Captain America & Bucky #623

[terra]

A few days ago I posted from issue #622, which was an Invaders-heavy issue. Today I will post from the latest issue, which is much darker.





It starts out that Bucky and Toro have been left alone at camp while the more senior Invaders have been called away on a mission. Bucky is bored, and so he eavesdrops on a secret meeting to learn about an American spy who was captured and is being held in a nearby prison camp. Obviously, Bucky and Toro have to save him!



There are quite a few pages of Bucky and Toro's humorous bickering, interspersed with grim foreshadowing. Bucky infiltrates the camp alone, leaving Toro on the outside in case he needs a quick escape. He gets to the prisoner with a bit of cunning and without much fuss, but then—





Bucky flips out.





He basically blows up half the camp, he's so angry. But when he's done, it hasn't really helped anything.



There's no way to evacuate the prisoners, they only came prepared for the one American spy. So Tom drags Bucky away, while Bucky promises they'll come back.

But they don't.

When Bucky gets back to camp he gets chewed out for running off on his own. He wants to go back and free the prisoners, but it all gets swallowed up in the chain of command, in mission after mission, until he gets himself blown up over the North Atlantic and a CCCP sub swoops in and takes up his corpse.

Superhero WW2 tales are kind of a curiosity, because they muck around in the established continuity that is, well, history. This is kind of the weighty anti-thesis to stories like "Jim Hammond kills Hitler, what a badass" because Bucky is ultimately powerless in the face of this atrocity. And it really gnaws at him, too. There's a story in the old Invaders series where Bucky visits a Japanese internment camp. (Where everyone is dressed in a kimono and sits on tatami mats to eat rice...) In the end, similarly, Bucky leaves without having changed much, but there was still the sense of a happy ending, because in discovering and displaying the racism of these camps the comic was, by its own logic, dismantling them. Not so much here, but I think the historical threads here are less about the Holocaust and more about the priorities of the military at war, and learning to live with the guilt about people you couldn't save.



I don't know. It's always a tricky business to balance history and superheroics, but, you know, Captain America was created by two Jewish kids in 1941 for the specific purpose of Hitler-punching, and that's a big part of what makes him interesting.

From Captain America & Bucky #623, written by Ed Brubaker and Marc Andreyko, pencils by Chris Samnee, colors by Bettie Breitweiser.

Comments

[whitesycamore]

Ugh please leave the holocaust alone, superhero comics.

Concentration camp imagery should really not be allowed to become hackneyed.

[terra]

Poor Magneto :(

[salinea]

Magneto gets away with it because he's an actual protagonist (in that context) with agency and stuff. And not a victim who is there to provide pathos and flavour to the hero's story.

[icon_uk]

Agreed.

Cap/Bucky/Invaders/etc in WWII flashback stories are particularly tricky, since WE know the scale of it, and I believe that knowledge of the extermination camps was known at high Governmental levels by at least 1941, so them NOT dealing with it rarely comes across well (Are we to believe that Cap just accepted an order not to intervene when it's clearly had such a horrific impact on Bucky and Toro? Or even Namor, who would be even less likely to accept chain of command orders)

[terra]

It's not so much that they accepted an order not to intervene, but that they had another mission they got sent on immediately, and another mission after that, other things that were vital to the war effort that demanded their special expertise. They always planned to go back, they just blew up a month or two later.

But I don't think it's meant to come across well. How could it ever?

I guess my question is, and not as a point of debate really, because my own feelings are pretty mixed: why is it okay to show Steve punching Hitler, but not okay to deal with the actual bad stuff that went down back then? Is it really better to keep these characters to a four-color fantasy of WW2 without dwelling much on the fact that this was a gruesome and tragic place in human history?

Pop culture Nazis raise a ton of questions in general.

[proteus_lives]

Never read Magneto: Testament?

[whitesycamore]

No, I haven't.

Why, does it use holocaust victims as nameless, faceless, inert props for a hero's tragedy? If not then it's probably ok!

See, when I said that comics should stop using concentration camp imagery, that was exactly what I meant. The imprisoned people in this are just *images,* just background art. They have no dialogue that I can see, and it seems as though the full extent of their writing was "here is a concentration camp. There are some people in it. Draw them looking hopeless against a backdrop of atrocities."

If they were actual actors in the plot I'd feel a lot better about it.

[runespoor]

So much this.

Stop using the Shoah as ~source of pathos~, fiction.

[mrosa]

So there IS something worse than using rape to get a big emotional reaction out a superhero! I'm so relieved to know that :-)

This is so unintentionally hilarious.

