Hackneyed crap from the House of Gimmickry
One of the motivations for founding Upstream Reviews was the generally dismal state of fiction being pushed by legacy publishers. This is nowhere more evident than in what passes for quality writing at the major comic book houses, particularly Marvel, home of Spider-Man, the X-Men and the Avengers. While movies based on these characters have generated billions over the past decade, the characters' popularity has not translated into comic sales. Marvel makes a fortune on movie rights and merchandising, but flagship comic books like Iron Man and Captain America sell a few tens of thousands of copies per month--around a tenth of their peak sales in the late 1960s. Comic books have become a sort of vestigial organ in the body of the vast Superhero Complex, as inconsequential as the little wings that once sprouted from Captain America's head. One result (and possibly cause) of this cultural and financial irrelevance has been the emphasis on goofy and often politically charged stunts, like when Marvel had the bright idea of turning Captain America into a Nazi. Did this plot twist make sense? No. Was it insulting to long-time readers? Yep. Was it a cynical attempt to get people talking about Captain America comics and provide a momentary boost in sales? Absolutely. And at the publisher which once proudly hailed itself as "The House of Ideas," that's all matters these days.
As if that dumb stunt wasn't enough of an insult to Cap, Marvel has now hired race-baiting grifter Ta-Nehisi Coates to helm the star-spangled Avenger's namesake title. This certainly isn't the first time Coates has written about heroes: for instance, in his memoir Between the World and Me, Coates memorably writes of the police and firefighters who died running into the burning buildings on 9/11:
They were not human to me. Black, white, or whatever, they were menaces of nature; they were the fire, the comet, the storm, which could — with no justification — shatter my body.
His vision of America is equally inspiring: "'White America'", he writes, "is a syndicate arrayed to protect its exclusive power to dominate and control our bodies." Coates's worldview is characterized by anger, racism (his own, very real, racism and the mostly imaginary racism of others), and resentment. He speaks of his "low expectations" of white people, and characterizes the shooting of a black acquaintance by a black police officer in an area governed by black leaders as a consequence of "White America." He favors reparations for slavery, but his own writings suggest that behavior, not history, is the primary cause of poverty among blacks. We're left to conclude that the point of reparations isn't so much to lift some people out of poverty as to punish others. Someone at Marvel apparently read Coates's work and thought, "Here is a person who can get into the head of a man whose entire existence revolves around an unshakable faith in the belief in America as a force for good in the world." Whether or not one agrees with Coates's worldview, one has to admit this is a very odd choice--unless, of course, the point of hiring Coates is not to produce comic books true to the character of Captain America, but rather to provoke controversy and outrage. By the latter metric, the move has been a smashing success.
Coates's ham-fisted effort at updating Captain America involved turning Cap's arch-enemy (and Nazi) the Red Skull into a... (dramatic pause) ... popular Internet blogger. No, I am not making that up. And no, we did not time-travel to 2007, when blogs were still a thing. Ah, but you see, there is a twist: Coates has also modeled his Red Skull on a well-known psychologist who is famous for telling young men to clean their rooms. Nope, still not joking. The Red Skull appears to be taking his cue from Jordan Peterson, author of Twelve Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos. You see, it turns out that when you put the words of a self-help writer into the mouth of a Nazi, HE SOUNDS JUST LIKE A NAZI. It's a dumb gimmick, made dumber by the fact that Peterson's philosophy of freedom and personal responsibility is about as far from Nazism as one can get. Twitter user @nymdok had some fun adding more banal Peterson quotes to images of the Red Skull, and then @haxanvillain gave the Red Skull treatment to some quotes from Coates himself:
I did the same with some Ta-Nehisi Coates quotes: pic.twitter.com/Ww1gYQwqPG
— Häxanäx (Minds: @haxanax) (@haxanvillain) April 7, 2021
The fact is, if you want to find a thinker who galvanizes young men to channel their discontent into resentment against people who look different than they do, Ta-Nehisi Coates fits the bill a lot better than Peterson. Setting aside the politics, though, the point is that this isn't writing meant to inspire or even to provoke important conversations about race or personal responsibility. It's cheap gimmickry intended to provoke outrage by scoring points against a man who has been outspoken against the damage done to society by identity politics. There are no universal themes here, nor any real villainy or heroism. Nobody is going to remember Ta-Nehisi Coates's run on Captain America in twenty years, because this kind of writing doesn't matter in any important way. I'd love to see Marvel stop with this divisive, hackneyed garbage, but I don't see that happening anytime soon. Meanwhile, we at Upstream Reviews will keep doing our best to get the word out about books that have something more to offer.