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AMERICAN ME captain america & the falconIn its most basic definition, any Captain America comic book must be a reaffirmation of our beliefs. It is a feel-good comic book, and a character who allows us to see the very best in ourselves. If I can achieve that, in any measurable sense, then maybe I get to stop being a black writer and get to be a writer again.
"Drink up, me hearties, yo ho." Depp's absolutely fabulous (in every conceivable sense of the phrase) Captain Jack broke every mold of every pirate we've ever seen as Depp pranced about in heavy Cover Girl eyeliner in a dead-on Prince impression (go on, I dare you to screen Purple Rain and Pirates... back to back the guy is doing Prince). With a wink and a pouty bad boy sneer, Depp comes across as the rogue Casanova so ultimately cool that rules of tough movie guy and gender need not apply. He humanizes Jack to a point where he becomes almost sympathetic while maintaining just enough hedonism that he doesn't lose the men in the audience. And he turns a script that in, say, Sylvester Stallone's hands would have been an absolute formulaic bore into an enormous treat. And I'm watching a pirate movie. A pirate movie. Pirates. And it is exactly what a pirate movie should be. Only totally different. Which has what, precisely, to do with CAPTAIN AMERICA & THE FALCON? Not much. I mean, Cap is not going to suddenly start wearing makeup and cracking one-liners. He's an icon that's been around for 60 years. People who buy his book want a certain thing. It'd be false advertising to not provide it. If there is any difference between my Cap and the dozens and hundreds of others fine writers' Cap is mine, like Pirates..., should be, ideally, a bit unexpected. The same yet totally different. At its most basic premise, Captain America & The Falcon is exactly what it sounds like, a mainstream Captain America book, reuniting him with his 1970's sidekick. Only we have the added delight of having to be creative with the Sword of Damocles held overhead as the burden becomes ours to prove we have a right to exist as we compete against The Avengers, The Ultimates and of course the Captain America book itself. Right away our voice has to loudly and clearly proclaim not what is the same about CAF but what makes the book different, and these are things that , like Depp's daffy pirate, are mostly best expressed in execution rather than in describing them. I am tremendously thrilled to be working with Bart Sears on his first post-CrossGen project. A major fan favorite for many years now, Bart has earned his reputation has a top industry talent at DC, Valiant, Marvel and CrossGen with his powerful and dynamic art on more heroes and villains than you can sling a shield at. I'm not sure Bart and I have ever met (though there may likely have been a party or three that we may have been at), and I've got to believe we've passed each other in the hall at some point over the years, but CAF will be our first time through the wringer together. From what I've seen so far, I'm blown away! Not only is Cap the sinewy soldier and major threat he deserves to be, but Bart has gently tweaked Falcon into being more of a hunter, more of a predator. I like the more threatening look because Falcon, as I see him, is certainly a force to be reckoned with and is, in many ways, Cap's equal moreso than just his sidekick. I am very much looking forward to working with Bart and anxious to see what he'll do with the all-out action scenes of the opening issues. There's not a whole lot of ways you can write a guy like Steve Rogers. A World War II era patriot, Rogers is the skinny kid from the Johnny Atlas ads who had sand kicked in his face, who yet had the spunk to volunteer for what he believed would be America's inevitable entry into the European conflict. Rejected by the army, Steve nonetheless volunteered for some Frankensteinian human experimentation out of love for country. This guy is right down the line. You can't Johnny Depp this guy. You can't suddenly change him into a wise acre or suddenly give him some kind of tick to hang your writing on. This is a guy you have to write exactly as who he is, which tends to make a lot of stories about him ultimately resolve into harmonies of the same tune. It's either an anthem you like or one you don't. My blessing, therefore, is more with Falcon. Falcon has had a long history that's added up to almost nothing at all. Like most black Marvel characters he has contributed pretty much nothing to the universe and, if his entire history was erased from The Official Handbook of The Marvel Universe, virtually none of the other entries would require much rewriting. Falcon has historically been a What Do We Do With Him? character, a guy just hanging around waiting for a safe to fall on him. Easily forgotten, Falcon, like most other black Marvel heroes, was an under-powered nuisance more than a colorful leading guy. And, like most other black Marvel heroes (Monica Rambeau being a notable exception, God bless Roger Stern), a great many writers, fans, staffers and yes actual comic book characters saw black first and the hero second. Including myself. I took some convincing to sign onto CAF. After the preemptive and, my opinion, premature cancellation of THE CREW, I had all but decided to hang up comics. This is my 25th year in the business which, for me, means 25 years of trying to break in. 25 years of looking in through the glass and trying to get noticed. At 42, I'm considered an old guy in this business, a kind of senior status I knew was inevitable but I am nonetheless chagrined to find myself here. And, much like my friend Falcon, a great many staffers and fans think "black" first and "writer" second, which I find heartbreaking and horrifying, considering once upon a time I was a writer, not just a black writer.
