What would Captain America make of Donald Trump? That’s not as fatuous a question as it might seem. Marvel CEO Ike Perlmutter is getting a place on the President-Elect’s team, and also donated money to his campaign. But what about one of Marvel’s best-known characters? Captain America is an inherently political figure. After all, someone assumed to represent a country could never not be. But Cap is far from the mouthpiece of government-sanctioned conformity many assume.
The cover of Captain America Comics #1 shows Cap punching Hitler. From a twenty-first-century perspective, that image fits neatly into America’s sense of itself in the mid-twentieth century. There’s nothing politically controversial, even strictly political at all, there. Right?
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