Your meta on 616 Tony's political affiliation was very well thought out and insightful! I was wondering if marvel ever did a comic storyline that was supposed to be an allegory for the iraq/afghanistan wars and if so, what positions tony and steve took? Like how the nixon alien thing was an allegory for watergate. Have the comics ever touched on the middle east wars? Do we know steve or tony's thoughts on those wars? Thanks!
The thing about modern Marvel comics is that they really, really donât like to touch real-world politics.
The Secret Empire/Nomad thing was exceptional precisely because it is clearly supposed to be a take on Watergate -- and, IIRC, in the letters column Marvel tried to assert that it was not Nixon. They did publish it, yeah, but also they immediately disavowed it.
Sure, sometimes comics canât not deal with major events -- JMS has a (as far as I know) very well-regarded Spider-Man issue about 9/11, but Marvel Comics are set in New York and they kind of had to say something about that one.
But for the most part, they just... donât. I know this might be hard to believe given that Captain America Comics #1 has Captain America slugging Hitler right on the cover, published back before the US entered WWII and explicit anti-fascism was actually still a controversial position. But that was then and this is now, and as far as I can tell, mostly they just try to avoid telling stories that would explicitly interact with real-world politics in controversial ways.
And yeah, I know that Tonyâs origin story was originally set during the Vietnam War and that he was an arms manufacturer during the Vietnam War. But in 1964 or so, this was not the controversial position that it became later. As the war became more and more unpopular, fans wrote in basically begging them to make Tony change. And, yes, they eventually did. In Iron Man #78, Tony leaves the weapons business. He reflects on how some of the terrible, terrible things he saw in Vietnam have made him commit to peace. Itâs a lovely issue. Itâs very moving. I recommend it a lot. But do you know when it was published? November 1975. Do you know when the US pulled out of Vietnam? I didnât, so I just checked. The US officially withdrew in January 1973 and they werenât all the way out until Saigon fell in April 1975. Marvel Comics did not make Tony stop manufacturing weapons until the Vietnam War was actually, completely over in terms of US involvement.
Thatâs not really what I would call being unafraid to take a bold, controversial anti-war stance. Iâm just saying.
And, sure, once it was over Marvel felt free to tell stories about the war. In 1979, they retconned Rhodey into existence, as a Marine whom Tony met in Vietnam. And in 1986 they introduced Frank Simpson (Nuke), whose entire theme as a character is basically âwhat if the Vietnam War had really, really fucked Captain America up?â And thereâs of course Frank Castle (The Punisher), who, like Tony, has a backstory that was originally tied to Vietnam. Of course, it isnât anymore, either.
So because of the way the Sliding Timescale works, pretty much every character who has a war-related backstory other than World War II has had their backstory reworked several times to incorporate whatever war would make the most sense for them to have been in if the modern comics happened right now. As Iâm sure you know. So both Tony and Frank Castle have had their backstories altered to various places in the Middle East; off the top of my head, I know it was Afghanistan by the time of Extremis, but it may also have been Afghanistan before then. And as far as I know, they also avoided having characters take a stand on that war, either. Nothing is coming to mind, but if anyone else knows something, feel free to chime in.
Currently, both Tony and Frank Castle have their canonical war origin in a completely fictional war in the completely fictional country of âSiancong.â
(For what itâs worth, Marvel has also been known to publish Armed Forces Editions of their comics, and the PR for the Empyre: Captain America miniseries made a big deal out of the fact that the writer was also active-duty military.)
And, yes, Captain America, because of who the character is, does have more of an opportunity to deal with situations that are political but these days he doesnât usually get to go very far beyond, like, âNazis are bad and so is racism and sexism (and sometimes if youâre really lucky, homophobia is also bad).â And if youâll recall, Mark Waid got in trouble for writing an essay for Marvel Comics #1000 in which Captain America described America as âdeeply flawedâ and they had him replace it with a different, less controversial essay, and this was, what, two weeks after they told Art Spiegelman that his introduction for a book of Golden Age comics could not compare Trump to the Red Skull? (Still not really sure why they asked Art Spiegelman to write that introduction at all since I would kind of assume they knew what they were getting with him in particular. But apparently not!)
But anyway, yeah, Marvel Comicsâ attitude toward explicitly putting politics in comics these days seems to lean toward âjust say no.â
