Marvel writer Nick Spencer explains to the fans the reasons why he turns Captain America, Steve Rogers into a supervillain.
“I’m the most hated man in America today,” laughs Nick Spencer on the
release date of Captain America: Steve Rogers #1. “And Donald Trump is
running for president!
*Spoiler Warning!
Spencer's work now became a hotly debating topic. The first episode
of the new Captain America series has revealed Steve Rogers is a secret
agent of Hydra, a extremely shocking twist and earned the writer
accusations of everything from anti-Semitism to soft homophobia (for
giving Steve a dual identity rather than a boyfriend).
Although he didn't expect the objections as well as hashtag
#SayNoToHYDRACap, Spencer really wants to trigger outrage: “When you
decide to do something like this, you understand obviously that people
aren’t gonna throw you a party for it,” he says. “You understand that
this is the kind of story designed to upset people and shock people and
worry people. That’s the response you’re supposed to have to something
like this, when you’re seeing a bad thing.”
At the end of the issue, the first solo of Captain America in
Marvel’s “All-New, All-Different” reboot, we learn that Sarah, Cap's
mother, is taken to the predecessor organization of Hydra in 1926, by a
woman who saved her from her abusive husband.
This relationship has showed it dark side, when Steve, back in the
present day, pushes his sidekick Jack Flag out of an airplane, even
though he knows it means killing Jack. And in the last frame, Steve
turns back, utters those dreaded words: “Hail Hydra.”
Captain America, the symbol of honor, sacrifice and freedom, now has
become one of the most evil villains unexpectedly, which he has hidden
for more than 75 years. Unlike other twists, according to Spencer, this
fact can not be dissolved within the span of one story arc, or in the
next few months.
“This is something that is gonna have a profound effect on the Marvel
universe,” he says. “I’ve seen a lot of people say things like, ‘Oh,
it’ll be wrapped up in the arc,’ or ‘Give it six months.’ And I can tell
you, that’s not the case. This has real lasting repercussions that are
gonna be with us for a while.”
The Daily Beast talked to Spencer about why he had Steve break bad,
how the twist will reconcile with the character’s legacy (and that of
its Jewish creators), and his response to fans’ outrage.
First off, are you OK? A lot of vitriol is going your way online. You're a trending topic!
(Laughs.) No, I love this stuff. I feed off it, it’s totally fine.
It’s looking like it’s gonna be a no. 1 trending topic here in a second.
I’m the most hated man in America today and Donald Trump is running for
president!
I was surprised by the sheer magnitude of the response. I
can’t remember the last time something that happened in comics upset
quite this many people.
When you decide to do something like this, you understand obviously
that people aren't gonna throw you a party for it. You understand that
this is the kind of story designed to upset people and shock people and
worry people. That’s the response you’re supposed to have to something
like this, when you’re seeing a bad thing. So, yeah, this is certainly
the kind of response I expected, but in terms of the magnitude of it and
just how many people are chiming in, that part’s unreal. That surpassed
any expectation that I had.
I think it just comes down to [the fact that] this character,
particularly since the movies, has really exploded in popularity.
Obviously he represents a lot to a lot of people. They’re emotionally
invested, which is good. The worst thing that could have happened today
is people shrugging, or even being reasonable. That would’ve said that
we didn’t stick the landing on it. So this is what we wanted, we just
have even more of it than we imagined.
What sorts of discussion with Marvel went into this? I read
your editor Tom Brevoort said this twist had been in the works ever
since Sam Wilson: Captain America #1.
Yeah, we’ve been holding onto this for about 16 months now, so it’s
been well over a year that we’ve been keeping this under wraps. And that
was a hugely gratifying thing, especially in the last couple of months
as we started work on the issue. There’s an artist drawing it [Jesús
Saiz] and a letterer [Joe Caramagna], and you start to worry because
obviously the book is getting passed through a lot of hands and there’s
something tangible out there that can get leaked. So yeah, I mean all
the credit in the world goes to Tom and everyone at Marvel, they really
went above and beyond to keep a lid on this. They took a lot of special
measures that we’ve never had before—and it worked! We managed to keep
this until it started leaking out last night, which was inevitable
because that’s when the book started arriving at various places. But
yeah, it was a big success. I was really surprised. I thought for sure
it would be ruined.
