Captain America #1 by Chip Zdarsky

A review by Basil Shepherd

This remarkable first issue starts with hard hitting imagery of a young boy witnessing first hand the attack on The World Trade Center. The boy, named David Colton, speaks on what it’s like to see death and in particular death inflicted by another human being. David asks himself “Are we worth saving? And if we are, am I willing to become the thing that I hate to save us? Am I willing to be a killer?”. We cut to our titular Captain as he is finding himself only a week after he’s been excavated from his icy stasis (that’s right, this book takes place not long after Cap finds himself in our present day! Personally, I’m loving it). The rest of the issue we go back and forth from watching Cap taking down bad guys, turning down a role on The Avengers in lieu of joining back up with the military, and David pushing as hard as he can to join the military himself and survive the abuse of his fellow soldiers.

We watch as David unintentionally re-enacts the origin story of Steve Rogers. He is indoctrinated into a war, fights as hard as he can to join the effort despite his lack of strength and build, and becomes a symbol for the war effort. What stands between Captain America and David is the war they stood for and the narratives/propaganda they were indoctrinated by. While our actions in WWII were far from greatness (Japanese internment camps, & the bombing of Hiroshima & Nagasaki just to name a couple atrocities we committed. I truly can’t get into all of the history and horrors of WWII here or we’d be here all day), the US military machine was in full swing with its hatred, bigotry, lies, and most importantly nationalism by the time we hit 2001. Cap was indoctrinated into a war where the opposition were world leaders, fascists, and nazis. David has been indoctrinated into a war where the American youth was sold a narrative that they were fighting a threat against them that was never as bad as they were told.

I would like to speak more on this but when I used Google to search “how we indoctrinated soldiers into the war on terror” I was met with links to sites such as georgewbushlibrary.gov and The Army Reserves website along with an AI overview that said “To provide a comprehensive answer, it's important to understand that the concept of ‘indoctrination’ is complex and can have negative connotations. It implies a forceful or coercive method of instilling beliefs. While military training aims to instill certain values and beliefs essential for effective service, it's not the same as the harmful forms of indoctrination practiced by terrorist groups.”

Wow. Okay, so I may have started to get incredibly upset while writing this review while thinking about this issue and the state of the world. However, I’d like to take this moment to say that this is exactly what comics were made for and exactly what a Captain America story should be. We are questioning the status quo. We are asking for better and we are asking for more. We should strive to write stories that beg questions from our readers and leave them asking themselves about the world around them. If that is what you are looking for then I highly recommend you check out this book as well as Zdarsky’s last take on the man in stripes in Avengers: Twilight. Here’s to hoping Zdarsky keeps it up and Marvel editorial doesn’t try to censor him too much!