SUPERHERO REPLACEMENT THEORY PT. 2

Earlier I examined the two ethical systems, of conservatism ("Keeping") and of liberalism ("Sharing"). in terms of the dynamics of human societies from ancient times onward. The same systems apply equally to the ways in which those societies determine their identities in terms of cultural matrices.

No one ever really knows why a given society, whether of antiquity or modernity, decides to dominantly pursue one cultural course over another: whether the tribe should worship one god or several, or whether it's good or bad to seethe a kid in its mother's milk. Even in modern times, pundits can make anterior comments about how some cultural development MAY have come about, but that's not the same as KNOWING how a dominant majority chooses that course. But it can be fairly stated that once the course is chosen, the Ethos of Keeping comes into play, as the majority members of the culture continue to "Keep Faith" with the choices of their ancestors. Minority cultural developments can still exert some historical influence. For instance, certain citizens of one culture may embrace the religion of another culture, ranging from Romans flirting with the worship of Cybele or George Harrison converting to Krishnaism. This can be seen as an articulation of the Ethos of Sharing, in that the majority culture shows tolerance for the tastes of the minority by not requiring absolute fidelity to the majority rule. 

Conservatism does rule the roost in most if not all societies when it comes to allowing members of other societies to join the ingroup, and in ancient times there would be zero examples of dominant societies that voluntarily changed to accomodate either migrants joining the dominant society or separate vassal societies. Minority societies did not manipulate but were manipulated. Minority "outgroups" could be (1) transported away from their native land to some other location, (2) absorbed into the majority culture under various restrictions, or (3) allowed to function in the majority culture as sojourners but subject to random expulsion. The Ethos of Sharing arguably grew somewhat stronger with the rise of pietistic religions like Buddhism and Christianity. These systems of faith stressed a latitudinarian approach to cultural differences, though one could argue that this ecumenical approach had the ulterior purpose of spreading a particular religious credo through the medium of cultural tolerance.

All of this groundwork concerning the inherent conservativism of human societies should provide context for the fact that the United States of America, for the first 150 years of its existence, tended to exclude potential immigrants who did not resemble the dominant culture. The Naturalization Act of 1790 specified that naturalization of aliens was limited to "free white persons." Isolated members of various minority groups did gain citizenship over the course of the next 175 years. Yet America immigration law was not substantially affected by any Ethos of Sharing, except in special cases, such as the Truman Directive of 1945, which fast-tracked visas for displaced persons from war-torn Europe. 

Then in 1963, President John F. Kennedy attempted, but failed, to overthrow the exclusionary strictures. Roughly two years after Kennedy's assassination, President Lyndon Johnson signed into law the 1965 Immigration Act, thus ensuring a greater liberalism in terms of making American immigration law less exclusionary.

Now, exclusion on the basis of race was always wrong, so I don't take issue with the 1965 act on that basis. It's demonstrable that human beings of all ethnicities were able to assimilate to the American culture and to become valuable members of the society, and that without being as legally restricted as, say, Jews and Christians in Muslim societies. However, buried within the Democratic imperative of liberation was the assumption that immigrants of other cultures would ALWAYS be willing to assimilate to established American culture.

As with the contemporaneous Civil Rights Act, political advantage, as much any sincere beliefs in societal tolerance, informed the changes in the older exclusionary immigration policy. However, the admission that "exclusion was wrong" led to the unjustified corollary that "inclusion must always be right." Liberals promoted the sophistry that, because the majority culture had been unforgivably racist and/or sexist, members of minority cultures had no responsibility to assimilate with the majority culture. This would slowly morph into the idea that the federal government could (and should) be blocked by so-called "sanctuary policies" at the state level. In the 21st century has become an "Ethos of Sharing" in which the state expects the federal authorities to accede to the wishes of the "minority culture" of that state.

In Part 1, I mentioned how most Liberals who addressed the phenomenon of illegal immigration almost invariably resorted to the "Honest Juan" paradigm. Said paradigm always portrays the illegal as a wholesome, honest person who's just trying to make a better life for himself and his family. I will admit comic books and films didn't promote this idea nearly as much as television shows, particularly legal dramas, where the sympathetic lawyer is always on the side of the poor but honest illegal. Even TV shows with a conservative slant, such as 24 (2001-2014), didn't tend to critique lax Liberal policies with respect (say) to admitting dangerous aliens into the country.    

I don't doubt that many of the Libs who support illegal entry sincerely believe that by assisting illegals, they're atoning for the sins of "Racist America." This is currently most evident in the fanatical anti-ICE protests of the past year, both in Los Angeles and Minneapolis, though in some ways these protests are a side-development of a general Democrat meme, in which everything the opposing party does today is irredeemably racist in nature. The upshot of this Ethos of Sharing, which resulted in the growth of sanctuary cities as a consequence of the 1965 Immigration Act, is that its proponents cannot deviate from the falsehood that every illegal must be an Honest Juan. Thus, Minnesota Liberals have made the not-quite-conscious decision to share their state with a wide variety of criminals, from rapists to drug-dealers to child molesters. I've even come across a few Liberals who defend this policy on the basis that there are an equal proportion of criminals within the ranks of legal American citizens. It's as if they think there should be "equal opportunity" for criminals from, say, Somalia to rip off the majority culture, because that culture is so irredeemably evil in nature. 

While it's not totally incorrect to critique the ethics of the dominant majority, there's no concomitant guarantee that the minority is going to be any more virtuous. Surprisingly, one of the few places I saw some pop-cultural pushback against the one-sided vilification of the dominant majority appeared in the 2017-18 Marvel series called FALCON. This eight-issue series appeared in the same year that "Black Captain America" failed to replace "White Captain America" in the hearts of comics-fans. Marvel then put Sam Wilson back in his Falcon outfit, and in the first issue, Falcon-Sam explains his ethical compass to a friend in terms that reference then-recent developments in the "Secret Empire" arc:

Steve being a traitor validated every cynic who felt America was an idealized metaphor for the dominant culture's survival and the minority's suffering. I can't let that idea take hold. People need HOPE"-- FALCON #1, writer Rodney Barnes, 2017.

