io9 reports that Marvel has picked Doctor Strange as the next superhero slated for a movie franchise—or at least a movie. If they’re going to do that, Marvel should just make an adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s 1602, the eight-issue story he wrote in 2003 that transplanted the Marvel pantheon back to Queen Elizabeth’s court.

It wouldn’t be as farfetched as it sounds. 1602 is an independent continuity, sure, and it’s an elaborate period piece. But the two best superhero movies of the summer were reasonably elaborate period pieces. And because Doctor Strange’s powers are openly acknowledged to be magical and mystic, instead of merely a kind of science so sophisticated and futuristic that it seems like magic, in a way he’s a much better fit for a world where magic vied equally with science for predominance. I’ve always been sort of entertained by the idea that Doctor Strange ended up in Greenwich Village in the 1970s—San Francisco or Portland might have been a better option, but I do appreciate the effort to find a magician a place where he might plausibly feel at home in the twentieth century.

And it’s not just that Stephen Strange fits better in an earlier century. 1602 is a nice little experiment in exactly how many circumstances superhero concepts can be resonant in. For the X-Men, the struggle between Professor Xavier and Magneto is as applicable to the inquisition as it is to black liberation or gay rights; men like Nick Fury will find hire in any generation; it’s got one of the most distinct and thoughtful Thor stories on record; and the power of the American idea doesn’t acquire its magic with the Shot Heard Round the World. That last point is particularly important: I’m not sure Gaiman has a distinct American idea in America Gods, but he manages to conjure up something akin to an originary American blessing and tragedy in 1602, a sense of chosenness for the land. And now that we’ve met all of these characters, or at least, most of them, you could just tell the story without worrying about spending a lot of time on origins. It would even redeem the Fantastic Four, and force folks to start over given that Chris Evans is Captain America now.

It’ll never happen, of course. It’s too weird. It doesn’t lend itself to an ongoing storyline because it has a central, resolvable mystery. It would be confusing for audiences who don’t follow comic books and aren’t used to juggling between multiple continuities at once. But Marvel has these people signed for nine-movie contracts. If it’s going to wring every last drop of potential profit out of them, it’d be fun if towards the end, they did something weird and brilliant, and more intensely engaged with the American idea as a whole than most of the stories it’s putting on-screen now.

Adam Serwer thinks that I’m wrong on Captain America: The First Avenger‘s optimism about American institutions because Peggy Carter, Cap’s girl, has been rejected elsewhere*:

Peggy Carter, Cap’s love interest, alludes to institutional sexism briefly in one of her first conversations with Steve Rogers, saying that she knows what it’s like to have “doors slammed in her face.” It’s easy to see how a similar scene could be constructed to explain the presence of Gabe Jones in Cap’s elite unit, something along the lines of Cap insisting that he be included because he knows what it’s like to have “doors slammed in his face,” alluding to his earlier conversation with Carter. That would be entirely in keeping with the narrative context of the movie itself, and even Cap’s character, without requiring a lengthy tangent on segregation in the armed forces during World War II.

My assumption was those doors were British ones — Peggy is, after all, a U.K. transplant to an American unit. And it’s true that Col. Chester Phillips can be skeptical of Peggy’s judgement out in the field as part of a larger skepticism of what Cap, who up until his arrival in Europe has been a war bond-shilling show pony, can actually accomplish that’s of military value. But she’s entirely accepted as a partner by Howard Stark and Dr. Abraham Erskine, and she gets to shuck that pencil skirt and put on some pants to fight Hydra on the ground. (Erskine’s top secret lab is guarded by a lady with a shotgun, too.)

In a sense, that fact that Peggy gets to hit the front lines and defend her man is just as cheery and dismissive of actual history as the suggestion that World War II units were racially integrated. Women in both the WACS and the WAVES were kept out of combat (something that actually occasioned prejudice from men who thought they’d be taken out of combat and sent to the front lines), and the WAVES were confined to the continental U.S. and Hawaii. The names of both units signaled that they were meant to be temporary units rather than to pave the way for women’s long-term service in the military. Somebody may have shut a door on Peggy Carter somewhere, but in Captain America, it sure wasn’t the U.S. Army.

*He also notes that the Marvel universe as a whole has some nicely skeptical storylines about the American government. This is indisputably true. But they have chosen a more optimistic story for their major movie venture, leaving Sony to produce the more pessimistic X-Men arc. That was all I meant.

Captain America: The First Avenger is a totally delightful facsimile of a ’40s movie, the kind of thing where canvas truck coverings are thumped vigorously and bad guys are chucked out the back; where plucky kids tossed in the river urge the hero to focus on the villain rather than on fishing them out because they can swim just fine; where wartime romances are no less tragic just because one lover’s frozen in the Antarctic while the other succumbs to the ravages of time, rather than someone dying on Omaha Beach or Iwo Jima. The most important thing about it, though, is that it demonstrates that there’s an actual narrative plan behind what A.O. Scott memorably described as Marvel’s Ponzi scheme with the multiple movies leading up to The Avengers. Whether it’s Tony Stark’s father hanging around with Captain America’s crew, womanizing (a running joke about fondue is one of the funniest recreations of forties humor) and tinkering; the appearance of the Cosmic Cube in Norway, and then in the Red Skull’s arsenal; or continuing to see Nick Fury wrangling a set of very talented men in very idiosyncratic circumstances, I can finally see how the personality clashes and the larger narrative are going to be fun (worth it remains to be seen) when they come together in a single movie.

