Captain America: Patriot
[This is a repost of a post I made this month on my Patreon.]
This isn't really an organized meta post or review so much as a few half-finished thoughts I wanted to get out after I read a Cap miniseries a few weeks ago that I can't really stop thinking about, because it had a scene that really stuck with me and that I think we could use more of in current comics and also with Steve, because even though it was a relatively recent mini it wasn't about Steve.
Captain America: Patriot is a 2011 miniseries about the third Captain America, Jeff Mace. For those of you who are more familiar with the MCU, I should probably explain something about 616, which is that Steve Rogers' identity as Captain America was not public during the war; it wasn't public until after 9/11, although generally his fellow superheroes knew. This meant that when Steve died -- well, as far as the Allies knew -- during World War II, what they did was conceal Captain America's death entirely. So they started putting other men in the Cap suit. It's important to note that none of these people were super-soldiers or superhuman in any way. They just wanted to keep morale up by making the world believe that Captain America was still alive. (Also Bucky. There are a bunch of Buckys too.)
The second Captain America was a guy named William Naslund, and he fought alongside what remained of the Invaders for about a year before dying in battle -- see above, re: not actually a superhuman. Coincidentally, Jeff Mace happens to be the guy who finds him on the battlefield, and Naslund actually dies in his arms.
Now, Mace isn't superpowered, but that doesn't mean he's not a superhero. Previously a Daily Bugle reporter, he decides to put on a costume and fight injustice as the Patriot, backed by the All-Winners Squad, which is how he manages to be around a battlefield to find Naslund dying.
And then basically the government says, "Hey, would you like to be the next Captain America?" and Jeff Mace here, despite having no superpowers whatsoever (there is in fact a plot thread about how he's the only baseline human on the All-Winners Squad and is worried about keeping up) and knowing that the last guy only lasted a year... well, he says yes. Of course he does.
But that's not really the part of this miniseries I want to talk about.
No, what I want to talk about is the subplot involving Jeff's friend Jack Casey. They were coworkers together at the Bugle before the war; Jack was a photographer and then served in the Navy during the war, took some great photos of him as the Patriot that made it into Life magazine, and so on. And then Jeff finds out that Jack was discharged from the Navy and committed suicide. He tells his superhero friends he'll go to the funeral and give a eulogy for him as Captain America.
And they say, no, Jeff, you can't do that. And when he asks why, they say it's because Jack was blue-ticketed.
A blue-ticket discharge can mean a lot of things (as Jeff points out while trying to wrap his mind around this), but it's pretty clear from context here that Jack Casey was gay. ("Did he ever have a girlfriend?" asks the Whizzer.)
Jeff says that it doesn't matter, that he's going to the funeral anyway, that he doesn't care if they take the Captain America uniform away from him.
The rest of his friends tell him he can't do that. Because the rest of the world is a terrible and homophobic place, he needs to remember that he's not the only Captain America, and if he does this, he'll destroy the world's trust in any Captain America who ever comes after him, or the ones before him. They point out that people will lose all respect for Captain America.
So he goes as the Patriot. His original identity. He lets the world keep respecting Captain America, and he sacrifices the identity that is actually his, and his dead gay friend gets a very touching eulogy.
Afterwards, he puts his Cap uniform back on, and hands his old Patriot costume to Torch to burn.
And then Namor, of course, tells him he is stupid: "Your loyalty is admirable, Mace, but clearly you've killed the Patriot and gained nothing in return! No opinions were changed, no legacies redeemed -- no mark left of any kind!"
This is when Jeff Mace demonstrates that he is truly the ally we all need and PUNCHES NAMOR RIGHT IN THE FUCKING FACE, breaking his hand in the process. (The new Bucky has to help patch his hand up.)
Right. So that's a thing you can read in a comic.
And mostly I just wanted to mention it because I keep thinking about it, both because I think it's absolutely what Steve Rogers would have done if it had been him in the uniform instead, and also because it demonstrates a really heartening amount of -- I don't know what to say, solidarity, maybe -- that I feel like I don't see in comics a lot these days. There's something really nice in knowing that Captain America would stand up for people like you, you know? (Especially when you, say, read Marvel #1000 and find that Waid's Cap speech was edited to make it less overtly political.)