To be sure, that ship had already sailed. The very agenda of Superhero Replacement in the 2010s showed that some people believed the very thing Barnes' Falcon wished to tamp down, and grievance-based anti-Americanism had been around since the rise of liberation movements around both Blacks and women. The chaos in Minnesota continues to validate protesters who have subscribed to the notion that their minority opinion re: illegal immigration "trumps" the opinions of the dominant majority, to say nothing of federal law. I don't agree that this belief is, as Barnes said, merely "cynical." Rather, false idealists like the Minnesota protesters have convinced themselves of their rightness by drawing upon a very old formula relating to uncritical liberality.             

SUPERHERO REPLACEMENT THEORY PT. 1

The term "replacement theory," a designation for a Right-leaning conspiracy theory, didn't come into vogue until French author Renaud Camus coined the term in 2011. In that context, Camus argued that vested interests in Europe were attempting to replace White Europeans with immigrants, legal or otherwise, the better to control the population. Camus made the interesting remark, derived from Brecht, that "the easiest thing to do for a government that had lost the confidence of its people would be to choose new people."

In September 2025 I argued that many of the political disagreements in American society stemmed from a conflict between two ethical systems: the Ethos of Keeping and the Ethos of Sharing.  In that three-part essay-series, I concentrated on explicating the idea first and then provided particular examples of the idea's application in pop culture. This time, I'll go the other way and start with an example.

Since I won't address "replacement theory" in terms of immigration law and politics until Part 2, here I'll concern myself with "the superhero replacement theory" that arose at Marvel Comics in the 2010s. This was a loose editorial policy aimed at portraying the Marvel Universe as having been too dominated by the Dreaded White Male, a tendency that the new breed of editors, like Axel Alonso, proposed to correct. TIME thought it worth covering this replacement of old characters with new ones, supposedly more diverse in terms of race, ethnicity and gender-- and all this roughly a year before the Marvel Cinematic Universe became heavily invested in its own replacement theory.

Alonso, a journalist turned modern-day mythologist, is leading the world’s top comics publisher during a time of great disruption. In an industry historically dominated by caucasian males, Alonso is breaking the laminated seal of stodgy tradition by adding people of every ilk to the brand’s roster of writers and dramatis personae. Under his watch, the Marvel universe has expanded to accommodate costumed crimefighters of myriad ethnicities: a biracial Spider-Man, a black Captain America, a Mexican-American Ghost Rider, to name a few.-- "Meet the Myth-Master Reinventing Marvel Comics," 2017.

It's ironic, though, that the TIME essay appeared in 2017, for by that time, the most famous/infamous replacement-- that of White Captain America by Black Captain America-- had utterly failed. According to the first collection of SAM WILSON CAPTAIN AMERICA, there were about a dozen stories in which Sam Wilson, formerly "The Falcon," assumed the mantle of star-spangled avenger. Following those dozen appearances, Marvel launched CAPTAIN AMERICA: SAM WILSON. This title lasted 24 issues from 2015 to 2017, with all scripts written by Nick Spencer. Spenser made his biggest splash with the notorious "Secret Empire" plotline, in which White Captain America was revealed to be an agent of Marvel's Nazi-adjacent terrorist cabal. Hydra. But I only read the first six issues of Spenser's WILSON, which just happen, in a serendipitous manner from my POV, to concern illegal immigration.

Spenser doesn't bestow individual titles on any stories in the six-issue arc. So because Wilson-Cap's main opponents are the Sons of the Serpent and the Serpent Society, I'll give the arc the arbitrary Marvel-style title "Serpents in Eden," albeit with the caveat that my ideas of who the serpents really are isn't the same as Spenser's. I'll pay Spenser a small compliment: while "Serpents" is a one-sided Liberal take on immigration, it's not nearly as stupid as either of the MCU stories focused on Wilson-Cap: 2021's teleseries FALCON AND THE WINTER SOLDIER and 2025's CAPTAIN AMERICA: BRAVE NEW WORLD. But Spenser is unapologetic about slanting his discourse on America's unsecured borders by relying on that hoary old Liberal cliche. the "Honest Juan" paradigm.

So Wilson-Cap is approached by the grandmother of one Joaquin Torres about her missing grandson. I think Spenser meant to imply that both Joaquin and his grandma were US citizens, though the writer doesn't actually say so. But Joaquin does resemble just about every other illegal-lover in American pop culture. Joaquin sets up resources to help migrants survive their attempts to illegally cross the border-- which proves he's a good guy, because he's saving lives but not directly providing aid in said crossings. (The grandma is careful to say that Joaquin is not a coyote.) Wilson-Cap soon discovers that a new incarnation of the Sons of the Serpent-- originally an American-nationalism group introduced in the 1960s-- has been kidnapping migrants to use for the subjects of mutation experiments. 

However, these Sons are only hired thugs, working for the Serpent Society, rebranded as "Serpent Solutions." The new snake-fiends are oriented upon getting rich White conservatives to invest in their villainous schemes-- because, as we all know, there are no Liberals who ever promote massive illegal schemes. In the midst of all this politically tinged superhero actions, not much is said about most of the migrants victimized-- except Good Samaritan Joaquin. As it happens, when he gets mutated, he gets turned into a guy with natural arm-wings, so that by the climax of "Serpents," Joaquin gives up helping illegals and assumes Wilson-Cap's old ID of "The Falcon." Not that Wilson-Cap ever totally dropped the avian part of his identity. I think two crusaders with wings, but not with a mutual bird-motif, feels a lot like gilding the lily, but that's me.

There are certainly some entertaining bits in "Serpents." Wilson-Cap has a "will they-won't they" thing going in these six issues with old femme-favorite Misty Knight, and for a good portion of the story the hero gets transformed into a wolf-man, which is a callback to a nineties CAPTAIN AMERICA arc, "Man and Wolf." But naturally Spenser's political take on illegal immigration is completely dishonest. He puts into the mouth of the villains' leader the standard claim that objections to illegals is all about xenophobia: "Afraid of losing your job? Perhaps you'd be interested in a border wall to keep out immigrants who might undercut your current pay." The presumption here is that average Americans ought to be willing to let their wages be cut by greedy corporations-- the same ones Spenser excoriates-- because the presence of cheap scab labor makes such wage-cutting feasible. As with most Leftist racial theories, the persons thought to be "marginalized" are incapable of causing harm, even unintentionally. They can only be framed as victims, even if real-world victimage doesn't involve getting turned into human-animal hybrids.

