Captain America: Man Out of Time #3

[stolisomancer]

After some of the discussion concerning Man Out of Time #4, I went to look at issue #3 at my LCS. I'd been skipping the miniseries because, as I noted on the thread, it's a pretty well-worn plot for Cap stories, and we've seen it as recently as the early issues dealing with Ultimate Cap, or Joe Kelly's Earth's Mightiest Heroes mini from a couple of years ago.

Given how some of the discussion's gone on the previous post, though, it seems like a good idea to put up a couple of pages from #3.


As the book opens, Hank and Tony are trying to talk Cap out of using the FF's time machine and going back to 1945 to save Bucky, because the time machine's untested technology and they don't know what it's going to do. Cap, who's suffering from a really vicious case of future shock, is adamant that the future doesn't need him and he doesn't belong in this era.

(The sliding timescale really screws up this story, as Tony's walking around in the pointy-headed early armor and offhandedly mentions Jimi Hendrix being alive, but he's got a camera on his cell phone, he plays Radiohead for Steve, he talks about the Challenger disaster, the president in this story is clearly Obama, and argh.)

Tony decides to invite Steve aboard the Stark Industries party jet for a night on the town, to display what's good about the modern era. Among other things, he mentions that polio and smallpox are gone.

Steve winds up liking the sound of an electric guitar, but it's not quite enough, so Tony takes him to the Smithsonian.





There's a scene after this where Cap meets the current President ("Can I get you anything? Coffee? Water? Medal of Honor?"), but the big scene in the issue, I think, is Cap watching the MLK speech. There's something very apt about Tony Stark as the ambassador of the present to the past.

Comments

[icon_uk]

Why is Tony a particularly apt as an ambassador from past to present? Nick Fury (who was there too) perhaps, but Tony I'd say is rarely about the past or present, he's the future (sort of).

Also not sure about the "Are they all honoured?" moment, given the frankly astonishing number of people who believe the Moon landings were faked, is that a question that an unambiguous answer can be given to?

Oh, and the tags should include the heroic identity, not just the civilian name, so it would be char: captain america/steve rogers etc...

[valtyr]

Also not sure about the "Are they all honoured?" moment, given the frankly astonishing number of people who believe the Moon landings were faked, is that a question that an unambiguous answer can be given to?

Pretty sure Steve is specifically asking whether black astronauts were honoured alongside white, which doesn't really have much to do with whether the landings were faked. The colouring doesn't really make it explicit.

[icon_uk]

Ah, that makes more sense then, thanks.

[blake_reitz]

Also, later in the series, Nick Fury is mentioned as having gone underground. It's hard to say how this fits into Marvel's weird sliding timeline.

[arbre_rieur]

That makes sense. In the early days of the Marvel Universe, S.H.I.E.L.D. was a secret organization.

[stolisomancer]

Since you're not American, you might not be aware of this, but the people who think the moon landing was faked are an astonishingly low number of conspiracy nuts and cranks. If they seriously make up more than about 0.5% of the American population (which is still a really noisy 1.5 million or so, so I may be off by a considerable margin one way or the other), I would be absolutely amazed, especially since "Mythbusters" took it on a while ago.

Leaving aside the very real problems with the modern depiction of Tony Stark, the general idea of the character at the moment seems to be that he's about the future. Between Ellis and Fraction, he's gone from corporate raider to transhuman futurist, which makes him a good viewpoint character for a story that's about how far we've come since the '40s. Fury's big modern character hook is that he himself hasn't come very far at all, so a similar story with him in Tony's spot would be mostly Fury drinking whiskey and telling Steve to man up.

[atj99]

If you don't mind me asking, what do you mean by the 'very real problems with the modern depiction of Tony Stark'?

[stolisomancer]

They've had to bend themselves into knots to avoid giving Tony anything even remotely resembling the appropriate consequences from his actions during Civil War, because it'd make the character nearly unusable as a member of the Avengers.

By rights, he should still be a pariah if not a fugitive, and they're dealing with it by ignoring it, with the weak handwave that the "brain reboot" absolves Current Tony of responsibility for his actions. I don't blame them for ignoring the Atlantean conspiracy from Civil War: Frontline, the same way they're quietly trying to pretend Sally Floyd never existed, but the whole "and now we're all friends again!" bit post-Siege rings pretty false to a lot of people, and it should.

[icon_uk]

Wiki shows a 6%-28% finding in assorted polls about whether the landings were faked, which is quite a variation, but does hint at it being a bit more than 0.5%

My own personal arguments against such nonsense are A) Who could keep a conspiracy THAT complex completely secret do long? (America? Please, with all respect they couldn't even keep Watergate quiet) and B) If anyone had a vested interest in proving such a thing had been faked it would be the Russians, and I don't think they ever even tried. (I'd suggest things like the mirrors left on the Moon which are still used for bouncing laser testing, but facts rarely work against conspiracy theorists)

I might rather enjoy that Fury/Rogers scene.

