Rading Captain America

Firstly, I'm glad we've gotten the rampant ivory tower rhetoric of homoeroticism between superheroes and their sidekicks.

Now, I'll address this issue as we move further into our negotiation with comics, but on the subject of bucky, regarding Captain America's visual representation when I discuss McCloud. Here we see McCloud's argument regarding iconographic representation in the cartoon style in practice, with an adolescent target audience, given the level of abstraction involved with depicting Captain America and Bucky's "Cartooniness" level. (now a part of deconstructionist theory might say that we've begun to have a wildly divergent system of representation if we were to take a control group of "general" comics today as opposed to the WW2 era-Golden age control group, but this is another discussion for another response).

Now McCloud gives us the basis of understanding in order to see how the Superhero-Sidekick dynamic might be effective in our examination of Gender given the particular context of the time Captain America and other comic book heroes were interwoven into the greater American narrative. (Now, I've confirmed that Joe Simon and Jack Kirby did indeed create Captain America in the 1940s) One this issue of fatherhood, we can easily see how a paternal narrative quickly becomes part of the overall militarization of society; Steve Rogers becomes an instrument of the military after all, and as we've discussed, in taking Bucky under his wing, the Captain America comics succeed in popularity perhaps due to how the comics addresses some basic wartime anxieties: the absence of a "proper" father figure in a challenged parternal system, which migh include his esmaculation, depending on his earning position/draft status in which by merit of being an American, the potential for strength is a part of the mythos (Steve Rogers was originally feeble) or deployment overseas in which case the abjection of the stable paternal system in wartime is shored up and reinforced, and thus filling a symbolic gap. Indeed, young boys become a part of the war effort in their own way, as a result.

Following Captain America's success, Joe SImon also took part in the creation of similiar comics such as the Newsboys Legion, and The Boy Commandos, with a similar narrative bent. On the other hand, however it might be interesting to note that in the inter-war period, such an unquestioningly partiotic appraisal of the American mythos did not continue as a strain in his work, as he would later revert to pulps that would capture the repressed imaginations of Americans living in the shadow of that American Golem. As Faulkner said during his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, the quesion "when will I be blown up?" does seem to drive us into writing "not of the heart but of the glands".

Now, on the racial/ethnic dimension I'll try to touch on very briefly; a snap assesment seems to tell me that the readership might primarily be urban, by merit of the geographic availability of comics, and thus potentially ethnicly defined in subordinate terms within the context of the period. This makes the "American creation myth" useful when negotiating the masculinity narrative as it presents itself in American comics. Furthermore, it is important to note the Jack Kirby is himself a kind of creation/recreation based on these social pressure, if we examine him through an ethosocial lens he is by definition a jew, with the birthname of Jacob Kurtzman.

I'm beginning to think it might be difficult to ignore this Jewish dimension. Is the Red skull perhaps representative of the paralell, and divergent trajectories of the Golem myth? Another question for another course.