The Griffon News

America is dead.

His name was Steve Rogers and he was what every man could only hope to be, and he was not even real. He was the inspiration for the silver age of modern mythology.

Marvel Comics cornerstone character Captain America was killed by a terrorist’s assassination plot involving snipers and brainwashed special agents. Tough guys all across America shed a big manly tear when Super Man died, but the death of the star-spangled super solider sent a shiver of stark terror down the spines of fan boys everywhere. This time death was going to mean something; this time was not some mad mastermind’s marketing ploy. The death of Captain America meant something. If one looks through the colored kaleidoscope of comic book history, it becomes apparent that there has been some level of humanity’s mass apprehensions and anxieties woven into the story fabric of the four-color fantasy that is the comic book mythos.

Examine four of the major icons of comic book creation: Superman, Spider-Man, the Hulk and Ghost Rider. Each one of these concepts had America’s fears tied into its origin.

Superman made his way into action in the year 1938, when the whole of America was fairly concerned with the little green men on mars that had dug all of those intricate canals. Not even two generations past the day when a radio show caused mass panic across the country because citizens were convinced that the Martians were invading. Super Man was rocketed away from the doomed planet Krypton.

Super Man was an alien in a time of extreme xenophobia. Spider-Man appeared in the ‘60s when well-off Americans were building bomb shelters in the backyard. Spider-Man was a victim of a radioactive spider bite. Interestingly enough when Spider-Man was recreated in film after the turn of the century, genetic engineering had been woven into the amazing origin. This, during a time when genetic engineering is a political issue as much as a scientific one.

The Hulk is much the same.

Born in the early ‘60s at the heart of a gamma bomb, a victim of dirty Red sabotage. In his rebirth to the world in film, the bomb was still in the story, but genetic engineering and nano-technology had replaced the commie spies.

Ghost Rider rode into the highways of the human imagination on his hellspawned hog at a time when Anton LeVey’s Church of Satan is inspiring people to take bold new career paths into the fine arts of deprogramming. Johnny Blaze got cursed to become the rider after he had made a deal with the devil, and he had just been seen down in Georgia. Now America is in a war on nouns – like drugs and poverty and terror – and the good Captain has breathed his last, so the questions must be asked: Why are we so afraid? Is all this fear really working out for us? Is it worth it?

RIP Captain America