As an ironic conclusion to this particular part of Marvel's replacement experiment, after the final issue of CAPTAIN AMERICA SAM WILSON in 2017, another group of raconteurs came out with an eight-issue FALCON series running from 2017 to 2018, possibly in an attempt to please the readers who wanted Sam Wilson to return to his previous super-ID. However, Axel Alonso was only credited as Marvel's editor-in-chief for the first three episodes of this series, and by issue four he had been ousted from the position by his successor C.B. Cebulski, whose editorial credit appears on the remaining five issues. I didn't read this series any more than I read the rest of the Spenser issues of WILSON, so I don't know what rationale was used to restore the status quo. But clearly the failure of Wilson-Cap indicates that the Marvel readership wanted to "Keep" Steve Rogers as their Captain America and didn't support the commandment that they ought to "Share" their entertainment with Liberals seeking to rewrite superheroes to be one-dimensional expressions of political correctness.

Next up: more stuff about "Sharing" when it takes the form of shoving messages down the mouths of consumers.

                     

MY CAPTAIN AMERICA REPLACEMENT THEORY

 To some extent the recent debut in theaters of CAPTAIN AMERICA BRAVE NEW WORLD plays into some aspects of my essays about totalitarian tokenism, beginning here-- though there are also some other aspects to consider in the response of reviewers to the controversial movie. In this essay I'm not responding to the movie itself-- which I don't plan to see until it hits DVD-- or to complaints about its narrative failures. I want to address just one subject: the question of how Captain America should have been replaced.                                                                                  

The conclusion of AVENGERS ENDGAME laid down the new dispensation: whatever the MCU's behind-the-scenes reasons for getting rid of the Steve Rogers character, as essayed by Chris Evans, Steve Rogers was written out of the Marvel Universe. I didn't think much of the idea of the MCU rather arbitrarily transferring the shield and costume of Cap to Sam "The Falcon" Wilson, and many of the reviewers I mentioned have cited reasons why they thought the replacement was badly executed. I would probably agree with most of these arguments. However, I also disagree with one of the most-cited alternatives of said reviewers: that the MCU should have put Bucky "Winter Soldier" Barnes into the star-spangled costume instead.                                                                                                         

                                                                                    


 To boil down many of the complaints about Sam Wilson to one narrative, the dominant gist seems to be that the showrunners presented no compelling reason for the Falcon to take on the Captain America mantle. What I think many if not all of them wanted was something along the lines of the "grenade scene" in CAPTAIN AMERICA THE FIRST AVENGER. In that scene, pantywaist Steve Rogers, one of many candidates for the super-soldier transformation, proves his fitness for the role through an act of imagined self-sacrifice. The logic with which AVENGER's script makes Steve' selection seem credible proved key to making Steve Rogers himself compelling to a mass audience that had no particular investment in the Rogers Cap of the comic books.                                                              

Now, the 1940s MCU version of Bucky Barnes also makes his debut in AVENGER, but that character has next to nothing in common with the juvenile sidekick of the comics. The new Bucky is a strapping young adult, a friend and contemporary to Steve, and what little the audience knows of him in that movie is that he just seems like an all-around nice guy. Also, he's able to join the army during WWII, unlike Sickly Steve. But Bucky, just as much as Sam Wilson, is given no specific connection to the American ethos, of which Steve Rogers is the embodiment, according to AVENGER's script. So if neither Bucky Barnes nor Sam Wilson was justified in terms of symbolizing that ethos, why would Bucky be any better a replacement than Sam? And these considerations don't even take in the problem that in CAPTAIN AMERICA THE WINTER SOLDIER, Bucky of the 1940s is preserved beyond his original lifespan, after which he's transformed into a brainwashed assassin with one metal arm. Call me crazy, but that personal history doesn't resonate with the ideal of Captain America any better than a Black military officer whose feelings about the United States of America are left vague, whether by design or by incompetence.                              

I personally don't want to either Falcon or Winter Soldier to assume the mantle; their characters are already set, and I don't think they can be retooled to make them resonate with audiences as Steve Rogers did. Nor do I think the current MCU can produce a new character, of any race, creed, or color, who can replace Steve Rogers. I assume that the current showrunners are married to the idea that the Rogers of the "official timeline" must go back in time and live out his life with his destined wife, so even though that outcome could be altered with the usual time-traveling BS, I don't think it will be. But now that DEADPOOL AND WOLVERINE established that alternate-world versions of characters can travel to the main timeline, that means that a new Steve Rogers could still show up in the MCU, though not necessarily one played by Chris Evans, in case the MCU is too cheap to pay his price.      

OH CAPTAIN! BLACK CAPTAIN!

I stated some of my opinions of "Black Captain America" in my review of THE FALCON AND THE WINTER SOLDIER, but here's another take on it that I wrote for a political forum.

________

Disney/Marvel devoted a whole series to the idea that it was terrible to have a white guy be Captain America, and that having a Black Cap would be the best solution to intersectional injustices of the past.

On the contrary, though, if your vision of America is one of White guys making everyone else go to the back of the bus, then what does a Black Captain America say about that? The fantasy is that it says, "we're overcoming all the intersectional injustices by casting a Black person in this role." But it could also say, "we, Black Americans, are claiming all of the power White people accrued when they conquered this country, but we don't accept any of the guilt of those acts." 

The advantage of a White Captain is that it captures the way White Americans thought about themselves at a point in history, when they were unquestionably the dominant racial group in America. Now you can take that idea and play it straight, as most conservatives would, or you can satirize it, as liberals would. But the idea of Black Captain America doesn't lend itself to any multivalent interpretations. You either follow the Lib program of what it's supposed to mean, or you don't. 

And frankly, I liked the Falcon. He's the first Black American superhero, so why is that heritage so easy to put aside for a mere gesture of phony intersectional triumph?

