What Captain America Missed Around the World

At one point in the Avengers movie, Captain America is excited to finally recognize one of the pop-culture references people are throwing around: “Flying Monkeys.”

You see, Captain America was trapped in ice at the end of World War 2 and thawed out only recently. When I was a lad, “only recently” meant the early 1960s, which was no longer that recent, but the basic conceit was established.

The new movie series allowed the corporate storytellers to move the date of Cap’s thawing up to the twenty-first century. Chris Evans plays him as a refugee from the 1940s trying to keep up with modern times. He knows the MGM Wizard of Oz but not much since.

The new Captain America: The Winter Soldier movie carries on that theme by showing how Cap keeps a to-look-up list consists of topics he’s missed and needs to look into. These include I Love Lucy, the Moon landing, the Berlin Wall’s rise and fall, and someone named Steve Jobs.

However, As Comics Alliance reported, a Reddit user collected screenshots from different versions of Captain America: The Winter Soldier from around the world, showing that Marvel/Disney tailored the hero’s to-look-up list for different audiences.

For Russian audiences what’s self-evidently important about the last seventy years are Yuri Gagarin, Vladimir Vysotskiy, the USSR breakup, and Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears.

For South Koreans, it’s Dance Dance Revolution, Ji-Sung Park, Old Boy, and the 2002 World Cup in soccer.

For Mexicans, it’s the Chilean miners, Maradona’s “hand of God,” Shakira, and Neri Vela.

And so on. It would make an interesting social-studies lesson for teams to identify what all those variant items are, and why they’re as important to other culture as I Love Lucy is to ours. Every nation has a different perspective on space, it appears, and almost every nation but the US is mad about soccer.

Spotting a Familiar Name

A few months back there were a lot of pictures of Damian Wayne with Death from Neil Gaiman’s Sandman, but I don’t recall having seen this one in my feeds. (Of course, there were a lot.)

This picture comes from Luciano Vecchio, an artist from Argentina. I first saw his work when I was editing the International Wizard of Oz Club’s Oziana fiction magazine, and art director Marcus Mébès recruited him to illustrate some stories. When I contacted him directly a while later, Luciano told me he’d gotten too busy with paying jobs to do more volunteer fan work, and I told him that was the best news an aspiring professional artist could share.

I ran across Luciano’s name in the second collection of comics spun off the Young Justice TV show. He drew a couple of issues of that magazine, as well as cartoon-style comics about the Avengers and Green Lantern. Earlier work includes the Sentinels, about a second-generation superhero team, from Drumfish. Here’s Luciano’s Deviant Art page.

Starting soon, Luciano will be the regular artist on the new Beware the Batman! magazine written by Ivan Cohen, which DC promoted this spring with a free preview comic scripted by Scott Beatty.

Who Would Win in a Debate—Batman or the Avengers?

The hype for the new Avengers movie (especially in the Boston Globe) has gotten so loud that it’s starting to make me forget the Kree-Skrull War. One item stood out: Alyssa Rosenberg’s brief essay at Think Progress:

I’m excited to see an intellectual debate between [The Dark Knight Rises] and The Avengers. Christopher Nolan’s Batman movies have always had an element of monkish sacrifice to them: to be an impactful superhero, Bruce Wayne’s had to surrender his true public image (in the first film, he acts the playboy to disguise his intentions), the love of his life and of the populace, and now, it’s implied, either his life or his physical health. . . .

The Marvel franchise, and The Avengers in particular (without spoiling anything), take the opposite tack. Its superheroes become better individuals more closely drawn to their communities for their experiences as superheroes. . . .

These two movies are going to make serious bank for their studios. But taken together, they’re also a vigorous argument about superheroism.

And the superhero genre is usually, I’d say, an exploration about what it means to be a hero, writ large and acted out while kicking other largely symbolic characters in the face.

The debate that Rosenberg envisions is, we should note, between Marvel’s mightiest team and Batman, not DC’s hero lineup or outlook. One theme of Kurt Busiek and George Pérez’s two-company crossover of the Justice League and the Avengers back in 2003-04 was the Marvel heroes’ surprise and suspicion that the DC team was so comfortable with popular acclaim. In that case the Avengers stood for “monkish sacrifice,” for doing the right thing without expecting praise or popularity. The Justice League was their world’s mightiest law-enforcement organization.

But Batman changes the equation. Since the 1980s the Dark Knight has stood apart from most of his DC Universe colleagues because of his lack of attention to social niceties and preference to work alone (albeit with a large “family” of supporters and protégés). Nolan’s movies give Bruce Wayne two in-the-know father figures (Alfred and Lucius Fox), but no other surviving confidants.

That Batman would fit with several of Marvel’s heroes as Stan Lee, Steve Ditko, Jack Kirby, and colleagues originally conceived of them: the Hulk is an anti-hero, Spider-Man an outsider, and so on. He wouldn’t get the modern Tony Stark, also a billionaire playboy but one who’s told the world that he’s Iron Man.