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Comics that Shouldn't Happen: Captain America #186

A previous column under the Opinions rubrick dealt with this book once before, but given the nasty taste it leaves in the mouth twenty five years later, I think it deserves a treatment here under "Truly Awful Comics."

We may note one remarkable thing about this particular item: It took some of the best hands in the business to cobble together a thoroughly vile piece that deserves some kind of star on the Comics Walk of Shame.

The Valleys between the Peaks

While Englehart has moments of true greatness he can proudly display on his resume, he has other things as well. His political pieces in Captain America and the Falcon sometimes seared with an acidly self-righteous leftism that suggested that nothing outside of his own (Englehart's) politics truly deserved the title "American."

While not spewing venom at already-discredited politicians (at whom O'Neil and Adams had cast more subtle and ironic barbs in Green Lantern/ Green Arrow not too many years previously) and while not earning his place in some comics Hall of Fame -- and Englehart has done all of these things -- he could occasionally pull a story out of his head that might best have remained in some dark place in his imagination.

Comics readership could have skipped his secret origin of the Falcon, for instance, with great benefit to all involved: benefit to Englehart, who would not, in future times, have to explain away his involvement in such a grotesque misuse of characters; benefit to Frank Robbins, whose eminent career would have remained untainted by his collaboration; and benefit to the Captain America franchise for never having involved itself in such a story.

What, you might asked, to invite this kind of opprobrium from a comics story?

Marvel and the Black Superhero

The sixties found Marvel comics as a dying enterprise that saved itself essentially by pulling itself up on its own bootstraps. Marvel invented an editorial model for superhero comics that still shapes the industry at the turn of the third millenium, created dozens of heroes that still sell comics to a new generation of readers, and introduced things into comics that did not previously ever appear in the medium.

If we take the Black Panther as the first Black Superhero, then Jack Kirby, his creator, deserves credit for first putting such a superhero to a mass audience. The Falcon dates from some three years later, still in the sixties, but fits well conceptually with the original Marvel model for these characters.

Marvel affixed these characters strongly to a communitarian ethos. In the Black Panther's case, the character spent a period in the unlikely but civically proactive role of a schoolteacher (although the notion that an African monarch would leave his throne for this does remain laughable even by the standards of sixties comics realism); and the Falcon began as a big city social worker. In each case, the characters had forward-looking and humane careers that firmly embedded their characters in an ethos that would incline each to heroism.

The DC model of iconic heroes, of virtues poured into colored tights, had not yet become such an object of derision as it seems today, and even the innovative crowd at Marvel recognized that heroes needed a certain amount of heroism to work.

As the first, and therefore most prominent, Black superheroes of their day, these characters stood as models, and the writers who handled them therefore gave them lives away from their masks that seemed worthy of emulation.

The Seventies and Blaxploitation

The street culture "Blaxploitation" movies of the seventies represent a kind of camp today, at the end of the nineties. The combination of extreme clothing (enormous lapels, ridiculously flared pants and sometimes sleeves, wide ties, absurd footwear) and obnoxiously overt hairstyles (a 1' afro really speaks for itself) provide a certain surrealistic humor to picaresque crime dramas about driving exploitative crime away from the Black neighborhoods.

This material did not fit in well with the constructs of Marvel's 1960s but did serve to inspire the Luke Cage Power Man (since stripped of much of his datedness in recent treatments).

No one wants to bear the accusation of obsolescence. Marvel, for its part, made valiant attempts to capitalize on fads of its day, including martial arts characters that enjoyed a limited success that petered out in the 1980s (Shang-Chai and Iron Fist). In a number of ways, Marvel attempted to get more "street" and "urban," and one way it sought to accomplish this involved borrowing elements from the movie culture of Black exploitation films.

The Pimp Suit Incident

I apologize if the cultural digression away from the topic of Captain America and the Falcon has put you to sleep. The background, however, makes what happened in issue #186 a little more explicable.

