Category: Character
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Wow, people haven't been this angry about a Captain America book since he was killed in 2007. And understandably so, because in today's Captain America: Steve Rogers #1, something even worse happens to the Sentinel of Liberty: he is revealed at the end of the comic to be a Hydra agent, and apparently has been…
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I clearly remember seeing the internet headlines on a Wednesday morning several weeks ago when the first issue of Nick Spencer and Daniel Acuña's Captain America: Sam Wilson was published, screaming about "Captain Socialism," which were joined later that day (naturally) by Fox News. The irony, of course, was that the alarm was completely unfounded,…
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Marvel's current crossover event, AXIS, involves various characters having their ethical orientation "inverted": heroes become villians and vice versa. A deceptively simple premise that has been used throughout the history of superhero comics—but rarely on this scale—it has potential for interesting stories (as well as culminating in "things will never be the same" changes to…
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Well, it's time to let the Cap out of the bag… I'm very pleased to announce my next book, The Virtues of Captain America: Modern-Day Lessons on Character from a World War II Superhero, which will be published by Wiley-Blackwell next March ahead of the film sequel Captain America 2: The Winter Soldier. (If you're…
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As Zap2It reported early this morning, part of Grant Morrison's sprawling DC Comics series Multiversity will tell the story of a stranger from another planet landing in Nazi Germany rather than Smallville, Kansas: "Imagine you're Superman and for the first 25 [years] of your life you were working for Hitler," Morrison says, "And then you…
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As you might have heard by now, in today's Ultimate Comics: Ultimates #15, Captain America is elected president of the United States in a special election. (He takes the oath in #16, shown to the right.) America is the real world may be divided ideologically, but the Ultimate version is divided physically, with various grouping of states…
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Inspired by my friend Colin Smith's post on his blog, Too Busy Thinking about My Comics, regarding our friendly neighborhood Spider-Man's questionable actions in Amazing Spider-Man #685, and then further spurred on by a vigorous debate with Spidey editor Stephen Wacker on Twitter this morning (joined by Colin and several other stalwart discussants), I need…
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In the back-up feature to last week's Detective Comics #8, written by Tony S. Daniel and illsutrated by Szymon Kudranski, Harvey Dent, aka Two-Face, appropriately adopts both sides of the recent philosophical and psychological debate over character traits. First, Harvey shows us the situationist position: Situationists such as John M. Doris, author of Lack of Character: Personality…
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I hadn't planned to write any more about the DC relaunch–every month I drop a couple more titles, and I fear it won't be long before I'm buying little more than the Batman and Green Lantern families of books. (Even Earth 2 is sounding more like a new Tangent Earth: the names are the same…
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Mark D. White In this morning's The Stone column in The New York Times, UNC visiting professor Iskra Fileva offers "Character and Its Discontents," in which she writes eloquently on the nature of character in response to the situationist critiques of Gilbert Harman and John Doris. Her article doesn't lend itself well to quotes–it really…
Mark D. White 