Elijah and Azuu

Author notes

#1215 Love/Hate: Pain

Inkmonkey

on March 12, 2007

I'm sure all of you who would actually care about this thing have already heard, but Captain America is dead. I know that doesn't hold much weight in the mainstream comics industry these days (I mean, they brought Bucky back, for God's Sake), but for the moment it seems Marvel intends to keep him dead.

Well, that's not true. To get down to the bare bones of it, Steve Rogers is dead; there's no shortage of potential Captain Americas likely to attempt to fill his shoes (a la "Death of Superman"). A lot of the specifics of his death are a bit stupid, but I like the potential for storytelling his death brings up.

For years Cap's been one of Marvel's lower-rung heroes. Not to say that, continuity-wise, he was a loser, but simply that he didn't sell comics. More than Moon Knight, to be sure, but nothing compared to heavy hitters like Spider-Man or the X-Men. Marvel's whole Civil War ordeal put him back in the spotlight after years of playing the "mentor", in a sense. Being the man on the side that most of fandom sided with, he was sort of the man of the hour.

Which is what surprises me, on a "business" level, about his death. This was a wave Cap could have rode for quite some time. His shelf life had been extended in a very real way, yet Marvel went with a decision normally reserved for characters whose glory is fading; a last ditch effort to drum up sales. That's what really strikes me about this; love it or hate it, I don't think this was a 'business decision' (as, unfortunately, comes up all too often in comics). Fiscally, it seems to make more sense to keep Cap alive, and while his death will sell out for months to come, it's ultimately a short splash in a big sea. It seems someone on staff just thought this was a good idea for the story, and I'm very curious to see where things go from here…