Was there ever resistance from Marvel to the idea?
It’s a really funny thing, there was not an enormous amount of debate
about the story. We do our creative retreats and this was a major
subject at both of the last two. And honestly, that was a little surreal
for me as well. Everybody seemed really into the idea and really
supportive. I know that I went into the first [retreat] really expecting
to have to fight for it and for there to be pushback, and there was
very little. We had a luxury though, I could lay out the whole story for
them. What everybody got today is obviously just sort of an opening
chapter. I was able to kind of explain the whole thing and put it all
into context. I’m as excited about this story as anything I’ve ever done
in comics. I think we’re onto something here. And certainly in the room
it seemed to go over well and that’s always a really encouraging sign.
Where did this new idea come from and why did a change of this magnitude feel necessary for the series?
It almost happened by chance, really. Rick Remender was the previous
writer on the book and when I took over, he had had some plotlines that
were outstanding. Tom ran through them with me, and one of them was that
Hydra had infiltrated all the various teams and organizations in the
Marvel universe and we were gonna be weeding out the various Hydra
clans. And, to be honest, at the time, I had just gotten the Captain
America assignment and that story really felt like an event. I felt like
it was maybe a little too big for me at that point, and that wasn’t
something they would want me to do.
So I started to kind of drill it down a bit and I started wondering,
what if there’s just one Hydra plant? What if they think they’re looking
for a hundred people and it turns out there’s just one really good one?
And if there’s just one really good Hydra plant, who would that be?
Within a second, I realized that Steve was by far the person who could
do the most damage. He’s the leader of the Avengers, he has a
relationship with the U.S. government, and he works closely with SHIELD.
Not to mention just his status in the Marvel universe—he’s a symbol,
everyone trusts him, everybody looks to him as an authority.
One of the first things most people will probably think is,
“But hasn’t he spent the last 75 years fighting Hydra?” How do you
reconcile the twist with the character’s history?
I can’t say a lot on that front, but what I can say is that that is
not a huge point of concern in the story. That question will be
answered, at least for the most part, in the next issue. That wasn’t
something that we wanted to drag out. We wanted to make that stuff as
clear as we could upfront. So now that we’ve gotten the big surprise,
we’re going to go back and explain some things to you so that you, as a
reader, have a much clearer vantage point. But your vantage point may
differ greatly from the characters in the Marvel universe.
There’s a lot of uproar online about how this storyline
insults the legacies of Captain America’s Jewish creators, Jack Kirby
and Joe Simon.
Look, everybody who’s working on this story loves Captain America. I
know that it may not seem like it today. But this book is edited by Tom
Brevoort, who has been protecting this character’s legacy for a very
long time now. He’s not gonna let me do anything that he thinks is going
to endanger that character’s legacy and how the character is perceived.
It’s always difficult when you’re at this point in a story, because you
don’t just wanna tell people, “Everything’s gonna work out great!”
Because that certainly may not be the case here. But what I think I can
say with confidence is that with this story, our intention and our hope
is that in its own unique way, it reinforces what everybody already
knows about Captain America, which is his power as a symbol and what
that means. We are approaching it from a different angle, but I think it
illuminates the character in a way that we’ve never seen before.
It’s always tough. The eternal divide is the reader wants the
character to succeed, to be happy, to win. Our job is often to put the
characters through things and that can often be mistaken for a lack of
respect or care for the character. It’s just the reality of what draws
people into these stories, whether you realize it or not, and this is
going to be a major test for a lot of characters in the Marvel universe.
