Captain America #9: Blind Flags

Chip Zdarsky’s run on Captain America has been boldly political since its inception, accidentally stumbling into relevancy well beyond the expectations of its creative team as real-world events begin to line up with the book’s own narrative. A Marvel comic hasn’t felt more like “the world outside your window” than this one in a long while, which has inadvertently raised expectations for its political writing. While this is still a thrilling superhero story, its core messages have grown messy, lost within the character’s iconography that symbolizes one thing while the narrative wishes to say something else altogether.

This issue is the big climax, where Steve and Alina take the fight directly to Salvation with a revolutionary rallying cry. Among the fray, we get to explore the various views on American imperialism that the characters in this book hold. How these perspectives work against one another is especially interesting. Alina wears her nationalist tendencies on her sleeve, but has no issue with secret interventionism that undermines threats to the globe as a whole while leaving people suffering on a micro level. Whether they have WMDs or not, a government that seeks control via oppression is still a moral evil worth fighting, for Steve. S.H.I.E.L.D. does not seem to share that interest. General Ross sits on the other side of that spectrum, showing little concern for loudly smashing through a nation’s identity to seize its power as his own. Latveria as a superpower is the threat, not so much the weapons it may possess. Steve is thus left outside their spectrum of ideology, seeing the danger in Salvation’s ideology as far greater than the weapons Doom left behind. If Widow represents Neo-Liberalism and Ross is fueled by militant conservatism, than Steve boldly represents the New Deal leftism he was created under.

However, that all falls apart when your main hero is dressed like the American flag. Steve’s motivation is not to assert American superiority like Ross, but the imagery of a man clad in the iconography of a country no better than the one he’s actively warring against says something else entirely. The choice to focus on Latverians finding inspiration in Steve standing up to Salvation as the American ideal, instead of finding truth in Alina’s words and their own Latverian identity, sours the message Zdarsky is trying to communicate. That message, as best as I can gather, is that no matter who you are or where you come from, uniting against forces of genocide and oppression is a universal human responsibility, leaving nationalist motivations at the door.

The imagery fails to make that message clear. In terms of its objective style, the art in this issue is great. The plot pushes us very quickly into total chaos, and the art matches this pace with rhythmic panel work, dynamic page layouts, and compositions that capture the emotional intensity of confronting dogmatic forces head-on. Unlike last month’s issue, the balance between dynamic superhero action and quieter, dialogue-driven pages is achieved quite well. Both sides of the story are visually interesting and rife with tension.