But what really interests me most about Captain America: The First Avenger, and Marvel’s project in The Avengers more generally is how sharp the contrast between that franchise’s faith in the annealing power of America to bind together different people and to make them individually and collectively better, and the X-Men movies’ increasing skepticism about how far America’s stated commitment to diversity actually accommodates difference. It’s not as if these divergent storylines are a shock, or anything — Captain America is a concentrated expression of American patriotism (one that’s been usefully complicated by writers like Robert Morales) where the X-Men are the Swiss Army Knife of oppression metaphors. But it’s still striking to see these stories unfold next to each other, as they are this summer.

One of the things that struck me most about Captain America: The First Avenger was the movie’s insistence on the military as a meritocracy that transforms the people who join it for the better. When Bucky and Cap reunite after the former 90-pound weakling rescues his friend from a Hydra base, Bucky, reckoning with Cap’s transformation asks, “What happened to you?” “I joined the army,” Cap tells him. In the middle of that same rescue, when a white POW comes face-to-face with an Asian-American one and asks “What, we taking everyone?” the guy gives him a spectacular side-eye, thumbs his dog tags out from under his shirt, and tells his fellow prisoner, “I’m from Fresno, ace,” after which he’s fully accepted as a member of the team, and nobody thinks to voice any anti-Japanese sentiments. The movie even portrays Captain America’s division, the 107th, as an integrated one (Derek Luke, once again underused: can we please find something wonderful for him to do? Please?), even though General Eisenhower didn’t voluntarily let black troops serve alongside white ones until the Battle of the Bulge in 1944, and the military wasn’t formally desegregated until President Truman’s executive order in 1948. What really drives the Red Skull nuts is the idea that it’s not that Captain America is great, but the institutions that made him and the things he stands for. “Arrogance may not be a uniquely American trait, but I must say, you do it better than anyone,” he says, demanding, “What makes you so special?” expecting an answer he can laugh at or bat away. “Nothing, I’m just a kid from Brooklyn,” Rogers tells him, provoking an attack. And when Steve Rogers wakes up in an altered America 70 years later, a governmental institution’s there for him again, Nick Fury showing some mercy and sensitivity as he tries to acclimate the latest member of his team to a drastically changed world.
Read more

Given how crude and ugly Frank Miller’s politics have become, I was already deeply uneasy about the prospects for his superhero-beats-al-Qaeda comic Holy Terror, slated for release right around the tenth anniversary of Sept. 11. Hero Complex’s interview with Miller doesn’t make me feel one whit better. Really, it’s this one line: “We’re living in a terrifying time and it’s changed us.”

This, to me, has always been the defining difference between progressive and conservative responses to Sept. 11. For (some) conservatives, Sept. 11 revealed that we were profoundly vulnerable, but also that we had the fortitude and the power to respond to new threats, that we were unafraid neither of outside threats nor of our own dark capacities. For progressives, Sept. 11 was a successful al Qaeda operation precisely because it opened up American values to question and lured us into a response that’s been a financial and moral drain on the country. It’s not that the murder of thousands of Americans didn’t demand a response, but Osama bin Laden would have been even more defeated than he is today if that response had been keeping with the American national character.

And that’s part of what makes Miller comparing his inspiration for Holy Terror to Jack Kirby’s creation of Captain America so irritating:

I’m a comic book artist first and foremost; as I got into this I felt probably something close to what Jack Kirby felt when he created Captain America. There’s a gut-level intensity to the work but there’s also levels where it needs to be entertainment. And this is propaganda. I think it’s a much abused word. I think most things I read on the Internet and in newspapers is propaganda. Everyone from the New York Times to Rupert Murdoch has a point of view and is putting forth their own propaganda. They’re stuck with the facts as they are but the way they interpret and frame them is wildly different.

There’s no question the United States made decisions during World War II that were injurious to the national character, most shamefully the internment of Japanese-American civilians. But there was a sense in everything from propaganda, to efforts like Liberty Gardens, to the movement of women into the workforce, that the response to the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the rise of Nazi Germany needed to be a reaffirmation of American strengths, not about entirely reevaluating what they were. Captain America embodies that spirit, an art student who cares so much about defending his country that he’s willing to go through a dangerous experiment to do it, who both fights on the ground himself and supports the troops through USO shows, and in an interesting parallel to the use of drones in our current conflicts, is frozen and loses his sidekick in an effort to shut down a dangerous experimental drone plane. The only thing I can imagine Miller’s new effort and Captain America having in common is that they’ll fulfill a deep desire to see someone KO Hitler or bin Laden. The thing is, we don’t really need a superhero to do that to bin Laden. Americans got him already, and for real.