The resurgent Hydra that Red Skull is pulling together seems
to share a lot of parallels with Trump's “Make America Great Again”
campaign. It’s xenophobia and anti-political correctness. What went into
forming his recruitment platform?
What I think I can say about this, is one of the later conceptions of
the story was “what if the new Hydra is a blank?” We wanted to kind of
get away from the green and yellow costumes and the doomsday machines
and things like that and really reconnect with what the organization has
at its sort of moral core.
We’ve obviously seen a lot of growth in white supremacist
organizations and extreme nationalist groups in the U.S., certainly over
the last eight years. And so I had to do the ugly research of what’s
drawing folks into those groups. What’s driving recruitment? The Skull
speech is a slightly sanitized version of that stuff. It’s been a little
interesting hearing people say, “Oh, he’s taking political shots.”
We’ve done that kind of thing, where we used a lot of topical language
in stories with varying degrees of sincerity. This was a little
different. I was looking at something else when I came to this. If
people see those things as similar, it’s not my place to say. (Laughs.)
There’s this moment where, through the character of Robbie,
we get an on-the-ground account of how radicalization of disenfranchised
young people works. What did you mean to highlight by outlining
Robbie’s journey from poverty to addiction to Hydra?
Getting back to what I was saying before about what a new Hydra would
look like and getting away from the previous trappings, I wanted to
make them interesting. I wanted us to kind of understand where this
endless supply of bodies that Hydra always has comes from. And why
someone would sign up for the gig. It became pretty clear that that
wasn’t going to be a supervillain screaming at the top of his lungs
about how he was gonna take over the world and everybody was gonna bow
to him. Instead, they would need to see some potential self-interest
gain from working in Hydra. It’s probably a pretty good paycheck because
it’s a dangerous job.
So again, when looking at various hate groups and what drew those
people in, these are the kinds of things you see a lot. A lot of times
they’re recruiting in areas that are economically depressed, they’re
recruiting people who don't have a lot of education or opportunity, who
could gain from employment and having future prospects. We [in the U.S.]
have a lot of people like that. It’s kind of a miracle that we don't
have more of this stuff. So I wanted to bring the camera in close on one
of them and give you an idea of who’s filling these rooms of people
that SHIELD’s fighting against. I think it makes for a stronger dynamic.
It presents SHIELD with some new problems that they’ve never really had
to deal with before.
What should we be reading into Eric Selvig’s expression there at the end? Was he in cahoots with Cap?
I know, he looks a little dark, doesn't he? He looks a little creepy.
(Laughs.) That’s a good observation. Good thing to keep in your back
pocket for future issues.
Have you been watching the #GiveCaptainAmericaABoyfriend campaign unfold?
Yeah. I think the only thing I can say there is it speaks to people’s
passion for the character. Which probably isn’t much of an answer, but
people strongly identify with these characters, they’re strongly
invested in these characters’ lives, and I think that this is a
reflection of that energy.
What can we expect from the story going forward?
I would tell everybody to take the solicits and stuff that are out
there with a real grain of salt. (Laughs.) We had to embellish somewhat
so that nobody would get suspicious. What I think I can say to folks
that might help them visualize where the story is going is that this is
not so much a story about what has come before as it is about what comes
next. The story is not Steve’s past, it’s Steve’s future.
So we’ve established that Captain America is Hydra. That is a huge
moment in the Marvel universe, regardless of when it came to be or how
it came to be. What that means in terms of the doors that are open to
Steve, what he can do, and what he chooses to do with that power is what
remains to be seen. But the thing that I can say is it’s a huge story I
really can’t believe that they’re letting me do.
This is something that is gonna have a profound effect on the Marvel
universe. I’ve seen a lot of people say things like, “Oh, it’ll be
wrapped up in the arc,” or “Give it six months.” And I can tell you,
that’s not the case. This has real lasting repercussions that are gonna
be with us for a while.
#
Captain America#
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