start of the wan

for request box

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JESSICA PLUMMER 5|26|16

[SPOILERS FOR CAPTAIN AMERICA: STEVE ROGERS #1 BELOW]

Yesterday, Marvel released the first issue of Captain America: Steve Rogers by Nick Spencer, Jesus Saiz, and Joe Caramagna. It’s a pretty boilerplate (albeit beautifully depicted) story of a rejuvenated Steve Rogers back in the field…right up until he tosses an ally to his death and declares “Hail Hydra” in a final page splash. The whole thing is intercut with flashbacks to his childhood of a neighbor inviting Steve’s mother to a Hydra meeting, thus implying that Steve was indoctrinated as a child and has been a sleeper agent of Hydra all along.

This is comics, right? Unleash a shocking twist to get readers to pick up the next issue! Make everything All-New All-Different for a few months until things settle back into the status quo! Have a character behave so incongruously that fans just have to know why!

Except.

Except this is different than having Superman be a jackass to Lois and Jimmy on the cover of some Silver Age issue of Action. This is different than a kiss or a death or a resurrection. This is even different than the usual “wildly out of character” stunts that would normally have readers up in arms, like Batman using a gun.

Quick comics history lesson: Captain America was created in 1941 by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby as a superpowered, super-patriotic soldier fighting the Axis forces. He was famously depicted punching out Adolf Hitler on the cover of his first appearance, inCaptain America Comics #1—which hit stands in December 1940, a full year before Pearl Harbor and before the United States joined World War II, making that cover a bold political statement.

You probably already knew that, but I’d invite you to think about it for a minute. In early 1941, a significant percentage of the American population was still staunchly isolationist. Yet more Americans were pro-Axis. The Nazi Party was not the unquestionably evil cartoon villains we’re familiar with today; coming out in strong opposition to them was not a given. It was a risky choice.

And Simon and Kirby—born Hymie Simon and Jacob Kurtzberg—were not making it lightly. Like most of the biggest names in the Golden Age of comics, they were Jewish. They had family and friends back in Europe who were losing their homes, their freedom, and eventually their lives to the Holocaust. The creation of Captain America was deeply personal and deeply political.

Ever since, Steve Rogers has stood in opposition to tyranny, prejudice, and genocide. While other characters have their backstories rolled up behind them as the decades march on to keep them young and relevant, Cap is never removed from his original context. He can’t be. To do so would empty the character of all meaning.

But yesterday, that’s what Marvel did.

Look, this isn’t my first rodeo. I know how comics work. He’s a Skrull, or a triple agent, or these are implanted memories, or it’s a time travel switcheroo, or, or, or. There’s a thousand ways Marvel can undo this reveal—and they will, of course, because they’re not about to just throw away a multi-billion dollar piece of IP. Steve Rogers is not going to stay Hydra any more than Superman stayed dead.

But Nazis (yes, yes, I know 616 Hydra doesn’t have the same 1:1 relationship with Nazism that MCU Hydra does) are not a wacky pretend bad guy, something I think geek media and pop culture too often forgets. They were a very real threat that existed in living memory. They are the reason I can’t go back to the villages my great-grandparents are from, because those communities were murdered. They are the reason I find my family name on Holocaust memorials. They are the perpetrators of unspeakable, uncountable, very real atrocities.

It’s easy, especially if you’re not Jewish, to think that anti-semitism is a thing of the past. It’s not. It flies under the radar, mostly, until suddenly it doesn’t: with graffiti in Spain, hateful party games in American high schools, vicious threats being flung at Jewish journalists for criticizing Trump. With physical attacks—with deaths—in France. Nor is neo-Nazi rhetoric, which hews closer to 616 Hydra’s shtick, a goofy make-believe thing. Not when the Republican presidential nominee spouts fascist ideology that echoes Hitler’s rise to power and spurs a literal rise in hate crimes against Muslims.

But writer Nick Spencer and editor Tom Brevoort are more concerned with making this “something new and unexpected”; with having “fun” and getting readers “invested in Hydra characters.” Because what’s more fun than downplaying genocide?

I’m not going to pretend to be cool here. I’m emotional. This is emotional. Captain America isn’t even my usual guy to get incandescently angry over the erasure of his coded Jewish history— that’s Kal-El, the Moses of Krypton—but reading this comic made me feel sick to my stomach. Reading the flippant responses of many non-Jewish readers—including friends—has brought me to tears. Somehow a community that gets up in arms about whether or not Batman has a yellow circle behind his logo seems to think that being angry about this is stupid, or indicative of a lack of experience with comics.

So let me be very clear: I don’t care if this gets undone next year, next month, next week. I know it’s clickbait disguised as storytelling. I am not angry because omg how dare you ruin Steve Rogers forever.

I am angry because how dare you use eleven million deaths as clickbait.

I am angry because Steve Rogers’s Jewish creators literally fought in a war against the organization Marvel has made him a part of to grab headlines.

I am angry because the very real pain of the Jewish community has been dismissed since this news leaked on Tuesday night as “Twitter outrage.”

If this story doesn’t hurt you? Good. I’m genuinely glad. I don’t want anyone else to have the gorge rise in their throat when they read the entertainment news. I love comics. I don’t want them to make people feel angry and betrayed. But understand that not feeling that way comes from a place of privilege, and don’t dismiss the concerns of those of us who are upset just because you have the luxury not to be.

