audience. If they cannot address a subject directly, then they will use metaphor. Such things happened in the final decade of Soviet rule. Such things, it seems, are happening now. Comics really are a subversive medium -- and thank God for it.

(By the way, the art is really quite good these days.)

Don't worry about Cap. He has "died" before.