[whitesycamore]

Good analogy, because this is exactly the same kind of uncomfortable I usually get over sexual violence in comics.

It devalues the horrific experiences of others if you're just using them to show how noble your hero is in his outrage. Doubly so if you're using real life events, and the victims' only role is to stand in the background looking abject.

[terra]

I agree that the thing that's most uncomfortable here is that the Holocaust victims are kind of nameless, faceless silent entities.

I disagree they're just being used to show how noble the hero is in his outrage. I picked the "How could you just watch?" panel because it sort of functions as a triple-indictment. Obviously, Bucky's angry at the German guard, but he ultimately winds up a mere witness himself. But I think most big-picture, it highlights with some unease that the Allied higher-ups did know about these camps, but kept silent and didn't make them a priority. One of the most persistent themes of the series is a contrast between the propaganda functions of these stories and the less glorious reality of the war— so it undercuts Bucky some as a noble figure even if it shows him as a sympathetic one.

I'm not sure any of that point B is enough to wave away point A, mind you, but there's really more going on than just handsome American heroes being heroic in a concentration camp.

[filthysize]

Personally, I find that not acknowledging historical incidents to be much more offensive.

[whitesycamore]

I like to think there's a nice middle ground between "not acknowledging historical incidents," and *this.*

[filthysize]

So the issue is the quality of the writing? Because I think if we've agreed that it can be appropriate to portray things like the Holocaust in fiction (which a middle ground implies), then we're just negotiating the level of tact. That's perfectly fine, of course, but I meant to address the idea that the subject matter is somehow inappropriate to explore in this genre, which I wholeheartedly disagree with. Especially when it's a WWII story about a character who's roots are closely tied to this historical event. It seems awfully weird to make a conscious decision to avoid the more atrocious aspects of the event. That's what I was suggesting as being offensive.

"Yay punching Nazis!"
"So why are we punching the Nazis?"
"Hey, come on, let's not talk about that."

I get that Reed RIchards can't fix everything but there are somethings that would be nice

[blue_bolt]

Here's the thing. You don't have to save 6 million Holocaust victims. Just save 500 or so and deal with the psychological ramificiations of how you couldn't save them all. I'd actually like to have a WWII talk to a therapist about how they felt guilt over not being able to save so many of the 60 million who died in WWII (does that include the Holocaust or is that just battle casualties?).

Re: I get that Reed RIchards can't fix everything but there are somethings that would be nice

[blue_bolt]

WWII "superhero"
Sorry I left that out, I'm pretty tired

Re: I get that Reed RIchards can't fix everything but there are somethings that would be nice

[biod]

New idea for a story: personifications of wars. I have no idea how it will work, how the inherent conflict in wars (which should make them severe schizophrenics at best) would factor in, or how not to turn something which is inherently violent and brutal into a persons you don't want to throttle immediately, but now I can't stop thinking about it!

[biod]

Yeah, there are unfortunate sacrifices for the war effort and then there's this. One ends with Captain America walking away grim faced, this should have ended with "Free those people or Captain America will make you". Steve walking away from something this horrid is such a denial of character, I wonder if the Allies just knocked him on the head till he forgot.

[terra]

Steve wasn't there, though.

And, well, I think Steve somehow saving the whole camp would have been worse, personally. That would have upped the "using a horrible historical massacre to showcase the heroism of a fictional character" factor by a lot.

[nyadnar17]

I don't see it as hackneyed. I thought it was powerful, showed the limitation of heroes when they are agents of the government as oppose to free agents, used the timeline and priorities of the war and Bucky and Cap's death to explain why they didn't put a stop to it, AND showed Bucky being a badass.

Don't really know what more you could want.

[kusonaga]

Besides the 'should they' or 'shouldn't they' discussion, I'd just like to point out that I love the art.

[biod]

Samnee is always brilliant.

[citygod]

I usually love Samnee's art but that first scan looks really rough - the close-up in the last panel (Toro?) is horrible. Good to see he's back to form on the other scans.

[tzipwich]

I think this story, theoretically, could be done well. But, at least from the scans shown, the prisoners just look like background art. None of them say anything, and the main characters don't interact with them at all--they just talk to each other about them... in front of them. Nice.

[terra]

Well, there is a referenced language barrier. Bucky does talk to them, and and tries to get them to leave, but they either don't trust the opportunity or don't trust the two weird American teenagers. They're silent though, and I agree that the biggest problem is that they're kind of creepy wallpaper.

But yeah, it's not a story about the prisoners, it's a story about how the Allies dealt with them, or didn't.