So I wasn't terribly enthused about associating myself with another minority character. In fact, comics, in general, was becoming a lost cause for me because in addition to being terribly insulting to my efforts to please TPTB, The Crew's cancellation was to me, confirmation that, while no one in the comics biz was literally showing me the door, they were certainly handing me my hat. Marvel Senior Editor Tom Brevoort, certainly a glutton for punishment for steadfastly insisting on (a) hiring actual writers and (b) developing actual comic books, got my attention by saying two words no editor has ever said to me before: Captain America. Not that I wanted to write Captain America all of my life, but that no black man has ever been assigned as a regular Cap writer (or Superman or Batman or a great many other major characters). It would amuse me to write a Cap book and have it be absolutely ordinary in the sense that it delivers exactly what Captain America fans expect. Only these fans would be, especially in this Internet age, keenly aware that the book didn't just have a writer, it had a black writer. But look, it's just as good as when the white guys write him. People expecting America Done Done Us Wrong anti-government propaganda will be sorely disappointed. People expecting a ghetto-ized or villainized Steve Rogers, or Arrogant Cap or Mean Cap or Clueless Cap will be terribly disappointed. The best news I can offer you about my Captain America is it's not materially different from Mark Waid's Captain America or Roger Stern's Captain America or Mark Gruenwald's Captain America or Steve Englehart's Captain America. It's Joe Simon's Captain America. Stan Lee's Captain America. It's Marvel Comics' Captain America, and it would be incredibly wrong to move him radically left or right, or to use him for anti-government propaganda. Captain America is the living embodiment of the American ideal, an ideal that applies to African Americans and Latinos and Asians and everybody else. CAF does not become the soapbox for my annoyance at Marvel's handling of The Crew. Captain America, at the end of the day, makes us feel good about who we are. Not a perfect people, and not a nation bereft of issues. But a great nation nonetheless. In its most basic definition, any Captain America comic book must be a reaffirmation of our beliefs. It is a feel-good comic book, and a character who allows us to see the very best in ourselves. If I can achieve that, in any measurable sense, then maybe I get to stop being a black writer and get to be a writer again.
THE FALCON #1 was my first published comics work, back in 1982. The book was by two newcomers named Jim Owsley and Paul Smith. But, while the staffers passed around Paul's amazing pencil work, the pencil work was unlettered. And the mindset of the day was, if some kid assistant wrote it, how good could it possibly be? So Paul was immediately picked up for other things, and I was ignored, to be here, 22 years later, still looking for that big break and back home again with Sam Wilson. I am terribly concerned about being so closely identified with black characters. It's not that I don't like Sam, but I want to write Tony Stark. I want to write Clark Kent. I want to be a guy, a real guy, a regular guy without any pronouns or adjectives. Blank Guy. Blank Writer. I really had to think about this, and I dragged my feet for weeks and then months as Tom nudged me about deadlines and so forth. Writing Sam, for me, is the easy part. It's the joy part. I know him like he's my cousin Fred, and in the intervening two decades since he was exclusively my character, almost nothing of any consequence has been done with him. Personality-wise, Sam still had none. I'd kind of written him in a subdued Anti-Luke Cage manner, tired as I was of seeing every black character in comics talk in the terribly offensive made-up "jive" of the day (my ears still ring from a Marvel staffer telling me, back in 1980, "You write the worst black dialogue ever," one of a great many racist milestones of being the spook sitting by Marvel's door). Falcon used street dialects when he was talking to the gangs. He'd never talk to the Avengers like that. I had to convince Marvel staffers (in those days) that, the dirty secret is black people can turn that language on and off. I made that point in a THOR Graphic Novel, "Whom The Gods Would Destroy," that Thor can, in fact, turn off the Big God Speech Pattern whenever he wants. It's ridiculous for us to think this is a guy who can rain down lightning and pulverize Thanos but he can't change his speech pattern. Falcon had two specific speech patterns, it all depended on who he was talking to. These days, thanks largely to (no kidding) Queen Latifa and Eminem, white people are more aware of the fact that blacks are not quite as ignorant was we may at times appear to be, and that we are in fact capable of articulating the English language if we choose to. Sam Wilson, a social worker for NYC, had to, by definition, have a masters in social work (MSW). It is unlikely he could have made it through a minimum of six years of college without learning how to speak English and how to communicate with white people. Learning to articulate the English language is, for black Americans, a job skill. It is something many whites never think twice about, but is, for blacks, crucially important that we learn to talk like whites moreso than whites need to learn to talk like blacks. We have to matriculate into the dominant culture if we want to work and, at 17 years old in Marvel's offices, it did not occur to the staffers making fun of how white I was that English was, for me, a kind of second language. That I was already several laps around the track ahead of them because I can function in their world, while they'd be lost and terrified if I dropped them into the local housing projects after midnight-- a place where I was perfectly safe around people I could effortlessly communicate with. Rules I understood. A Vietnamese kid wandering Marvel's halls speaking perfect American English would likely be viewed as an intelligent overachiever, while for a great many years I was dismissed as a disingenuous Oreo. And Falcon, as written by me, was dismissed as such also.