ADDENDUM: And if the showrunners were really trying to sell the idea of the new Black Captain-- why didn't they entitle the series CAPTAIN AMERICA AND THE WINTER SOLDIER?

"WHY DID KIRBY THINK HE COULD WRITE?"

 I saw this question on Classic Horror Film Board, so here's my answer.

__________

That's a complicated question, and a lot of different people will give you different answers. I've done as much research as I can into the subject, but obviously I'm speaking of matters I didn't witness.

From his first independent ventures in comics, like a POPEYE imitation comic strip ("Socko the Sea Dog"), I think Kirby only "wrote" in the sense that he would map out the pencils and then add dialogue later. I'd be surprised if ever in his long career he actually wrote a script for anyone else. He hooked up with fellow artist Joe Simon within a few years of getting into comic  books, at least partly because Simon had a better head for business and for seeking out editorial contacts. When Simon and Kirby hit it big with Captain America (to be sure, an independent creation of Simon's), the two artists became flush enough to open their own studio. I would guess that Simon "wrote" in the same way as Kirby but the studio did accept scripts by other hands; in one interview, Kirby admitted that some other guy originated the Red Skull during that period. The only comment I've seen from Simon was the offhand remark that during their association he "would never let Kirby write," but he didn't elaborate. Most of the dialogue from the Simon-Kirby titles, both at Timely and at DC, is jazzy and efficient, but it's so much unlike the weird dialogue Kirby produced in the seventies that I tend to think the two artists had ghosts come in and smooth things out. 

Kirby and Simon collaborated on the farcical FIGHTING AMERICAN-- whose dialogue, TO ME, sounds a lot like the wacky scripting of the solo Kirby stuff later-- and then the two parted ways in the mid fifties. Then we see a few features written purely by Kirby, not quite as free-wheeling, but still tending to a lot of gosh-wow exclamations. He had a success with CHALLENGERS OF THE UNKNOWN in 1957 but he was teamed with writer Dave Wood. Was that at the insistence of his editors at DC, who wanted some quality control? I would think so, even though on the whole the CHALLENGERS stories were driven by Kirby's profligate imagination. I theorize that Wood just kind of went along with whatever wild gimmicks Kirby turned out. This is an important point because in Kirby's mind, he was really "writing" the whole feature and Wood was just adding dialogue that would suit DC'S editors.

Kirby got on the outs with DC's management and Atlas Comics, soon to become Marvel circa 1960, became Kirby's main account. Editor Stan Lee didn't immediately start turning out masterpieces with Kirby, and it seems like to Lee Kirby was just another jobbing artist, even though the two of them had crossed paths at Timely, when Lee was just an office boy. Then DC started its superhero revival, so Lee naturally turned to one of the artists best known for that genre, and thus FANTASTIC FOUR was born. There are a few surviving documents indicating that Lee did not at this time turn over sole creative effort to Kirby, and this would be logical, given that Kirby hadn't exactly had a ton of hits over the past ten years.  Once books like FF and THOR became successful, slowly the working relationship became more fluid, and it appears that Lee let Kirby "have his head" more often. For all that, though, it's obvious to me that Kirby did some things-- such as crossovers-- only because Editor Lee demanded them.

Over time, Kirby came to resent the fact that Lee got the writers' salary, when he Kirby was the one inventing most of the new heroes and villains. Personally I don't think he appreciated Lee's contribution to the dramatic heft of the new wave of superheroes, and I think he came to believe he had done it all and Lee just filled in the dialogue as had Dave Wood. In the eighties COMICS JOURNAL editor Gary Groth certainly encouraged Kirby in this belief, during which time Kirby dismissed the idea that Lee had ever contributed to the stories. He got both a writer's and penciler's salary when he went to DC, and so his later work at Marvel, Pacific and elsewhere was usually though not always on the same terms. 

And that's my view as to why Kirby believed himself both the writer and creator of everything he did after breaking up with Simon, except for a few isolated special projects.

A PAUSE FOR CLAWS

At the end of my YELLOW CLAW review, I said:

...in a separate essay I'll explore some possible reasons why the name might have retained some resonance, less because of the book than because of the racial myth Rohmer was indirectly invoking.

What "racial myth?" The one I suggested in my 2016 review of the first story that introduced "Shang-Chi, son of Fu Manchu." In part I focused upon not one but two racial myths represented by the debut cover.

Of the depiction of Fu Manchu I said:

Looming over Shang-Chi on the cover is the gigantic figure of Fu Manchu, though his name does not appear until the first page of the interior story. Most viewers would automatically call Fu Manchu's image-- given both pointed ears and clawlike fingers-- to be unreservedly racist. I will write no apologias for the pointed ears, but I think it worth pointing out that the widespread icon of the Asian with Clawlike Fingers may have come about as a Western response to the Chinese custom of incredibly long fingernails. For the Chinese long fingernails signified an aristocrat's freedom from the necessities of manual labor, but many Westerners, whether actively racist or not, plainly found the image off-putting and so evolved their own reading of this image. To be sure, as the story reveals, Fu Manchu is an aristocrat in the sense that he hopes to restore the prominence of the Manchu dynasty-- though one cannot necessarily render the same reading for every Asian villain who had "claw" in his name.

Now, though I reviewed all of Rohmer's Fu Manchu books in recent years, I wasn't specifically checking to see when if at all the early books showed the devil-doctor with either pointed ears or claw-fingers, nor have I checked to see whether or not the early covers for the books utilize such iconography. But there's not much question that the 1915 YELLOW CLAW does use the latter image to signify its barely-seen villain "Mister King."

Straight at the bare throat leapt the yellow hands; a gurgling cry rose—fell—and died away.

 

And later in the same novel:

A yellow hand and arm—a hand and arm of great nervous strength and of the hue of old ivory, directed a pistol through the opening above him.

So whether Rohmer or any other predecessor used the "Asian claw" motif, it's definitely there in the 1915 CLAW novel. Rohmer's "Mister King" is not that memorable a villain, being nothing but a mundane drug-dealer, and so he cannot be said to share the "aristocratic" background attributed to Fu Manchu. But since he doesn't have a background of any kind, readers also can't see him as anything but a vague spectre of evil. In the second King section, Gaston Max thinks of King in this way:

WHO had escaped? Someone—man or woman; rather some THING, which, yellow handed, had sought to murder him!