[stolisomancer]

The problem with "assorted polls" in the United States is that they skew heavily towards older people who A) still have landlines and B) are at home to answer them in the middle of the afternoon. Like I said, the entire thing was debunked repeatedly, and the only people who still believe it would believe it if we sent them to the moon.

Also, because it's awesome, here's Buzz Aldrin punching a guy who called him a liar.

[golden_orange]

I do love in that clip how, when Buzz is clocking that guy, everyone around him is like "What? Oh. Huh." and just disinterestedly lets him get on with it.

[icon_uk]

that they skew heavily towards older people who A) still have landlines and B) are at home to answer them in the middle of the afternoon.

Which would be much more likely to put them into the category of people who were around at the time of the landings and so would, one would have thought, be more believing of them.

And I've always loved that clip! :)

[proteus_lives]

I've argued with a poster on another board and nothing, nothing will make her believe that the Moon Landing happened.

It's weird.

[stolisomancer]

And, for that matter, they're rather specifically discussing the Challenger explosion in 1985, which has nothing to do with the moon landing conspiracy.

[icon_uk]

True enough, I was looking at it in context of the space program they'd been discussing, not the context of a space crew having women and black people in it, but as valtyr noted, the colouring (sic) doesn't help make that clear.

[starwolf_oakley]

My only question about the moon landing is where was the camera that took the pictures on the moon as Armstrong is walking. Just never figured that part out.

[stolisomancer]

"At 02:39 UTC on Monday July 21 (10:39pm EDT, Sunday July 20), 1969, Armstrong opened the hatch, and at 02:51 UTC began his descent to the Moon's surface. The Remote Control Unit controls on his chest kept him from seeing his feet. Climbing down the nine-rung ladder, Armstrong pulled a D-ring to deploy the Modular Equipment Stowage Assembly (MESA) folded against Eagle's side and activate the TV camera, and at 02:56 UTC (10:56pm EDT) he set his left foot on the surface.[22] The first landing used slow-scan television incompatible with commercial TV, so it was displayed on a special monitor and a conventional TV camera viewed this monitor, significantly reducing the quality of the picture.[23] The signal was received at Goldstone in the USA but with better fidelity by Honeysuckle Creek Tracking Station in Australia. Minutes later the feed was switched to the more sensitive Parkes radio telescope in Australia.[24]"

[icon_uk]

Have you seen The Dish, fun movie.

[arilou_skiff]

Tony is a great ambassador from the future (from Cap's POV). Because Tony in a sense is all about advancement, going forward, building new thing snad trying them out. He's modernity in a business suit and powered armour.

Which makes him a bit different from Reed (who is far more interested in just discovery for it's own sake) Tony enjoys watching stuff work and get stuff done.

[icon_uk]

I can sort of see that, but I've never got the feeling that Tony was that into history (which is what he'd need to give context to Steve, since his future is Tony's past). I think one of Tony's failings is that he thinks of the future (which is a fine thing), but doesn't always learn from the past.

[jarodrussell]

Why is Tony a particularly apt as an ambassador from past to present?

Because comics are written by geeks for geeks, which means the subtle but important differences between someone who appreciates the social context of NASA and someone who just wants to figure out how to make a better rocket are lost on them.

[arbre_rieur]

"the president in this story is clearly Obama"

You're not the first person to mention this, but I don't see it. He's more Generic President than anything else.

[stolisomancer]

Except that he's black.

[arbre_rieur]

Which can conveniently be written off to him standing in the shade. It's ambiguous like the Challenger pic.

[stolisomancer]

I disagree, but obviously, mileage has varied.

[valtyr]

There's actually no reason 'generic president' can't be black.

[schala_kid]

There's no way this fits into regular Marvel continuity since how things are right now Steve should have been defrosted in the 90's. Plus all of those anachronistic things you just mentioned, I guess it's best to ignore it or we'll end sup pulling our hair.

[flidgetjerome]

That's a really great moment there, it really is, and it's just very Steve that that's what'd impress him.

Now can we fix Isaiah Bradley's dementia already?

[wasabi.livejournal.com]

Tony, I'm not sure Steve wants to hear about Woodstock.

"My god - were these people ever cured? And where were the toilets?"

Hendrix

[fourds]

I haven't read the issue myself, but the impression I got from a scan was that when Tony said something like "need to get Hendrix in here," he was referring to having the music piped in, not having a living Jimi show up.

[kirke_novak]

This is one of my favorite comic books atm - I love fish out of temporal water stories and one with Cap? Win/win.
Cap is a guy whose believes are ahead of his times and now he is ahead of his times... and sees that he was right but at the same time, he faces the deterioration of values.