The Captain and the Kid

Okay, I am here to confess that when I was a boy I played with dolls. Well actually I only played with one doll (I’d like to call it an “action figure” but that term hadn’t yet come into vogue back in long ago youth) and that doll was, of course, Captain Action.

G.I. Joe never interested me but I loved the idea of Captain Action the first time I saw a commercial on one long lost Saturday morning. The good Captain was not only a hero in his own right but he could become other heroes…Superman, Batman, the Lone Ranger, Aquaman, Captain America, Flash Gordon…simply by switching into different costumes and masks (all sold separately, of course.)

I can only remember two times in my childhood where I actively hounded my poor mother for a specific Christmas gift (I would hint strongly at other times…) once was in my teen years when I just had to have the four-LP set of Chicago at Carnegie Hall (Chicago was a relatively cool band before they let Peter Cetera turn them into the schmaltz factory they were during the 80’s) and the other time was when I was 10 and I just had to have Captain Action.

Mom came through.

I got the main Captain doll…sweet!...and the Superman and Aquaman accessory costumes and I was one happy camper. Never got Action Boy…he seemed a bit lame to me for some reason…but I loved the Captain.

I even bought the 5-issue Captain Action comic book series that DC put out (great Gil Kane and Wally Wood art with stories by Jim Shooter…I still have them, yellowed and dog-eared, in a box somewhere in the garage) though the adventures I came up with on my own seemed a hundred times more interesting.

I’m not sure why I thought of Captain Action today but the memory still warms the imaginative little boy who still dwells somewhere deep inside the cynically optimistic soul of the old man I am today :-)

O Captain, My Captain?

This then is the new Captain America. He doesn't debut until January's Captain America #34 so we won't be sure who is in this shiny uniform (designed by Alex Ross) until then. Bucky Barnes...the Winter Soldier...seems the most likely candidate but we shall see.

The pistol and the knife make it unlikely that it is a resurrected Steve Rogers in the red, white, and blue (and black) togs but, again, we shall see.

Ed Brubaker and Steve Epting have made Captain America an enormously entertaining book even after they killed off the title character (the post-death cast...including The Winter Soldier, The Falcon, Sharon Carter, the Black Widow, Tony Stark, Maria Hill, and Nick Fury...has picked up the slack admirably) so I'm in for the long haul (though I am still hoping and expecting that Steve Rogers will return to the book and the uniform at some point in the future.)

...and yet we remember...

The years pass...the pain recedes...and yet we remember. For all of the blood and sweat and tears shed on the day...shed on the bloodied streets and battlefields since that day...attention must be paid.

The years pass...and yet we remember.

The years pass...and yet we must remember.

Now the Time is Here for Iron Man to Spread Fear...

Tony Stark is a tool. That was, for a hot minute anyway, almost the name of this blog. I’ve never completely warmed to Iron Man over the years…he always seemed steeped in patrician arrogance even when he was raging alcoholic and that just irked me for whatever reason…but right now I’m pretty much over him as a character right now.

He has, in a typically smug and self-righteous manner, made himself The Man (writ large) in the Marvel Universe with his zealous championing of the Superhero Registration Act and his assumption of the role of Director of SHIELD. And the Marvel Universe is not really a better place for that.

As far as the Superhero Registration Act goes I can sort of understand his position without agreeing with it. Here in the real world if there were people who had superhuman powers I might indeed want them to be regulated and registered. But the Marvel Universe is not…and nor has it ever been (sorry, Stan)…”the real world” (once you have people who can burst into flame, lift school buses over their heads, or control the weather running around the notion that the MU is just like the world outside your window is immediately revealed as a blatant falsehood) and in the context of that Universe, Stark’s self-serving “futurist” excuses for persecuting his so-called friends don’t hold water. Unless, of course, Tony Stark is a tool…then it makes perfect sense.

Stark has all but forsaken his role as a “hero” with his storm troopers going nuts on draft resisters (which is, basically, what the anti-registration folks are given the so-called 50 States Initiative), the establishment of his other-dimensional prison (where people are held indefinitely without due process), the fact that he gave relatively free reign to a nutjob like Norman Osborn (who, in turn, put nutjobs like Bullseye and Venom on the federal payroll to track down super-beings who refuse to register...yeah, Osborn and the rest of the Thunderbolts are injected with nanites that are supposed to keep them under control but you know that that little plan is going to go horribly astray at some point), and his Draconian manipulation of events to further his ends (as revealed in the final issue of Civil War: Frontline)…”the ends justifies the means” almost never being an acceptable excuse for anything (unless, of course, you’re a tool…and then anything goes.)

Now I will be the first to admit that the Superhero Registration Act goes against every Libertarian bone in my cynical body and thus I was not inclined to be on Stark’s side from the word go (hell, the other side…however smug and self-righteous they were and are as “rebels”…was led by Captain America. CAPTAIN AMERICA…dude, 99 times out of a 100 I’m going to be on Cap’s side because, well, he’s Captain America…and yes I refuse to speak of him in past tense because I know that he will be back sooner or later…) but the heavy handed way the pro-Registration side” continues to act and behave (we could do a whole “Hank Pym is a tool” rant but it would be redundant and not worth the effort) does nothing to win me over to their arguments.

Mayhap Tony Stark can be redeemed in my eyes at some point. I don’t see how but I will continue to try to keep a somewhat open mind. But until that time I will hold firm to my belief that he is indeed a tool until he (and, more to the point, the people writing his adventures) see fit to prove otherwise.