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

[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.