So here we are, Sam and I, back together again. And it's terribly easy. so easy that Sam threatens to upstage Steve, which exposes me to accusations that the "black" writer would, of course, favor Sam to Steve. So Sam gets pushed into the background a little for the opening business. We meet Sam at a place where the fans are accustomed to seeing him-- as Cap's subordinate. As a sidekick who exists in one-dimensional periphery to the book's star. And we evolve him from that into the New Deal, into being Cap's equal. But I can't just tell you Sam is Cap's equal, Sam's got to earn it, on-stage. Sam's got to sell that business. The foundation of the book is the unshakeable friendship between these two men. The friendship is non-negotiable and the trust between them is implicit, despite the rather damming evidence that, in issue #1, The Falcon has violated National Security, and the government has given Cap just 24 hours to bring Falcon in before they go after Falcon with guns blazing. If you use the trust these two men have as a compass, it makes negotiating the many twists and turns of "Two Americas," CAF's inaugural story arc, much easier. In four issues taking place in just over 24 hours, Cap tracks the fugitive Falcon through rural Cuba as a hurricane slams the island, trying to stay one step ahead of government agents and Columbian drug warlords-- all out gunning for Falcon, who has apparently and inexplicably turned against his own government. Cap's faith and trust in his old partner is put to the test as Falcon leads Cap through a dangerous steeplechase, ending in a major firefight in Miami. Using all the training he's received from Cap to stay one step ahead of his old partner, Falcon comes into his own as a worthy adversary for Cap as he manages to evade not only Cap but the good guys and bad guys as well. Complicating matters is a powerful rogue agent, a mysterious new threat developed by the US Navy, who is determined to stop Falcon from revealing classified secrets and who will stop at nothing-- not even Cap's death-- to achieve that objective. It's hard to give out too many plot specifics without ringing bells we don't want prematurely rung, but "Two Americas" is an all-out action story pitting Captain America against his old friend The Falcon, with national security secrets and their very relationship at stake. With the clock running down, these two friends must pass through a crucible of plot twists, political intrigue and lies as both men defend the same principle from opposing perspectives. As a result of decisions The Falcon makes in the "Two Americas" arc, he becomes a wanted man with Federal arrest warrants outstanding. Cap is pressured to bring Falcon in, but because of events in "Two Americas," Cap realizes the Falcon's criminal status is a retaliatory measure against Cap himself, and he refuses to cooperate. The Falcon is given asylum at the Wakandan embassy by The Black Panther, which is where the Falcon's new aerie will be located. Falcon's flying rig and costume will be updated and Falcon will operate as a vigilante, somewhat outside the law (much like Spider-Man in the old days). This process causes The Falcon to emerge from this crucible as much more his own man. Redefined more towards the center, much more of an equal to Cap, with a kind of wily Andre Braugher (Homicide, City of Angels, Hack) arrogance as he evolves into more of a Green Arrow to Cap's Green Lantern. Two men, two Americas, two different approaches and perspectives, two different expressions of the same ideal. Both right. Only, now occasionally in conflict. With major villains and larger-than-life conflicts still to come, Captain America and The Falcon will, in every conceivable sense, be exactly what you expect it to be. Only different. Yo ho ho, kids. Christopher J. Priest |
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The best moment in comics for me, in
those days, was when Editor Denny O'Neil allowed me to reveal
the fact that Luke Cage's street talk was a put-on. In POWER MAN
& IRON FIST #123, Cage attempts to rattle NYPD Detective Tyrone
King's cage a bit, but King remains unfazed, and Luke exits,
annoyed that his "Loud, angry Negro" routine failed. For many
black fans, that line validated us as a thinking people, as a
people capable of being much more than loudmouthed minstrels .
Street guys like Cage, in the real world, are among the most
resourceful and intelligent men you'll ever meet. Much of
everything they do is calculated to evoke a specific response.
It's a 24-7 con job and, while you are dismissing them as
lowlifes and idiots, they are, in fact, playing you. They are
Captain Jack, ultimately the wisest guy in the movie.