By Ryan Pike
Last March, comic book fans of all ages mourned as Marvel Comics’ famed wartime hero Captain America was assassinated within the pages of Captain America #25. Since then, his eponymous title has published despite not having a title character, prompting speculation that a new Captain America would soon find his way onto the book’s pages.
The series finally saw the debut of a red, white and blue-clad hero in last week’s Captain America #34, but the new Cap has garnered Marvel a bit of criticism–not for replacing a beloved character, but for the weapons he carries.
Days before the new Captain America officially debuted, media across the globe were questioning that the new Cap carries a knife and gun in addition to the shield that Captain America has carried since the 1940s. A Daily Telegraph headline proclaimed “Gun-toting Captain America comes back to life,” while an ABC News photo caption comparing the old and new heroes noted, “The former Captain America wards off danger with his shield. The new Captain America wields a gun.”
Luckily, media-savvy Marvel Comics wasn’t wholly unprepared for the backlash. Much as they did when they killed Captain America, unmasked Spider-Man or disbanded the Avengers, Marvel had their writers speak with the media and reveal the rationale behind Captain America packing heat: he always has.
The debut issue of the original Captain America in Jun. 1941, Captain America Comics #1, featured Captain America punching out Adolf Hitler on the cover. Later covers featured Captain America shoving Nazis into an oven, his sidekick firing a machine gun at enemy troops and Cap throwing grenades at Russian troops. While many of these were blatant wartime propaganda images, they still involved Captain America and friends using the weapons of war.
Issues in the 1980s aimed to sanitize Cap’s history, and the events of the Second World War suddenly became much less gory. When Ed Brubaker began writing the re-launched series in 2005, he returned Cap’s wartime escapades to canon and also revised the role of his teenaged sidekick, Bucky. Instead of traipsing around war zones as a platoon mascot, Brubaker’s Bucky became a knife-wielding scout who dealt with threats covertly while the colourful Captain America acted as a distraction. Most of all, Brubaker established very firmly that Captain America–while marketed as a super-soldier–was at heart a soldier involved in a war. He used guns, knives or grenades along with his trademark shield to fight Nazis in the 1940s,his successor fought against communists in the 1950s and he fought terrorists following 9/11.
The new Captain America–who was the original’s former sidekick Bucky, recently revived by Brubaker as a brainwashed secret Soviet assassin called the Winter Soldier–carries a gun. The old Captain America carried a gun. Since technology allowed them to do so, soldiers worldwide have carried guns in pretty much every military conflict. Police officers carry guns. As long as he also uses his shield and doesn’t just solve problems by shooting at them, there’s no reason why, given history, this Captain America can’t carry a gun. After all, he is American.