I lack the inside data to make claims on how far ahead Marvel had planned Jack Kirby's lackluster return to the title in 1976. The evidence that content provides suggests that they intended to remove the Falcon from the title so that it would belong to Captain America alone in time for the Bicentennial, and that Englehart knew this far enough in advance to craft a tale that would allow the Falcon to go out with a bang.

Discussed in the abstract, Englehart's story does not offend in the way it must when one has actually read it. The Falcon originally appeared in the hundred-teens of Captain America during a story line in which the Red Skull had used the Cosmic Cube to switch bodies with Captain America in order better to sow mayhem. To this end, he stranded Captain America, in his body, on a desert island. There, Captain America encountered the similarly stranded Sam Wilson, a hawk-raising social worker from New York. Captain America decided to train and use Sam Wilson as a proxy to help him defeat the Red Skull, and thus between the two of them they created the Falcon persona.

A sense of community and a desire to better the place where he lived so that his neighbors of like kind might enjoy a better life motivated the Falcon. He attacked one set of problems in his social work, and tended to another dressed as the Falcon, in whose role he beset the predatory criminals that seem attracted to the inner city.

So went his career with and without Captain America between 1969 and 1975.

When devising the Falcon's exit from Captain America's book, however, Steve Englehart, who had repeatedly distinguished himself on the title, returned to his origin. Back we went to the Skull's designs on the Cosmic Cube; but we went back even further, to a previously undisclosed criminal past.

As Englehart told it, the Skull had created Sam Wilson as an ace-in- the-hole to use later as a weapon in case his Cube plan failed. At this point, the story tossed aside the original Falcon concept, for, as it turns out, Sam Wilson originally answered to the street handle of "Snap" Wilson, a petty hoodlum chosen for the ironic way in which his history might seem to make a lie of Captain America's liberalism (previous stories had established that Englehart felt Captain America represented only the America that had tried, but failed, to elect McGovern president).

Frank Robbins got to draw this last story. I can only describe his style as "frenzied," because the characters seem about to vibrate off the page; his work enjoyed an undeniable vitality, but also had certain cartoonish forties overtones. The careers of Golden Age cartoonists in the seventies sometimes include peculiar experiments in modern faddishness, such as Joe Simon's sometimes unfortunate dabbling in camp or pop art themes (see Prez).

When depicting the scenes of Falcon's brand new criminal past, therefore, Frank Robbins drew from latter day material, most probably gleaned from Blaxploitation films. "Snap" Wilson therefore appeared in those scenes in a really bad seventies pimp suit. The Falcon had fallen that far from the Marvel model of dignity to the seventies street chic of a Dolomite movie.

Many still refuse to discuss the Pimp Suit Incident, and perhaps we need not dwell on it too much here; but note that the Falcon's exodus followed it in short form.

The Subsequent Obscurity

Where have we seen the Falcon since then? He hung on to a tenuous connection to the Avengers until the late seventies, when a shakeup in lineup, followed by his own stand on principle - he admirably refused membership when government policies made the position open to him based on race rather than merit - caused him to leave the team.

He enjoyed a miniseries in the early eighties and only intermittent appearances here and there since that day. In other words, he has remained on the fringe of the second string since 1975.

Other forces might have kept him away from the comics mainstream, but the damage done by one really grotesque story has to share some of the blame here. Would it have taken eight years to find some venue for the Falcon (the aforementioned miniseries) if Englehart and Robbins had not delivered such a low blow to the character's dignity in his last days in Captain America and the Falcon?

Marvel's editorial side back then may not have completely caught on that not all African Americans live or dress the same way. Some would bravely fight to the death before they would allow anyone to force them into the latest innovation in pimpwear; others would merely snicker at the clothes; and others would view the opportunity to display sartorial eccentricity as something akin to a sacrament.

We could see in Sam Wilson, prior to his destruction, one of the least likely of Marvel's creations to want to dress in one of Antonio Fargas' "Huggy Bear" outfits from Starsky and Hutch. The character did not include the option.

Marvel does not mention this story much any more, and for good reason.