If you’ve met me you know I am a bit of a nerd. The origin story goes back to a little girl who wanted boys to like her but that is a whole other blog. This one is about a return to a time in the medium to when it made statements, comics that is, when it reflected society and what the best of society can or possibly should be.

Since 45 we live in the United States in a place where the systemic racism which made America great is being challenged. I will allow the reader to determine how successful that challenge. It is being challenged though. I am living within the moment history books will describe as…well something. I won’t know because I will likely be dead by the time we fully understand what shift we are in the middle of.

Comics, specifically Marvel Comics has been in the mix so to speak. From very early on the late Stan Lee ran his company with the understanding that in technicolor and in speak boxes you can address what is happening in the world and possibly impact a generation to do differently. Comics have always been political.

There is a loud and wrong group of mostly yt men who want politics out of comics, but they didn’t sing that song when Steve Rogers was punching Nazis in the face. That was acceptable. What is not currently acceptable to them, today, is non Whites demanding to be seen and heard.

MAGA was never about anything other than make yt men comfortable again.

I would like to think that the time of centering yt comfort is gone.

As comics often do, because they are an evolving media, the villainy of the story changes. Nazis aren’t a “thing” anymore, so Captain America isn’t punching them in the face anymore. Yes, for this moment we are going to pretend that ANTIFA wasn’t created from need.

What’s always been true about comics, is you get to tell a story about humanity, and if you are good, then people will question what kind of human they want to be. Do you want to be Steve Rogers or do you want to be John Walker?

I can admit I haven’t read the John Walker stories. While I still have a thing for comics, these days I don’t have the budget, and in the absence of money the time to track them down for free on Al Gore’s Internet. What I’ve been able to discern from podcasts and such is that Walker was elevated to the moniker Captain America after Steve took a break. What I’ve also been able to discern is that Sam Wilson has also been Captain America.

I know this because a few years back the uncomfortable yt men went on a rant that Sam Wilson was #NotMyCaptainAmerica.

Comics.

They reflect the world around you and if you are lucky make you question who you want to be in that world.

It was unfathomable to yt men who recall the glory years of Cap punching Nazis that a Black man could ever be representative of all that is good and wholesome of America. Cap is supposed to be a yt man so I can see myself in that story.

Yet, not once did they ask themselves, because why would they, what do the little [and not so little] Black and Brown little boys see in the character? Captain America is the face of America, holding truth and justice and blue eyes up for the world to see, and value and emulate. Captain America allowed yt men to think they could be like this superhero, with the super soldier serum in his veins. When you give him brown eyes and kinky hair, you sully that image, because of how they’ve always seen non Whites – less than.

Comics reflect the world around you.

I’ve watched every Marvel Studios creation, loved some more than others, cried when Peter Parker turned to dust, cheered when T’Challa was the first one out the blazing orange circle. I am a fan. I am a fan of the story telling. I am a fan of the casting. There is a uniqueness to the Kevin Feige run group that it can capture the essence of the characters from those technicolor pages of my youth, yet tell their story in the world we actually live in. The Falcon and the Winter Soldier is one such story.

It happens post ‘blip’, 5 years after Thanos wiped out half the living creatures in the universe, and Tony Stark snapped them back into existence.

In the non stop action of End Game, in the glory of the final battle scene which was a live action comic splash page, you didn’t take the time to wonder what life was like in those 5 years the Earth was reduced to 3 billion people.

FAWS as a streaming series lets you unpack some of that. It touches on a planet, where suddenly color didn’t matter, money didn’t matter, borders didn’t matter. Humans were humans. Well maybe, or best case scenario hopefully. In the return of the vanished, yt men decided they would return the world to what was, rather than accept what it had become when yt supremacy was defeated by the arbitrary algorithm of the Mad Titan. It was hinted at in WandaVision. The yt man at the head of one of the agencies said you don’t know what we had to endure. FAWS picks it right back up by showing non Whites corralled into camps, so that yt people could have their station back.

If you doubt that allow me to remind you that on January 6, 2021 a mob of mostly yt people tried to do just that, in the insurrection attempt.

Yt insecurity gave us Bernie Sanders and his BernieBros, the 45th President of the United States, and Q-Anon.

The confusion of yt men that they could do all that they were taught to do, and now there was a world where who they were told to be no longer resulted in accolades was too much for Walker, not unlike it was too much for 45 voters:

The symbolism is real.

What was even more real to me was the discussion between the next “Captain America” Sam Wilson and the first Black Super Soldier.

It was the realest representation of Blackness in the United States. It was 48 year old me talking to 21 year old me and goddamn.

It was the Black man who came before, who was the equal of the yt men and penalized for it, talking to the Black man who came up in a different world, in part due to the blood of the men who came before, and reminding that kid the fight is not over. It was the bitterness of a man who was not able to fix the world, infused with the hope of the man who had not yet tried.

Then we went home with Sam, and saw Black community. The community we created due to the community we were denied. It was the awe of a 10 year old Black boy looking up at the shield and thinking for the first time ever…maybe me.

Episode 5 of FAWS is must see TV.

I wonder if the fragility of ytness will see the same things I saw.

Not unlike Sam Wilson I am staring into the suitcase at the armor wondering if I want to put it on.

Stay Tuned