It's only just yesterday that #GiveCaptainAmericaABoyfriend was trending on social media and other mainstream sites. And now all that changed quickly with the recent release of Steve Rogers: Captain America #1, which reveals that Steve Rogers has been a sleeper agent for Hydra since the very beginning. And that rustled a lot of feathers for everyone.
Now let me be clear that this is THE Steve Rogers from main Marvel continuity, otherwise known as Earth-616. He's not a clone or an imposter or anything of the sort. He is the Steve Rogers co-created by Jack Kirby and Joe Simon since the 1940's, now revealed to be an undercover agent for Hydra, one of the most notorious organizations in the Marvel universe. Or if you never read the comics, they're the villain team Coulson took on in Agents of SHIELD and Coulson's team seems to have ultimately won when all of Hydra's bases were destroyed.
Whether you're a die-hard comic book fan or just among the general public, Captain America has always been the icon of American Patriotism - "Truth, Justice, and the American Way", so to speak. Yes that's a line for Superman, but the same also applies to Captain America, perhaps in many more ways than Superman's. And to reveal that Rogers has been on the side of the villains from the very beginning, and the fact that the issue was released just as Memorial Day in the US is around the corner, then you got everybody all riled up. Now #SayNoToHYDRACap is trending on social media that it not only trumps yesterday's call to make Steve Rogers gay, but also kind squashed any hype for DC's Rebirth event, but that's another story.
Obviously all of this is part of a marketing effort to get people to pick up the comic and know what's going on. In my case, their tactic worked. As I was shopping for some groceries earlier today, I decided to go and grab the issue and read it myself.
Full Disclosure, I haven't spent time reading Marvel after the Secret Wars event, and only read a few issues of Spider-Man and Iron Man from the All-New All-Different line of Marvel comics. So I missed out a lot of what happened in between. I haven't even gotten into the backstory behind the Civil War II event that is going on now, which I will discuss about later.
Thankfully the first issue doesn't ask you to read back issues to what happened prior to this and only asks you at least know who Captain America is. Not a problem since the recent Civil War movie has placed Cap on the map, so a lot of people know him already, as are the other supporting cast like Maria Hill, Sharon Carter, and Sam Wilson aka Falcon.
Now obviously, outlets like Entertainment Weekly and Yahoo have already spoiled the plot of Captain America #1, so I don't need to tell you that. There are a couple of key things on the issue when I read it: First, Hydra in this series is actually in a middle of an internal struggle for who controls the organization. On one hand, we have the Red Skull - longtime enemy of Cap. The other is another archenemy of his, Baron Zemo, which I assume you've already seen in the Civil War movie, just without his signature hood.
Second, the way Hyrda operates now is far different than they were decades ago, as Rogers notes it. Now Hydra's operations are akin to that of real-life extremists like the Daesh or the Taliban. This is something that not just disturbs Rogers, but Zemo as well.
Third, in addition for control of Hydra, Skull and Zemo are also fighting for control of Kobik. If you recall the Cosmic Cube from the first Captain America movie, it's the very same, except it's somehow sentient and is responsible for not only making Captain America young again, it also grants him his powers back. This is the only part of the issue where you may need to go read some backstories to see what's going on. But for the moment, Kobik is but a McGuffin in this plot.
That being said, it got me to think that maybe, just maybe, Kobik has somehow altered Cap's memory of him as a child and getting a false reminder that he was inspired by Hydra. Having memories altered is not uncommon in Marvel. Rogers did confess that ever since he became young again, he felt some strange changes in him. So that could be a factor. However, it is way too early to tell as this is just the first issue, and I can expect this arc to be ongoing for several months.
On that note, because of this 'revelation' that Cap is a Hydra agent, he will not likely get involved in the ongoing Civil War II event between Team Iron Man, and Team Captain Marvel. I also forgot to mention there are actually TWO Captain Americas currently in Earth-616: one is Steve Rogers, and the other is Sam Wilson. So I am suspecting that, aside from a marketing ploy, it is also to help push Wilson as the de facto Captain America, much the same way Jane Foster is pushed as the new Thor, and Laura Kinney as the new Wolverine.
So I'm not shocked at all by this revelation. This is something that happens a lot in comics and eventually it all goes back to the status quo. The only thing I didn't like in this issue is simply the writing. This is most especially when Zemo does his dialogues, as it makes him sound like he's in a 1960s cartoon. Red Skull too, though he can be forgiven because he's from the 1940s as well, and with the Axis forces at that time.
Does this make me buy more issues of Cap? Only out of curiosity. But I'm not gonna invest that deep, to be honest. So to anyone who got "triggered" by the revelation, you really shouldn't, but Marvel got you there. So kudos to Marvel for hyping this one up, regardless of its direction.
No comments:
Post a Comment