Did Rohmer really mean to suggest that King was "a Thing," like something out of Lovecraft (or even a Robert E. Howard rewriting of HPL?) Nothing in Rohmer would support such a thesis. But his visual focus on King as a pair of nearly disembodied yellow hands has a certain mythic appeal. It suggests that King's "hold" over London's criminal demimonde also constitutes a "stranglehold" upon the daylight world of London, inhabited by sensible Brits. 

Though Rohmer gives King a racial connotation, the image of "evil hands" is certainly not CONFINED to Asian characters. One year before the publication of YELLOW CLAW, the American serial THE EXPLOITS OF ELAINE debuted a character that some scholars consider to be "cinema's first mystery-villain"-- and this character, The Clutching Hand, was dramatized in the advertisements by making him seem to be a disembodied pair of evil hands. But since the villain here was played by a flesh and blood actor, the actual Clutching Hand is a guy in a bandanna, who holds one hand up in a clawlike rictus most likely to make moderns think he's arthritic.

Now, I mentioned in the YELLOW CLAW review that most Marvel Comics fan only know one character named "Yellow Claw"-- though even that reference is qualified by the fact that this 1956 character wasn't the first of his comic-book kind. Instead, in 1942 we see the company's first Yellow Claw, who battles Captain America and Bucky with his "petals of doom." Neither the original story nor GCD attributes a name to the writer, though it's possible that editor Stan Lee wrote it. (Lee served in the Army Signal Corps from 1942 to 1945 but stated that he continued mailing scripts to his company during that period.) 

The second page definitely utilizes the "clutching yellow claw" image:

Lee certainly could have derived the name of this villain from having read or even just seen Rohmer's novel. However, nowhere in the story is it explicitly stated that the Claw is any sort of Asian. Here's his first clear depiction from page ten:

The Claw is mostly colored Caucasian, and he doesn't have slanted eyes, though the fanglike teeth were typical for negative Asian depictions. Only his hands are yellow, but no one in the story comments on this anomaly. The villain is given no solid motive for sending poisonous flowers to members of the U.S. military. Why not make him Japanese, since the country was at war with that Asian country? But this would have conflicted with the big reveal: that the blonde-haired villain is actually a previously introduced Caucasian, one "Captain Elliott." Maybe his hands only turned yellow from working with poisons? It's worth remembering that Fu Manchu, unlike Mister King, makes frequent reference to using flowers to produce sedatives.

I doubt Stan Lee, even if he scripted this weird story, consciously remembered the character when he greenlighted the 1956 YELLOW CLAW comic book. Still, maybe he suggested to the book's scripter the use of the name for the title villain, recalling less the Captain America tale than the Rohmer title. And throughout the first issue, Yellow Claw, unlike Mister King, emulates the established iconography of Fu Manchu, who I believe did have in some depictions excessively long (and hence aristocratic) fingernails. None of the other Asians in the first issue are given any exaggerated features, so Yellow Claw is also imposing, as the cover copy says, because he's something hard to identify: "who-- or what-- is he?"

I had planned to work in a reference to the Yellow Claw's quasi-revival in the 1960s, but now I think I may give that revival separate attention in a future essay. 

CRYPTO-CONTINUITY AND DOPPELGANGBANGERS PT. 2

 

I ended Part 1 on this observation: that even though it was possible for raconteurs to use the name of a famous literary character for any number of secondary doppelgangers, the mere use of the name did not confer a prior status or charisma upon a doppelganger that shared no points of continuity with the original. Thus, a few dozen Dracula-doppelgangers may register as either strong or weak template deviations of the Stoker creation—but “Dracula, Superhero” did not. The latter would be a “total template deviation,” in that he has no gradations of “strong” or “weak” points of continuity.

A similar “total deviation” appears in the case of impostors who assume a familiar guise for some clandestine motive. A few months before Marvel Comics revived the 1940s hero Captain America, Stan Lee had a criminal impostor, the Acrobat, assume the guise of the WII hero in order to deceive the Human Torch. The Acrobat was a total deviation because he clearly shared no continuity with any previous version of the star-spangled adventurer. 

Once a continuity was forged between the forties and sixties version of the character, a “retcon” had to be devised to explain away a previous fifties-era iteration of both Captain American and his sidekick Bucky. Those characters then became demonstrably separate from the original iterations.

The clandestine motive may even remain hidden only from the doppelganger. In the amusing script for issue #4 of THE JOKER, an actor playing Sherlock Holmes suffers amnesia, and becomes convinced that he is Holmes. He then assumes the Holmes persona in order to track down and defeat the Clown Prince, though neither the Joker nor any reader of the comic thinks that the actor is the real thing.

Cycling back in the other direction, it’s possible to have a valid template derivation even without using a famous name, by invoking only images or tropes familiar to an audience. A major plotline of the first LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN sequence includes a turf war in 1890s London between perennial Holmes-foe Moriarty and a mysterious figure called “the Doctor.” Moore used both images and verbal tropes to imply that the Doctor was Fu Manchu, but he never named the character since Fu Manchu is still trademarked, unlike all the public-domain characters in the LEAGUE franchise. 

Similarly, Moore may not have been sure as to whether the prose-and-film character Bulldog Drummond was free and clear. Thus when a version of the character appears in BLACK DOSSIER, Moore changed the doppelganger’s given name from the “Hugh” of the original prose books to “Hugo.” Ironically, the prose character is barely known to modern audiences, having been eclipsed by cinema’s heavily glamorized “strong template deviation,” but Moore’s “Hugo” bears more resemblance to the rude, brutish character in the original prose series.

However, also in DOSSIER we find a “total template deviation” of a different nature: the spoof. The story also includes “Jimmy,” an easily recognizable parody of James Bond, but Jimmy has no significant points of commonality with the Bond of either prose or films. Moore created Jimmy to mock what he deemed the unlikable aspects of James Bond, but he lays it on so thick that the reader no longer believes that there exists any continuity between the two agents, any more than one could believe that “Bats-Man,” a spoof of the 1966 BATMAN teleseries, had anything in common with any version of Batman.

