O’ Captains My Captains: The Return of Steve Rogers

On Tuesday, coinciding with the 75th Anniversary of Captain America, Marvel dropped the news that Steve Rogers would be returning as Captain America alongside Sam Wilson, who took up the shield in 2014 after Steve was sapped of his Super Soldier Serum-derived perpetual youth and superhuman strength.

In the words of Ben Grimm, the everlovin’ blue-eyed Thing, “What a revoltin’ development this is.”

If you’ve been living under a rock, or are just out of the loop in general, you may not be aware that Sam Wilson—formerly Caps’ partner Falcon—is Black. Amidst a tragic and embarrassingly high number of police related killings, and in a country with a long history of white-on-Black harassment, having a Black man as Captain America was a big deal. As one of a number of moves by Marvel to diversify their line, this one in particular made me proud to be a comics fan.

Of course, there was some pushback from both the white and Black communities on the change. Racist white people rolled their eyes, threw their hands up and cried “Not MY Captain America!” while frustrated, historically marginalized Black people asked why Marvel wasn’t putting more support behind already Black characters or wondered why they didn’t have the common sense—or the guts—to put a Black creative team on the book.

Following a story where Cap stops a group of militarized white supremacists from kidnapping Mexicans attempting to cross the border into America, Fox and Friends cohost Clayton Morris went as far as to say that this new Captain America was forgoing the fight against classic villains like Hydra and the Red Skull, and “going after conservatives.” That’s right, conservatives, Fox News thinks you’re a bunch of racist kidnappers.

Steve Cap

Well, you can’t please everyone, but no matter your stance on it—having a Black Captain America in 2014 was a ballsy move on Marvel’s part and the choice of Sam Wilson was perfect. He’d trained with and fought alongside Rogers for decades as his right hand man and eyes in the sky and was potentially Rogers’ most trusted compatriot. Wilson, like Rogers, had an unwavering moral compass and history of insubordination when it meant doing the right thing. Most importantly, the character had just been exposed to a huge mainstream audience through Anthony Mackie’s stellar portrayal of the character in 2014’s Captain America: The Winter Soldier. Everything felt right about the move, right down to Marvel having Rogers specifically choose Wilson to take up the stars and stripes.

Despite our greatest hopes, it’s not surprising to any of us that Rogers is returning—he’s the main protagonist in highly profitable film franchise that has a movie being released in May of this year. The timing of it however, is absolutely tone deaf and transparent. Falling a little over a week before Black History Month, it feels a lot like Wilson is being downgraded to “Cap Jr.”, and based on the press release by Marvel, he’ll be handling “topical, ripped-from-the-headlines” crises while Rogers takes on “Hydra and his classic rogues gallery.” So, essentially, Wilson will be taking on incendiary clown-shoes political figures like Donald Trump while Rogers takes on global terrorism. That seems a little lopsided to me.

Sam Cap

I’ve had the conversation with few friends, and the point that gets casually thrown around is, “Well, I mean, Miles Morales and Peter Parker are both Spider-Man right now, and no one’s got a problem with that. And what about Kate Bishop and Clint Barton both being Hawkeye?”

Yeah, about that. Miles Morales—who is both Black and Latino—and Kate Bishop—a woman—had years of existing completely independently of their predecessors before commingling with them. Clint Barton was considered dead for years. Miles Morales existed in a completely different universe from the mainstream Marvel U in which he became Spider-Man following Peter’s death. There’s a large divide between them and Sam Wilson, who had spent decades in Roger’s shadow and had his 2014 series All-New Captain America relaunched after just 6 issues—complete with a change in creative team—after Marvel’s Secret Wars storyline gave them cart-blanche to reshuffle nearly every single book in their line. We barely got to see Wilson grow into the role, whereas Miles and Kate were both on books that had consistent creative teams to develop the characters and series that had lengthy runs that weren’t rear-ended by a line-wide crossover event.

Perhaps the most offensive takeaway from Marvel’s press release is that “there is only one man who can challenge the threat of Hydra—Captain America himself—Steve Rogers!” (Jeez, with friends like these…right?)

From that perspective, it’s hard to feel like Sam isn’t being just as marginalized as the community he directly represents.

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