The general reaction to Captain America #6, from a quick look around, seems to have been middling.  I disagree.  I think the book is vomitously awful, for the reasons that I shall enumerate.

Regular readers may recall that back in April, I reviewed issue #2 of this series, and expressed concerns that the storyline seemed to be barking up the wrong tree.  Now that this terrorism storyline is completed, I feel comfortable in concluding that the entire plot is thoroughly loathsome.  Before proceeding with a vitriolic assault on the entire thing, however, I should make the following disclaimers.

The first issue of this series came out back at the end of April.  This issue should have been out in September and is now crawling out two and a half months late.  Neither writer John Ney Reiber nor artist John Cassaday has a particularly poor track record for punctuality.  Cassaday is the artist on the glacially slow Planetary, but this seems to be largely a problem in obtaining scripts.  It is unclear how the book managed to end up so very late.  It has been suggested to me that this is circumstantial evidence of a problematic rewrite.  That may be so.  I venture no opinion.

Secondly, so dire is this comic, and so ridiculous are its mock-propaganda covers, that I have given serious consideration to the possibility that it might in fact be a deadpan parody of American self-righteousness and racism.  Nobody else seems to read it that way, nor is there really any evidence to support it besides the staggeringly low level of insight displayed by the plot and the utterly absurd covers.  Really, it boils down to the fact that I can't quite believe creators would willingly put their name to this nonsense and actually mean it.  I am probably just being overly generous by allowing for this possibility.

Those two points out of the way, and acknowledging that the art is very nice, I turn to consider the reasons why I hate this book so very much, and why you should feel likewise.

Before we look at the political subtext, let's consider the comic from a purely technical perspective.  If you haven't been reading this series, then here's the plot: in the first story arc, the evil terrorist Faysal al-Tariq (whose place of origin is apparently a mystery, since "Faysal al-Tariq" is such a common name worldwide) attacked the middle American town of Centerville and took a load of god-fearing white people hostage.  In defeating al-Tariq, Captain America discovered that the terrorists had advanced technology which they shouldn't have.  In this storyline, he heads to Dresden, where the tags are manufactured.  There he immediately comes under attack from al-Tariq.

Cue big showdown this issue, in which Captain America is all awfully heroic, al-Tariq is desperately villainous, they argue about politics for a bit, and our hero wins, while the narrator gives us what is presumably supposed to be an inspirational speech.  "We can stem the tide of blood.  Defend the dream.  We, the people -- we all have the freedom and the power to fight, for peace."

Isn't that lovely?

A notable problem with this series is its stunningly awful use of imagery.  The hostages in the first arc were middle Ameicans, so they get to live in a town called "Centerville."  But that's not all.  To distinguish themselves from the (not explicitly stated but obviously drawn as) Muslim terrorists, the victims are hijacked IN A CHURCH.  Because they're Christians, you see.  God, it's subtle.

This starts to look almost subtle compared to the scene in issue #4 where our hero rides around on his motorbike under a series of July 4 firework displays while assorted American citizens gawp at him and comment about what a great bloke he is.

In this issue, al-Tariq is drawn as a man dressed entirely in black with a badly scarred face.  Because he's a villain, you see.  Christ, even Dan Jurgens was subtler than this.

Al-Tariq is a cartoon villain.  Captain America is a one-dimensional hero.  And they fight, because the villain is bad, and wants to hurt people, but the hero is good.  There, in a nutshell, you have the content of this storyline.  Oh, and somewhere in there Cap abandons his secret identity, but since he never interacts with the public and has no private life or supporting cast, it has no dramatic consequences at all, and therefore might as well not have happened.

What we have here is a middling-to-dreary storyline from the Dan Jurgens period, only slowed down to half speed, and passed off as art on the basis that it's "decompressed storytelling."  If this is decompressed storytelling then it has contracted a nasty case of the bends.  In reality, this is painfully slow storytelling of a vacuously generic Silver Age plot where a cartoon villain does something nasty and a nice shiny hero stops him.  When you do such a story slowly, you don't miraculously turn it into art.  You just expose its innate silliness by asking the audience to take it seriously.  Moreover, you make it really, really dull.

This makes the series mediocre.  What makes it actively appalling?

As is well known, this first arc was inserted at a late stage in development of the series, as a response to September 11.  I think it can be said without too much controversy that we already have more than enough responses to September 11.  We only need a new one if it has something more to say.  And yes, this arc does seem to aspire to political content.  It has something to say about what sort of person becomes a terrorist, and what sort of values enable America to fight them.

Let's examine what it has to say.  After all, the centrepiece of this issue is supposed to be the debate between Captain America and al-Tariq.  On the merits of this, everything turns.

Al-Tariq spends much of the issue droning on about "what made me what I am."  The idea seems to be to give him a generic origin that could apply to people from any number of countries which have been affected by US foreign policy, hence his challenge to Captain America to identify where he's from.