We all know that Steve has demonstrated nothing but respect and affection for his queer friends and teammates, as far back as the storyline that introduced Arnie Roth, Steve's childhood best friend, way back in 1982 in Cap #268. Despite the fact that no one in this comic is actually allowed to say the word "gay" (ah, Comics Code, how I don't miss you!), Arnie is definitely gay, and at one point Steve explicitly compares the relationship Arnie has with his, ahem, roommate Michael, to the love he feels for Bernie, whom he's dating at the time. So that was also nice.
(Steve also has canonically gay teammates from World War II -- Brian Falsworth (Union Jack) and Roger Aubrey (The Destroyer) were a couple, but this was retconned into canon much later so to the best of my knowledge we never see Steve interact with them as gay characters during, say, the 70s Invaders series.)
Spencer's recent run actually gave us a few more glimpses at queerness, even if Steve wasn't really himself. There's a panel of Sam on a Pride float, and longtime sidekick Dennis Dunphy (D-Man) actually came out, but, of course, we don't know what the real Steve thinks about that, or if he's ever gone to Pride.
So at that point I was getting kind of frustrated, because, I mean, yes, Marvel has plenty of actually canonically queer characters elsewhere and I love them too, but it would sure be nice to see that Captain America stood for me too once in a while, you know?
The most satisfying recent issue I can point to is Tini Howard's recent Cap annual. It's a World War II-set story about Steve and Bucky helping out some injured people in need of assistance, and one of them eventually confesses that he's gay, expecting that Steve won't still want to help him and of course Steve does. It's really, really sweet, but I feel that it lacks the immediately extremely public stance that Jeff was unhesitatingly willing to take for his friend, knowing that people would hate him for it, which I think is part of why the Patriot miniseries keeps sticking with me. Steve's support here was very nice, but it was also... very quiet. No one else is going to know, which is not the case for what Jeff was willing to do and for what he eventually did.
Plus, Jeff got to punch Namor in the face.
So I guess I just keep thinking that I want more of... that. I want Marvel to write Steve standing up and just doing the right thing, dammit, even if it's the unpopular thing -- the essence of no, you move, I guess, and I think maybe these days they're... not.
Anyway, yeah. Captain America: Patriot. I recommend it.
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This isn't really an organized meta post or review so much as a few half-finished thoughts I wanted to get out after I read a Cap miniseries a few weeks ago that I can't really stop thinking about, because it had a scene that really stuck with me and that I think we could use more of in current comics and also with Steve, because even though it was a relatively recent mini it wasn't about Steve.
Captain America: Patriot is a 2011 miniseries about the third Captain America, Jeff Mace. For those of you who are more familiar with the MCU, I should probably explain something about 616, which is that Steve Rogers' identity as Captain America was not public during the war; it wasn't public until after 9/11, although generally his fellow superheroes knew. This meant that when Steve died -- well, as far as the Allies knew -- during World War II, what they did was conceal Captain America's death entirely. So they started putting other men in the Cap suit. It's important to note that none of these people were super-soldiers or superhuman in any way. They just wanted to keep morale up by making the world believe that Captain America was still alive. (Also Bucky. There are a bunch of Buckys too.)
The second Captain America was a guy named William Naslund, and he fought alongside what remained of the Invaders for about a year before dying in battle -- see above, re: not actually a superhuman. Coincidentally, Jeff Mace happens to be the guy who finds him on the battlefield, and Naslund actually dies in his arms.
Now, Mace isn't superpowered, but that doesn't mean he's not a superhero. Previously a Daily Bugle reporter, he decides to put on a costume and fight injustice as the Patriot, backed by the All-Winners Squad, which is how he manages to be around a battlefield to find Naslund dying.
And then basically the government says, "Hey, would you like to be the next Captain America?" and Jeff Mace here, despite having no superpowers whatsoever (there is in fact a plot thread about how he's the only baseline human on the All-Winners Squad and is worried about keeping up) and knowing that the last guy only lasted a year... well, he says yes. Of course he does.
But that's not really the part of this miniseries I want to talk about.
No, what I want to talk about is the subplot involving Jeff's friend Jack Casey. They were coworkers together at the Bugle before the war; Jack was a photographer and then served in the Navy during the war, took some great photos of him as the Patriot that made it into Life magazine, and so on. And then Jeff finds out that Jack was discharged from the Navy and committed suicide. He tells his superhero friends he'll go to the funeral and give a eulogy for him as Captain America.
