Sam Wilson: Captain America #20

[laughing_tree]

"Righties mad about looting: a nice TV is a small consolation prize for knowing a cop could shoot you anytime for no fucking reason." -- Nick Spencer


















"--God's rage."

Comments

[laughing_tree]

That's what superhero stories do, take a real world problem and put a domino mask on it. They're Americops instead of regular cops so that the story will have supervillains in it. It's the same tradition as the Sons of the Serpent and the Hate-Monger.

[cyberghostface]

Spencer seeing the police as supervillains would explain a lot about his intent here.

[laughing_tree]

Corrupt police are definitely deserving of supervillain-ification.

[cyberghostface]

If that was his intent than a story where the police are represented with a wholly corrupt fascist force targeting innocent minorities as part of a sinister gentrification scheme probably wasn't the way to go.

[laughing_tree]

So what this boils down to is "not all police"?

[cyberghostface]

I don't think all policemen are evil fascists deliberately targeting innocent minorities as part of a gentrification scheme, yes.

[laughing_tree]

And I don't think bigots build gigantic purple minority-hunting robots. Supervillain-ification.

[cyberghostface]

I don't think you'd disagree that all bigots are by definition bigoted against one group or another, would you?

[laughing_tree]

I do not disagree.

[cyberghostface]

So a story where bigots are depicted as being bigots is not the same as a story where the police are represented as being fascists.

The Batman comics have tackled police corruption (see Year One for example) without having to resort to stuff like this so it's not impossible for a superhero comic to actually deal with such things in a level manner.

[laughing_tree]

One's an intentionally "realistic" story, the other isn't. The beauty of the genre is that it can handle so many different flavors.

[cyberghostface]

Except Spencer's trying to make this grounded in reality and talking about 'important issues', he's just not doing a good job.

[laughing_tree]

This is the same run that revealed his falcon is a vampire. Throughout the run, it's had parts grounded in reality and others most deliberately not. That juxtaposition is the lifeblood of many a superhero story.

[cyberghostface]

Unless Spencer's Twitter account is some meta comic tie-in and meant to be not grounded in reality I think it's pretty clear how much of what he writes he thinks is truth.

[sadoeuphemist]

Don't see how that can be true because the politics of his comics are nonsensical. Like, the first arc of Sam Wilson's book featured a cabal of evil Wall Streeters funding racist human experimentation, and then ended with Sam letting most of them go on with their business because they were 'too big to fail.' I don't see how a single person can hold both political viewpoints simultaneously.

[laughing_tree]

I don't know what you mean by this. The politics of his story reflect his personal politics, so therefore the story must utterly grounded? Even the most fanciful stories can and do have political stances.

[raspberryrain]

The Americops don't represent all police. That doesn't mean they don't represent some.

[cyberghostface]

In the context of the story they're the only police representation. There are no other alternatives in the book.

[raspberryrain]

That's a stretch. It's not like there were never police in the Marvel Universe before.

[cyberghostface]

I'm talking about this title specifically. He's doing a story about the police and is depicting them as faceless fascists. There's no middle ground.

[raspberryrain]

You're the one declaring that there is no middle ground.

[cyberghostface]

Is there anything in this comic to indicate otherwise?