"Guerrillas gunned my father down while he was at work in the fields - with American bullets, American weapons.  My father didn't know that the Cold War was at its height.  Remember?  When the Soviets were your great enemy?  The evil empire?  My mother didn't know that our nation was in the throes of an undeclared civil war between your allies and the allies of evil -- when she ran to find her husband.  My mother was interrogated and shot.  Our home was burned..."

And so on.  Basically he's an indirect victim of American foreign policy.  And so... he hates America.

Uh-huh.  Here's where we go off the rails.  Al-Tariq is portrayed as having no positive agenda whatsoever.  He simply hates America.  And who can blame him, you may say.  A valid point being raised, surely.  Well, apparently not, according to Captain America, but we'll come back to that.

Al-Tariq is presented, quite openly, as representing terrorism.  But the comparison is completely invalid.  Terrorist movements have positive goals.  Even al-Qaeda has a positive agenda - they want the world to live according to a strict interpretation of Islamic law.  They may well hate the USA, but this is ultimately incidental to their primary agenda.  They attack the USA not because they hate it but because it is an obstacle to their core purpose.  Whether you agree with their agenda or not is immaterial - the key to understanding terrorists is that their attitude is "The end justifies the means."  They believe, rightly or wrongly, that no better option is available to pursue their agenda and that the moral power of their position is such as to justify the loss of life involved in terrorism.

By denying al-Tariq any wider agenda than the mere destruction of American lives for the sake of doing so, Reiber not only denies him the possibility of putting forward any coherent explanation for his actions, but completely invalidates him as any kind of analogy for terrorism.  He is, instead, a boring nihilist, a comforting vision of unequivocal evil, with an unhappy past put forward as a token attempt to pretend he is something more than a cartoon villain.

It is comforting, but intellectually dishonest, to think of terrorists in this way.  It tells us nothing of value about their motivations, or about the ethical questions raised - a nation founded on an armed war of independence has to concede, at least in principle, the possibility of justified political violence.  The issue is where you draw the line, which in turn leads to the uncomfortable question of what exactly the USA might have done that might, just possibly, justify such actions, or at least lead to them being seen by sane people as justified, however wrongly.

By continuing to think of terrorists as pantomime villains, it is possible to avoid thinking about any of this.  This is a story which dodges the issues entirely, on the pretext of meeting them head-on.  It wheels out a straw man argument, passes it off as the reality of terrorism, and bleats that it has achieved a balanced presentation of issues.  This annoys me.

But still, what does Captain America have to offer in response to this caricature of evil?  In Africa, Asia, South America, says al-Tariq, "my people died."  (That's one hell of a lot of people.)  "And your people--"  Cap cuts him off here, to deliver the following jawdropping response.

"My people never knew."

Apparently the US public were completely ignorant of any civilians being hurt by their foreign policy during the entirety of the Cold War.  This is a fascinating proposition.  It would be interesting to know, for example, just who comprised the US army that raped and burned its away across Vietnam, if not American conscripts.  Perhaps on planet Reiber, these atrocities were committed by a parallel army of bootleg Canadians.

It gets better.

"We've changed.  We've learned."

Yup.  No civilian casualties in Afghanistan, or Iraq.  God bless America, with its perfectly accurate smart bombs.  In fact, now the Cold War is over, America doesn't do anything wrong at all!  Isn't life great?

Now, really, this is the bit where it gets actively offensive.  Of course America's track record isn't perfect - nobody's is.  Perfectly rational arguments could be advanced that America has indeed improved somewhat, that the country is no worse than many and better than most when it comes to these things, and that many civilian casualties were objectively and pragmatically justifiable for the greater good.

But these are not clear-cut arguments, so instead we get outright lies.  Life is cheap.  Indeed, if it isn't American, life apparently doesn't count at all.  However you died, this comic has an excuse for why the Americans don't have to accept responsibility for their actions.

It is the vile, wheedling, bleating, hypocritical, self-righteous lies and sophistry of this passage that, for me, topples the book over the edge from merely bad, dull and pretentious into actively nauseating and hateful.

For christ's sake, the central argument of this issue fancies itself as a comparison between the moral values of Al-Qaeda and the USA.  Even without turning Al-Qaeda into one-dimensional cartoons or airbrushing American history, it would scarcely be a challenge to bring the USA out on top in this argument.  But the suggestion that the other side might have a point, or that the USA could be remotely flawed, is inadmissible in this comic.  Repellently, a flimsy facsimile of a counter-argument is put forward so that it can be brushed aside, under pretext of showing the opposite side of the argument.  That's your counter-argument, get back to waving your flags.

I didn't like this sort of jingoistic drivel when Dan Jurgens did it, but at least he had no pretensions of high intellectual and artistic achievement.  This book likes to pass itself off as having both when it has neither.  It is a despicable piece of question-dodging, comfort food dressed up as insight, tired old propaganda posing as art.

Precisely the last thing the USA needs.

Rating: D-

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