And they say, no, Jeff, you can't do that. And when he asks why, they say it's because Jack was blue-ticketed.
A blue-ticket discharge can mean a lot of things (as Jeff points out while trying to wrap his mind around this), but it's pretty clear from context here that Jack Casey was gay. ("Did he ever have a girlfriend?" asks the Whizzer.)
Jeff says that it doesn't matter, that he's going to the funeral anyway, that he doesn't care if they take the Captain America uniform away from him.
The rest of his friends tell him he can't do that. Because the rest of the world is a terrible and homophobic place, he needs to remember that he's not the only Captain America, and if he does this, he'll destroy the world's trust in any Captain America who ever comes after him, or the ones before him. They point out that people will lose all respect for Captain America.
So he goes as the Patriot. His original identity. He lets the world keep respecting Captain America, and he sacrifices the identity that is actually his, and his dead gay friend gets a very touching eulogy.
Afterwards, he puts his Cap uniform back on, and hands his old Patriot costume to Torch to burn.
And then Namor, of course, tells him he is stupid: "Your loyalty is admirable, Mace, but clearly you've killed the Patriot and gained nothing in return! No opinions were changed, no legacies redeemed -- no mark left of any kind!"
This is when Jeff Mace demonstrates that he is truly the ally we all need and PUNCHES NAMOR RIGHT IN THE FUCKING FACE, breaking his hand in the process. (The new Bucky has to help patch his hand up.)
Right. So that's a thing you can read in a comic.
And mostly I just wanted to mention it because I keep thinking about it, both because I think it's absolutely what Steve Rogers would have done if it had been him in the uniform instead, and also because it demonstrates a really heartening amount of -- I don't know what to say, solidarity, maybe -- that I feel like I don't see in comics a lot these days. There's something really nice in knowing that Captain America would stand up for people like you, you know? (Especially when you, say, read Marvel #1000 and find that Waid's Cap speech was edited to make it less overtly political.)
We all know that Steve has demonstrated nothing but respect and affection for his queer friends and teammates, as far back as the storyline that introduced Arnie Roth, Steve's childhood best friend, way back in 1982 in Cap #268. Despite the fact that no one in this comic is actually allowed to say the word "gay" (ah, Comics Code, how I don't miss you!), Arnie is definitely gay, and at one point Steve explicitly compares the relationship Arnie has with his, ahem, roommate Michael, to the love he feels for Bernie, whom he's dating at the time. So that was also nice.
(Steve also has canonically gay teammates from World War II -- Brian Falsworth (Union Jack) and Roger Aubrey (The Destroyer) were a couple, but this was retconned into canon much later so to the best of my knowledge we never see Steve interact with them as gay characters during, say, the 70s Invaders series.)
Spencer's recent run actually gave us a few more glimpses at queerness, even if Steve wasn't really himself. There's a panel of Sam on a Pride float, and longtime sidekick Dennis Dunphy (D-Man) actually came out, but, of course, we don't know what the real Steve thinks about that, or if he's ever gone to Pride.
So at that point I was getting kind of frustrated, because, I mean, yes, Marvel has plenty of actually canonically queer characters elsewhere and I love them too, but it would sure be nice to see that Captain America stood for me too once in a while, you know?
The most satisfying recent issue I can point to is Tini Howard's recent Cap annual. It's a World War II-set story about Steve and Bucky helping out some injured people in need of assistance, and one of them eventually confesses that he's gay, expecting that Steve won't still want to help him and of course Steve does. It's really, really sweet, but I feel that it lacks the immediately extremely public stance that Jeff was unhesitatingly willing to take for his friend, knowing that people would hate him for it, which I think is part of why the Patriot miniseries keeps sticking with me. Steve's support here was very nice, but it was also... very quiet. No one else is going to know, which is not the case for what Jeff was willing to do and for what he eventually did.
Plus, Jeff got to punch Namor in the face.
So I guess I just keep thinking that I want more of... that. I want Marvel to write Steve standing up and just doing the right thing, dammit, even if it's the unpopular thing -- the essence of no, you move, I guess, and I think maybe these days they're... not.
Anyway, yeah. Captain America: Patriot. I recommend it.
Read this entry on Dreamwidth ||
comments