John Walker: U.S. Agent #1

[cyberghostface]

“The basic key to John Walker is the fact he is not Steve Rogers. U.S. Agent dresses like Captain America but is, in fact, not Captain America. The whole point of the character is to help better define who Captain America is, or more pointedly, who or what Cap is not.

Walker is impatient, fast-tempered, judgmental, cynical; a deeply flawed mirror of the impeccable warrior Cap represents. Within those flaws lies his humanity, a kind of Bruce Willis willingness to inject himself into perilous situations simply because it is the right thing to do.

John Walker is a guy who tries hard. He's Joe Lunchbucket, All-American. He's worth rooting for.” - Christopher Priest

Comments

[thanekos]

One-two issues later: " Say goodnight, Johnboy! "

[zachbeacon]

I normally like Priest but that's a terrible reveal. Did he just establish the existence of a character a page before someone unmasked to reveal them self as said character?

[cyberghostface]

There are earlier flashbacks before this.

[starwolf_oakley]

I know Marc Gruenwald introducing John Walker as a new Captain America was to get in new readers. But I'm not sure if "This guy is VERY different from Steve Rogers, but still a hero in his own right" works as well as Marvel wants.

Plus a LOT of writers, Gruenwald included, wrote Walker as borderline crazy. Sometimes not even that borderline. With "It was the late 1980s/ early1990s" as the excuse.

[silicondream]

Yeah, "All-American risk-taker who tries hard but makes bad decisions" is not a great pitch right now.

[beyondthefringe]

And can Priest find something new and compelling to ay about what's basically "Captain America, only for the red states"?

I hope so. Because honestly, this is such a bad time to try and celebrate the kind of Cap who would appeal to the Proud Boys and Boogaloo Boys and so forth.

[tcampbell1000]

Walker's "Never join the club that would have you" did a lot to win me over.

The Watchdogs, Walker's sparring partners who killed his parents, always seemed a lot closer to the actual Proud Boys to me than he was. Frankly, at this point, unless Walker starts overthrowing ballot counts, I can't see him as their hero.

[themajesticmoose]

Okay but put it this way: would he have hated the Watchdogs if they HADN'T killed his parents? If they hadn't killed anyone he knew, would he have wanted to shut them down or would he have either ignored or supported their racist, homophobic, transphobic, misogynistic, anti-sex, anti-choice hate campaigns?

It's easy to hate a person or organisation when they're after you personally or someone you personally know. The sign of a good person is someone who stands against oppression, injustice and bigotry on principle not just because it personally affects them.

I'm not black but I support Black Lives Matter. I'm not Jewish but I stand against antisemitism. I'm not a sex worker but I stand against those who want to demonise, oppress and villify them and take away their livelihood.

And honestly given the current state of the world right now, this seems like a spectacularly awful time to be trying to sell the "Noble Bigot With a Badge" trope, the harmful and vile idea that some bigots "Aren't all bad" the idea that there are somehow varying levels of bigotry and that as long as someone's only a LITTLE bit bigoted that's not AS bad.

"Oh he's racist but he's not like...RACIST racist...he wouldn't join the KKK or the Proud Boys or anything he just thinks certain people are inferior to the white man in some ways"

Honestly unless this story is Walker realising he's a bigoted ass and changing his ways I'm rooting for the lady with the pink hair here to just shoot him and get it over with. Because I can't see anyone like him as being fit to be called a hero or even just a basic decent human being

[tcampbell1000]

If you don't want to read a story with Walker in it, that's certainly your right. The character's checkered sales history after his time as Captain America suggests you're not alone!

But it's outright weird to insist that there aren't varying levels of bigotry. I mean, I'm sorry, but of course there are. My 88-year-old neighbor says something on the lower levels at least once a month ("I still don't think this country is ready for a black person in the White House"). And last week, she opened up her own home to a homeless immigrant of color who needed a place to stay for a couple of nights, until someone else helped her into a more permanent safe house. (She helps feed the homeless on a regular basis, which is how she learned about the situation.) She's been burgled by roommates before, she's physically frail, it's the middle of COVID, but she did it anyway.

That's one reason why I'm her friend... and why I put up with her occasionally expressed, less than ideal beliefs about race. I'd say "being a Southerner means you have to do this kind of calculus sometimes," but Donald Trump, creator of homelessness for many people of color, is from the North.

So there is a spectrum. Where Walker falls on it seems to vary by writer. Gruenwald was pretty careful to show him as very, very supportive of his black crimefighting partner, and not just in an "oh, you're one of the GOOD ones" way. Others have found the irony of someone in a Cap-like suit embodying "the other America" too irresistible to allow for much nuance. I don't know if this story will be one I end up enjoying, but it's working better for me than a lot of recent Priest material so far.

