What is exciting is the possibility of exploration, of avoiding the repetition of a voice I’ve tired of.Īnd then there is the basic challenge of drawing with words-the fear that accompanies every effort. And Captain America, the embodiment of a kind of Lincolnesque optimism, poses a direct question for me: Why would anyone believe in The Dream? What is exciting here is not some didactic act of putting my words in Captain America’s head, but attempting to put Captain America’s words in my head. Writing, for me, is about questions-not answers. But one reason that I chose the practice of opinion journalism-which is to say a mix of reporting and opinion-is because understanding how those opinions fit in with the perspectives of others has always been more interesting to me than repeatedly restating my own.
I have my share of strong opinions about the world.
I confess to having a conflicted history with this kind of proclamation-which is precisely why I am so excited to take on Captain America. In one famous scene, flattered by a treacherous general for his “loyalty,” Rogers-grasping the American flag-retorts, “I’m loyal to nothing, general … except the dream.” Thus, Captain America is not so much tied to America as it is, but to an America of the imagined past. He is “a man out of time,” a walking emblem of greatest-generation propaganda brought to life in this splintered postmodern time. At the end of World War II, Captain America is frozen in ice and awakens in our time-and this, too, distances him from his country and its ideals. Conspirators against him rank all the way up to the White House, causing Rogers to, at one point, reject the very title of Captain America. But, perhaps haunted by his own roots in powerlessness, he is a dissident just as likely to be feuding with his superiors in civilian and military governance as he is to be fighting with the supervillain Red Skull. Rogers’s transformation into Captain America is underwritten by the military. Dubbed Captain America, Rogers becomes the personification of his country’s egalitarian ideals-an anatomical Horatio Alger who through sheer grit and the wonders of science rises to become a national hero. The heart and body are brought into alignment through the Super Soldier Serum, which transforms Rogers into a peak human physical specimen. Captain America begins as Steve Rogers-a man with the heart of a god and the body of a wimp. In fact, the best thing about the story of Captain America is the implicit irony. Those of you who’ve never read a Captain America comic book or seen him in the Marvel movies would be forgiven for thinking of Captain America as an unblinking mascot for American nationalism.
This summer, I’m entering a new one-the world of Captain America. For two years I’ve lived in the world of Wakanda, writing the title Black Panther. Everything has to be shown, a fact I knew going into the work, but could not truly know until I had actually done it. Writers don’t write comics so much as they draw them with words. To say it is more difficult than it looks is to commit oneself to criminal understatement. Two years ago I began taking up the childhood dream of writing comics.