Some points of continuity may exist when the doppelgangers are not merely impostors, but re-creations of the originals that invoke specific memories in those that observe them. In the story “Santa Claus in Wonderland,” Santa never actually meets any denizen of that Lewis Carroll domain; he merely dreams his encounters with Alice, the Mad Hatter et al. But these dream-figures maintain at least a weak continuity with the originals, because Santa imagines that they are like the characters in the books (which for the most part, they are).

However, in SCOOBY DOO 2, the teen detectives and their Great Dane encounter doppelgangers who are artificially concocted versions of ”spooks” who were all originally just costumed human beings. As entertaining as it is to see the Scooby Gang attacked by a “legion of doom” that seems made up of their old enemies, these artificial menaces no more share identity with their originals than a Hulk-robot does with the Incredible Hulk.

One more "total deviation" will suffice for the time being: the type openly based on some familiar characters but who are meant to be entirely separate characters. The four main characters of MONSTERS VS. ALIENS do not claim to be identical in any way with their 1950s SF-movie models, who are, going left from right, the Fly, the Fifty-Foot Woman, the Creature from the Black Lagoon, and The Blob. Because they don't share any continuity with their models, MONSTERS VS. ALIENS does not qualify as any kind of crossover, though it is a "mashup," in which diverse characters with some similar aspects but also with different backgrounds are jammed together in one narrative. It might be fairly argued that all crossovers may be called mashups, but that all mashups are not crossovers.

DEPARTMENT OF COMICS CURIOSITIES

I happened to be paging through the early issues of the Golden Age Captain America, when I came to issue #14 (1942), and found myself face to face with-- The Yellow Claw!

But he had nothing to do with the 1950s character, whom Steranko and others revived for Marvel Comics, much less anything to do with the 1915 Sax Rohmer novel of that title.

Here's the first "Marvel" Yellow Claw:

He's got no backstory, though he makes one remark about Americans, so presumably he's not one. He's just a weird masked dude who kills people with poisoned flowers, and who is brought to heel by Captain America and Bucky. 

And that's about all there is to say about him!

NULL-MYTHS: "FATE SPINS AN EVIL WEB" (YOUNG ALLIES #2, 1941)

I finally got around to reading this 1941 story, a follow-up to the CAPTAIN AMERICA story "The Case of the Black Talon," which stands as one of the first times in comics that a villain introduced in one feature made a "crossover" appearance in another-- though one of the characters in the CAPTAIN AMERICA ensemble, Bucky, was also a charter member of the Young Allies.

This is however no mythcomic, and what myth-material appears has less to do with the Black Talon-- whose evildoing role could've been fulfilled by nearly any similar fiend-- than with the myth of American "Manifest Destiny," linked with the struggle to find resources with which to defeat the Axis powers. Oddly, Otto Binder, who created the Talon, wrote most of the first issue of YOUNG ALLIES, but "Evil Web" is totally the product of Stan Lee and artist Al Gabriele. As the cover suggests, this is pure wild-and-woolly pulp at its finest, though with none of the subtler aspects of the Simon/Kirby story. There's only one quickie reference to the reason Black Talon has one black hand, and significantly, it's used to put down the savagery of the Nazis.

That said, "Evil Web" is certainly chauvinist, for eventually the Talon and his heroic enemies will contend over a newly risen island rich in raw materials/ The island's discoverer is named Livingstone, and Lee even goes so far as to directly align him with the historical explorer, though a better analogue might be Christopher Columbus. The moment after Livingstone conceives of turning the island over the Allies, its residents-- a race of fish-men who not only can breathe air but who talk like Indian stereotypes-- attack him, and never once does the white guy think that the island might belong to the people inhabiting it.

Livingstone hides from the savages on the island, but sends out a "message in a bottle." The Young Allies find the bottle and notify the man's daughter, who insists on going along to rescue her dad. But the Nazis are monitoring her, so the Black Talon goes after the heroes.

Eventually, after the heroes fight lots of thugs and a giant spider, everyone gets to the island, and then the fish-men, despite saying words like "gettum" and "make-um," start looking more like African cannibals, and Toro even routs them with an elephant attack a la Tarzan. The fish-men then disappear from the story, and the Allies manage to blow up a whole Nazi camp, which effectively returns the island to the Allies. "We were here first," Bucky helpfully explains. For a finale, the Allies call in two senior heroes, the Human Torch and Captain America, to help take down the Talon.

The only other incident worth mentioning is that even though the Negro member of the team is drawn in the grotesque manner of most "comic Negroes" of the time, he does get to kick a little ass, and even rescues his fellow teens from a death-trap at one point.

INFINITELY REGRESSIVE UTILITARIANISM

One of the CBR threads informed me of this VOX article discussing the interactions of utilitarian philosophy and "deonotological philosophy" in AVENGERS: INFINITY WAR.

Frankly, I've yet to find any MCU movies, except possibly the original IRON MAN, which articulate a coherent philosophical stance. In any case, I responded to the essay twice in the CBR thread. First:

In the essay the writer associated "the greater good" with pure, unfettered utilitarianism. I think that's an overstatement, and the writer himself brings up an extreme case of real-world utilitarianism, as well as pointing out that sooner or later Thanos will just have to start killing again. It's pretty hard to regard either example as being truly "for the greater good," particularly since the result is a total acceptance of brutality as a means to an end. 

BTW, if there's one intellectually dishonest aspect of INFINITY, it's that it doesn't really specify why Thanos thinks that galactic overpopulation is a given. At least when Ra's Al Ghul excoriates the ecological chaos of Earth, it's something readers can see for themselves.

The "no-kill" policy is often framed as a preventive to unfettered utilitarianism. Sometimes the arguments in its defense are clever; sometimes not.  But the policy isn't quite as divorced from real-world consequences as the Kantian model suggests.