P.S.: To answer the question you led with, you've got a point. Walker was at first tempted by the Watchdogs' ideological similarities to his own beliefs, and Gruenwald was probably teasing the idea that he might end up joining them before taking him in a different direction. But a different direction is where he went, and it'd be pretty strange to take him back there now. It may be this story's a "there but for the grace of god go I" bit, since it looks like his sister's joined a similar organization.

[themajesticmoose]

I'm not saying that no one's ever allowed to make ignorant comments. We all do that. I don't think there's a single person on the planet who's never said something ignorant that was offensive to someone.

What I am saying is that's not the case with John Walker. He's been shown repeatedly in canon to be willfully and deliberately bigoted and when people have said "Hey don't do that" he hasn't tried to educate himself or improve as a person to my knowledge he's just continued being shitty

Yeah he had one black friend and he's not literally a member of the KKK but that doesn't give him a pass on all the other ways he's been disgusting and the fact that he was even tempted to join a Nazi terrorist cult is pretty telling.

Put bluntly...I think if someone is the kind of person who would even consider joining a literal Nazi organisation who are as open about the fact that they are literally Nazi's as the Watchdogs were that's the kind of person who doesn't deserve to breathe oxygen

I mean let's be clear here the Watchdogs weren't a situation like in the MCU where Hydra sneakily infiltrated SHIELD and slowly warped the organisation towards their fascist goals. This isn't like how Wanda and Pietro thought they were working with good people when they volunteered for Strucker's experiments and got tricked. The Watchdogs were literally screaming their bigoted, hateful Nazi garbage at the top of their lungs. The only way they could have been more blatant is if they got swastikas tattooed on their faces. And Walker still looked at the worthless garbage they were shitting out of their mouths and thought "I can see where they are coming from"

His bigotry may not manifest in the form of him actively doing hate crimes like the Watch Dogs or trying to commit a genocide like Red Skull or William Stryker but no as far as I'm concerned that doesn't make it a "Better" form of bigotry. Any more than I think those mouth breathing trash with their "Hate the sin, love the sinner" brainless garbage are any less repulsive and worthless than the cretins screeching their homophobia to the sky

[tcampbell1000]

I am, as I say, a product of the South, which makes me wearily familiar with the Republican brainwashing machine. When I was young and figuring things out and politics were less polarized, I even called myself a Republican, though I never ended up voting that way.

I've seen others get seduced by that machine, to varying degrees, and some of them ultimately escaped its pull and some of them did not. So as long as Walker struggles... and in the good stories, he does struggle... I can see those escapees in him, and hope he makes it out too.

But of course, that's personal, and different people are gonna bring different things to it. Still, I kind of have to observe those degrees, because the alternative would've been to give up on them too soon.

[icon_uk]

I don't think Gruenwald ever created Walker to be a hero in his own right, he was an anti-hero from the get go. He was there to be a shadow for Steve Rogers light, if you'll pardon the overblown metaphor, and I can imagine he'd have been happy to drop the character for good once the arc was over, but the late 80/90's being what it was, they kept him. I wonder how much of that part was editorial wanting to keep him around. Does anyone know of any interviews on the topic or the like?

[tcampbell1000]

Well, just from what Wikipedia's collected, Walker was originally conceived as the Super-Patriot, a villain, not Captain America's replacement or colleague. He was promoted to the title role as a response to the public's hunger for Punisher-like antiheroes, but it seems like Gruenwald developed some affection for him along the way (and he certainly liked the reader response).

[jlbarnett]

didn't Gruenwald write him as borderline crazy only after giving him a breakdown with a hell of a reason for it?

[beyondthefringe]

Let's see.
Non-linear storytelling? Check.
Snark everywhere? Check.
White on black scenesetting boxes? check.
Social commentary disguised as bickering between unlikely duo? Check.

Definitely a Priest comic. The man sticks to his style.

[icon_uk]

So that pink haired frenemy to a Captain America analogue is NOT Diamondback then?

[cricharddavies]

He gets one point for referencing Morrie Kuramoto, but the reveal of Walker's previously unmentioned sister loses it and then some.

[cyberghostface]

She’s been mentioned before.

[cricharddavies]

The fact that he's talking about his siblings in the past tense, in contrast to his parents (who were still alive when this happened) suggests that they weren't among the living. Resurrecting one of them as a villain is a bad move.

[cyberghostface]

She's not dead. When John Walker was believed to be killed she was mentioned as his next of kin who requested him to be cremated (although his death was faked).

[nyadnar17]

Sure would be nice to have a Center-Right take on Captain America that was actually written for a Center-Right audience.

[hotfoot]

What would you like to see with that?

[bravest_spinja]

Priest is probably the best, as any, to write for this. One of the first Black pros to make a name in the industry (Well, two names) but I want to say his views are, at the time, to right of say, the Greg Ruckas of the world? He definitely has a worldview that wouldn't be predictable.

[zachbeacon]

Are there any left? The more conservative comics folks I used to like all seem to have lost their minds in 2016.