Star-Spangled Schlemiel.
Captain America: all too human.
6 thoughts on “Star-Spangled Schlemiel”
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A journal by artist and designer John Coulthart.
The Cap wasn’t so popular in America, because he was more of an underdog, founding father type of America-based character, than a dumb, blind flagwaver, at least that is my opinion, and one of the reasons I actually liked him more than a lot of others did, though Hawkeye was better no doubt. He wasn’t at all trusting of the government, and was more concerned with justice (though I am not sure what this word means) than his own prejudiced views of right and wrong. For many today, this behavior would be called unAmerican, but only in the eyes of those same idiots who wear confederate flag capes, refuse to question the hypocrisy of their leaders, yet always call themselves rebels.
I won’t deny that the Cap’s costume was a piece of shit though.
If it’s any consolation, Captain Britain was/is far worse on just about every level!
I haven’t followed comics that much at all recently, and after they killed Psylocke on the X-Men when I was little, I lost all care for what hero characters they offed after that (of all the stupid women on those X-teams, why rub out Psylocke?!) Comics featuring Excalibur, if I am spelling that right, just weren’t around where I lived, though I wish they because they had Nightcrawler for such a long time. As a result, I’ve never even read a line of Britain’s dialogue.
Captain Britain was another muscle-bound lunk in a tight-fitting flag suit. I remember when the first issues appeared and they seemed completely wrong from the outset, American writers trying to do British stuff in the belief that Brit patriotism is somehow the same as American patriotism which it isn’t at all. No one in Britain puts flags outside their houses the way Americans do.
Funny to think of Alan Moore writing some of the stories but he was just starting out so was doing all manner of scripts at the time to pay the rent. Captain America at least had a function as a wartime propaganda tool; Captain Britain had no reason to exist at all apart from being a silly copy of an American institution.
Agreed. I think an individual from any place or walk of life can make a fairly or even very good representation of events unique to another culture or part of the world. In England’s case, when I was in school, the last few historical English pieces I saw seemed to have Indian directors, at least that is what their names most resembled to me.
I have always hated it when an idea started by a few in one part of the world falls under the pen of not a single man of the world from somewhere else but bunch of so-so writers who’ve no insights into the original context.
Have you ever seen an old American film (I can’t remember the title) set in central Asia with John Wayne starring as Genghis Kahn?
That was The Conqueror, notable for being filmed in a part of the Utah desert where atomic testing took place. Many of the cast and crew–Wayne included–suffered from cancer as a result.