I’ve been trying to think of how to finish this post, but I don’t think I can say it better than my friend and fellow Panelteer Sigrid Ellis did here:

And knowing that this wound is temporary, that it’s for the sake of sales and money and a story beat, that just makes it hurt more, not less. How little we must matter, the people who needed Steve to be the defender of the underdog and the weak, how little we must matter if betraying us for a story beat is so easy.

How little must we matter. The people who created Captain America, and Superman, and countless other heroes like them. The people who need him. The people whose history and suffering and hope, as we stood on the brink of annihilation, gave you your weekly entertainment and your fun thought experiment, 75 years later.

I hope it was worth it, Marvel.

For AP Studio Art, I’m putting together a concentration on the concept of home. I need people from a wide variety of backgrounds to interview about their life and what the concept of home means to them. From there, I will be painting their concept of home in oil paints to create a 12 piece collection to submit to the College Board next year. Right now I’m looking for 6 people to interview over Skype. Please message me to let me know if you’re interested or have any questions by Tumblr messaging me.

What I’m looking for in an interviewee:

REQUIRED: Willingness to answer pretty personal questions about their life and experiences (I won’t make you answer anything you don’t feel comfortable answering, but I need a decent chunk of information to be able to fit together to a piece of art about you!)

Able to talk on Skype for at least an hour

Comfortable with the conversation being recorded

PREFERRED (you don’t need all of these to qualify, just one or two): From a non-English speaking country

Of a religion other than Christianity or Atheism

On an “extreme” (i.e. extremely rich or extremely poor, extremely happy or extremely depressed)

Interesting and/or unusual life

Could you guys help me out by reblogging this? Thank you!

LORDY

U DO NOT KNOW ABOUT YUGIOH!!

YUGIOH WAS 100% ORIGINALLY… A HORROR MANGA, I AM HONESTLY NOT KIDDING YOU, it was intended to be a violent horror manga

GO ON, GO TRY AND READ IT ON MANGAFOX. IT’S FUCKED UP.

Before the concept of Duel Monsters was even introduced to the series, Yugioh was about Yami Yuugi basically being a murderous fuck who enjoyed punishing people with ‘shadow games’ that ended with losers being, uh, electrocuted to death, burnt alive, and a whole host of other horrific deaths. Other screwed up subplots include Kaiba being totally obsessed with murdering Yuugi/Yami and building an entire theme park to try to do so, Mokuba (Kaiba’s sweet lil brother) attempting to kill half the cast by forcing them to compete in a Russian Roulette with poisoned food, Anzu/Tea being drugged by a classmate with chloroform and almost assaulted, Jounouchi/Joey being kidnapped by a gang he’s been hanging out with and tortured with tasers before Yami electrocutes the gang and kills them all, quite happily, to save Jounouchi, multiple people getting set on fire, a man getting his head bitten off by Shadi’s pet crocodile Amet monster, the list goes on and on.  I’m not entirely sure if it’s included in the anime or not, but Bakura gouges out Pegasus’ eyeball.

I honestly ended up stopping reading the manga because it was getting to be too violent and morbid for even my tastes

So yeah, in the original Duel Monsters Yugioh anime, people die. Death is a real threat. Even though it’s significantly toned down from the original first few arcs of the manga, which are just bizarre. Almost every instance of characters being sent to the ‘shadow realm’ in the 4Kids dub is censored ‘I’m going to murder you’ plot points. Oh boy does 4 Kids tone down the violence.

Here’s a delightful episode from the anime some may remember; Yami Yuugi fights some weird stage magician guy and during the duel they’re both strapped into buzzsaws which slowly approach their feet as they lose life points. No biggy - the loser just gets sent to the shadow realm!

Except in the original, the threat is that the loser of the game is going to get their legs sawn off and bleed to death.

So, yknow, now you know that not only did they censor Kaiba’s gun, but just a whole bunch of brutal violence and murder as well!

A lesser known fact about Yugioh is that there’s a missing season - Season 0, aired in 1998, which follows the plot line of the original initial manga volumes before Yugioh became an anime and manga about playing card games. It’s still significantly toned down from the manga but is a little closer to theme and vibe.

i couldn’t sleep, so I decided to just start flicking through some internet TV things, like Netflix, Crunchyroll, etc.

and I found

{{ VOICE QUIVERING }}

this ANIME~~~~

called “SHE AND HER CAT”.

and it’s just it’s about

this girl and her cat.

but… it’s from the perspective of the cat. who LOVES HER.

SO MUCH.

and… the whole show is just about how happy he is to be her cat and how he thinks she’s amazing and the best ever

it’s a whole SHOW ABOUT HOW MUCH THIS CAT AND HUMAN LOVE EACH OTHER

AND HOW HAPPY HE IS TO ALWAYS BE THERE FOR HER

AND, AND, AND THE SECOND EPISODE IS JUST THEM REMINISCING ABOUT THE FIRST day they met…

and i SWEAR ON MY LIFE, I am a grown 30-year-old man with a successful business

reduced to literal tears

because it made me miss having a cat SO MUCH that I just cannot deal without ranting on Tumblr!!!

I mean come on… 

She always comes home exhausted.

She brings the smell of a faraway town I don’t know.

I live in my own time, and she lives in her own time.

So these moments when my time and hers intersect

are more precious to me than anything

it’s SO MELODRAMATIC AND SO SWEET AND IT MAKES ME SO HAPPY 

FULL ON TEARS. 

Well since this got over 1000 notes she’s still happily getting jiggled.