Second:

 I'm not convinced that utilitarianism applies to INFINITY WAR. I think it's a big weakness of the script that the heroes have access to two stones, the destruction of which will prevent Thanos from the specific goal of destroying half the people in the universe. But OK: say that in some alternate world, the heroes succeed in destroying one or both stones, whether it costs Vision his life or not. What happens then? Thanos just shrugs his shoulders and goes home? Hah, we're talking about someone who's already wiped out multiple worlds with his space-army. No, thwarted of his goal, Thanos takes revenge and obliterates Earth.

On another thread I saw someone complain that the Wakandans were being needlessly sacrificed to protect the Vision's life. I wasn't particularly fond of the "ticking clock" trope involving the Vision. But the Wakandans are not being used as cannon-fodder. It's their bloody world too, and they've just as much reason as anyone to defeat Thanos.  Suppose the movie starts out with a pure endorsement of utilitarianism: some hero who doesn't mind "trading lives" kills Vision right off, defeating his larger goal. The menace doesn't go away; Thanos just goes after the whole world, and Wakanda's isolationism doesn't help it one damn bit. So here's another case where, in contrast to the thrust of the online essay, pure utilitarianism leaves those involved no better off than they were before.

I didn't bother pointing it out on the thread, but this 1980 issue of CAPTAIN AMERICA, written by Mike Barr, plays Captain America and the Punisher off one another as representatives of what might be called "enlightened vigilantism" vs. "unenlightened vigilantism," or what I called "unfettered utilitarianism."

Morally, Barr's story does set up its oppositions better than INFINITY WAR does. In this scene, the Punisher takes the utilitarian POV, referring to his ethic of treating the war on crime in terms of real war, while Captain America holds to a vision of moral compass, stating that there's a moral code that the "good guys" should advocate.

The upshot of the story is clearly in Cap's favor, particularly when it's revealed that one of the Punisher's "hits" on a big mob-meeting would have killed  not only real criminals, but also an undercover police agent. The Punisher escapes Cap and, to the best of my knowledge, rarely encounters such challenges to his utilitarian POV in his own title-- much as, in my own experience, the critics of the HOODED UTILITARIAN website rarely responded well to having their regressive ethics challenged.

TRANSITIVE AND INTRANSITIVE ENSEMBLES

In CREATOR AND CREATED ENSEMBLED HE THEM I sussed out the centricities of various "mad scientists" and their creations. In Stevenson's DOCTOR JEKYLL AND MISTER HYDE, Jekyll's alter ego Hyde has the greatest centricity, and is therefore the story's focal presence. In Wells' ISLAND OF DOCTOR MOREAU, the beast-men creations of the scientist are less central to the story than Moreau himself, and so he takes the position of the focal presence. However, in Shelley's FRANKENSTEIN, both the creator and his creation share the spotlight.

From these books, it should be clear that the title of a feature doesn't indicate the focal presence, and as I've noticed elsewhere, this is equally true in other media. As others before me have noted, the Universal Frankenstein series is principally about the monster, while the Hammer series concentrates on the scientist.

This principle applies across the board to many comics-features. BATMAN started as a concept with just one focal presence. But the addition of Robin, BATMAN became known as an ensemble of two focal presences for the next twenty-odd years. After Robin went away to college, the serial feature frequently alternated between Batman on his own, and Batman rejoined with a new Robin, though some of the Robin-rebirths didn't go so well.

I would tend to say that whenever a comics-feature presented a team-mate as an "equal partner," then that partner, however nugatory he might be as a character, became an equal focal presence in the feature. Yet this sense of equality had to flow more from the creators' attitude toward the character than from the character's representation in the stories. As a contrary example, the comic strip introduced "Junior" to the DICK TRACY in 1932, and the youth got more than a fair number of storylines devoted to him. But he was not treated as an equal partner, and so he remained one of the main character's support-cast.

In the terminology I've introduced here, then, Robin has a transitive effect in terms of his centricity, so that he's centric to the action even in stories where he has no significant role. Junior, though, has an intransitive effect in terms of centricity. Whole story-arcs can be centered on him, but he's never really the focus, but rather a reason for central character Tracy to take action. Tracy is always the "common thread" of the stories, even if he doesn't appear that much in a given arc, much the same way that Will Eisner's Spirit is that feature's common thread even in stand-alone stories where the masked detective barely appears.

Titles of movies and movie-serials are similarly deceptive. CAPTAIN AMERICA: CIVIL WAR picks up story-lines that are established in other movies, particularly AVENGERS: AGE OF ULTRON, and Captain America shares the stage with about eleven other costumed characters. Yet the other Avengers and hangers-on are in the same position as Junior in the DICK TRACY strip: intransitive. The main thrust of the story focuses on two aspects of Captain America's personal cosmos: the fate of his old friend Bucky Barnes, and the need to keep himself and his fellow superheroes free of government oversight (which attitude is to a slight extent justified by the events of INFINITY WAR). The other heroes of CIVIL WAR are more in the nature of "guest stars" than supporting characters-- even the Falcon, who had the status of an equal partner during a brief period of the CAPTAIN AMERICA comic book, but did not achieve that status in the movie series.

But though the title of CAPTAIN AMERICA: CIVIL WAR correctly foregrounds the fact that it's a Captain America film in a series of Captain America movies, AVENGERS: INFINITY WAR is not focused only upon the Avengers in the diegesis. The title in this case only functions to provide a semblance of continuity with the 2012 AVENGERS film, but in structure the story is just as much a sequel to the first GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY film. INFINITY WAR's structure is directly patterned upon one of Jim Starlin's many superhero smorgasbords, which in turn owes its lineage to early multi-character mashups like Marvel's SECRET WARS. To be sure, not every character in such mashups is necessarily a focal presence. For instance, Shadowcat's quasi-pet Lockheed the Dragon, who was never a focal presence in the X-MEN titles, did not become one just because he also took part in SECRET WARS. He would still be intransitive in terms of centricity, just like Junior Tracy-- but almost every other hero in the story would be a focal presence, whether that hero played a large or small part in the story. (CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS also tosses in many hero-cameos that simply don't register high in terms of centricity.)

But INFINITY WAR doesn't have those niggling problems, and so all the featured heroes of the Avengers and the Guardians groups are focal, as is the one solo act, Doctor Strange, making a total of nineteen focal presences in all. The only characters who aren't part of the ensemble are those who weren't ever focal in other films: "helper-types" like Nick Fury, Wong, et al.

MYTHCOMICS: "THE FANTASTIC ORIGIN OF THE RED SKULL" (TALES OF SUSPENSE #66, 1966)

In this essay, I cited the two-page origin of Batman as a mythcomic, deeming that its discourse could be separated from the main story it prefaces, the unremarkable "The Batman Wars on the Dirigible of Doom." The story "The Fantastic Origin of the Red Skull" requires more mental gymnastics.

Lee and Kirby revived Captain America in AVENGERS #4 (March 1964), and a modern-day series for the Captain appeared in November of that year. However, after four Cap adventures in modern times, the creative team began retelling stories from the hero's appearances during the Golden Age. I'd speculate that Lee and Kirby had not yet decided what to do with the displaced patriotic fighter, and that they were testing his appeal as a wartime feature while keeping him active with the Avengers. However, after eight WWII issues, Captain America returned to modern-day adventures. Still, the Great War was still part of the story, since in TALES OF SUSPENSE #72 Cap faces off against the Three Sleepers, Nazi-created robots who had been created by the Red Skull as a much-delayed measure against the Allies.

One possible reason for Cap's visit to the past may have been that Lee and Kirby had decided to revive the Red Skull for the 1960s. Such a revival had happened before, when a version of the Red Skull had also appeared in the non-canonical stories of the Commie-busting Cap of the 1950s, but Lee and Kirby naturally ignored that iteration. Issue #66 seems clearly designed to impress Silver Age readers with the WWII record of Cap's greatest villain-- which suggests that by 1966 Lee was planning to have the Skull revived for Silver Age adventures. In keeping with Marvel's attempt to design dramatically strong origins for villains, such as the Mandarin and Doctor Doom, Lee and Kirby did the same thing for the Nazi fiend, who had never had a distinct backstory during the Golden Age.

The "fantastic origin" of the title, though, is not a self-contained vignette like Batman's: it's a narrative of roughly five pages that the villain relates to a captive Captain America. The frame-story, like "Dirigible of Doom," is nothing special: as a result of the Skull's capture of the flag-garbed fighter, Captain America is brainwashed and sent to kill the Allied commander, and this in turn leads to yet more involved plot-developments. None of the main story is mythic, only the five pages in which the Skull tells his story-- even though said narrative is occasionally interrupted by Captain America trying to assault his enemy.

The narrative owes much to the origin of the hero. Captain America starts out as a nobody, a spindly weakling defined only by his desire to fight for his country. The Skull doesn't even get a name, calling himself a "nameless orphan." Later stories, though, give the villain the proper name "Johann Schmidt"-- almost certainly a German-ization of the commonplace English name "John Smith." And though the origin of the Skull doesn't directly reference the economic depression of Germany that preceded the rise of the Nazis, there's at least a prevailing consciousness in Kirby's visuals that the nameless orphan lived in a time of hardship and privation.

The hero interrupts to tell the villain that "my early years were no bed of roses," which is probably an even more indirect reference to the American Depression. Lee and Kirby don't choose to press the parallel further, but simply concentrate on showing how the young orphan grows up as a virtual nobody. Then the Nazis rise to power by openly terrorizing the citizens to compliance, and Orphan-Skull admires not only their forcefulness, but that of the man who inspired them. The orphan-- whose face is never shown-- is working as a bellboy when Adolf Hitler himself comes to the hotel where the future villain works. Apparently the young man's sense of self is so meager that he doesn't even consider joining the Nazi ranks as a soldier, for he reflects, "[Hitler] has power-- and I am nothing."

Then the bellboy takes refreshments to his idol, and this changes his life.

One may fairly fault Lee for his purple prose here, with his Fuhrer stating that he, like the maltreated nobody, nurtures hatred "for all mankind." But then again, this is the myth of Hitler as a absolute devotee of evil, rather than an attempt to portray the flesh-and-blood chancellor of Germany. Thus in the not-yet-molded clay of the bellboy, Hitler sees his chance to give birth to "evil personified."

At this point, the bellboy-- who has received at least basic storm trooper training-- accepts the skull-mask given him, and totally incarnates the role his mentor created. Modern fans, examining the last two panels of the page above, have speculated that Kirby's original idea for the sequence was simply that the Red Skull took another soldier's gun and shot his former trainer to death. This would explain the surprised look on Hitler's face. However, Lee chose to emphasize the Skull's penchant for psychological terror, for in Lee's script, Hitler gives the order for the trainer to die, and the Skull spares the man's life by shooting the buttons from his jacket. I for one think that the revision makes the Skull more vicious: he doesn't just want to kill, he wants to degrade-- hence, he spares the man just so that he'll be a "slave" who will "obey your every whim."

Going by the Aristotelian model I used earlier, the early part of the bellboy's life was the "beginning," while his meeting with Hitler and his ascension to supreme villainy forms the "middle." If there is an end as such, though, it can only be the Skull's revelation that he did not content himself with being Hitler's loyal second in command. In addition to fighting the Allies, the Skull has started preying on Hitler's trusted advisers, undoubtedly because he plans to turn on his former master-- which was probably designed to serve as an obvious contrast to Captain America's altruism.

I should add in closing that at this point in Marvel's history, the creators might not have been ready to broach the subject of the Holocaust in a comic book meant for entertainment. Lee's script does work in the term "Aryan" twice. The first time, a storm trooper accosts a man on the street, saying "You are not a true Aryan." One page later, Hitler rants at a subordinate, "Must I create my own race of perfect Aryans?" In both cases, Lee's context is not explicitly racial, but seems to be shorthand for the concept that Nazis-- as opposed to the race of "Nordics" to which Germans supposedly belonged-- considered themselves "supermen."

Though the frame-story of "Origin" is not that interesting mythically, it ends with the Skull using a chemical treatment to brainwash Captain America into thinking he's a Nazi. If only Stan Lee had realized how much attention he could received back then, if he'd omitted the rationalization and just shown Cap turning Nazi, as was done in this overblown modern production.