holding comics accountable
or why i won't be seeing captain america: brave new world
From the first published comic pages, political messaging has never been subtle. Arguably one of the most famous comic book pages is the title page of Captain America #1, the punch in the Nazi face heard around the world.
Social and political issues have always had a place in comics, and I wouldn’t say the messages were always clear or even aged well. But writers saw a space to discuss and make their readers think, and they used it.
That said, as comics got a larger base and people realized that the country was listening, it became… murkier. I will be the first to admit that superhero comics have warped, and usually lean heavily in favor of the American government and their vested interests in other countries.
So, enter Sabra, a member of the Israeli secret service.
Her costume is the Israeli flag, later changed in the early 2000s to a black and white costume.
First introduced in 1981, a year later a devastating massacre by the same name would occur in Lebanon, the direct result of the Israeli Defense Forces.
Marvel did not change the name of the character.
She only had 51 total appearances.
This character was obscure and could have gone the way of countless other insensitive creations. Instead, the character is set to debut in Captain America: Brave New World. And let’s not forget that that’s not even the original title of the film, originally called New World Order, which is an antisemitic conspiracy theory.
As someone who has loved comic books since I was a kid, and especially many from both Marvel and DC, talking about this isn’t easy. But not because I don’t see how wrong the addition of this character to the Captain America film franchise will be. It isn’t easy, because I read and watched all these stories as a kid, and I thought characters I loved were for everyone.
But knowing something I love is being used to propagate dangerous rhetoric for a government hell-bent on the extermination of a people makes it simple.
I personally believe that if these companies can publicly admit that they made mistakes in the past with other characters of color and storylines, they can apologize for the harm done with this character.
Even in her portrayals one can get the sense that from writer to writer, they didn’t… really know what to do with her. She was just a mouthpiece. In her first appearance, the Hulk blames her for the death of a Palestinian boy and for one brief moment she sees that boy as a human being.
I think what’s most chilling about that, and much of the history I have read over the years regarding the treatment of Palestinians by the Israeli government, is that it could have been any time in the last two and half months or the last 70 plus years.
Now, this character is going to be put into the public eye. As much as I love comic books and graphic novels, they simply do not get the exposure to the mainstream media the way the films and television series do. Millions of people who have never heard of this character or her fraught history are going to be introduced to her.
And since Marvel Studios has decided to “revamp” her to be a CIA agent instead of a member of the Israeli secret service, I can’t help but ask: why? Do they really want to rehabilitate the image of a character most associated with a state currently killing hundreds of people a day?
Why not use any number of other characters that served in S.H.I.E.LD. or the CIA or the FBI? Marvel Comics has multiple fictional government agencies in their own source material, and yet the film studio has decided to include this character.
What’s worse, they have made this decision thinking it will have no big financial impact on them. They decided they would rather risk alienating what they think are a few people than taking this character out of the project altogether.
Fans have power, because we have our wallets. And while Disney itself is not on the boycott list, targeted pressure is encouraged by the BDS movement. Specific pressure on the films, the only thing they really keep the comics around for, would have an impact. Personally, I will not be giving Marvel any of my money until they publicly announce this character will no longer be appearing in the film.
I will admit, I wanted to do a deeper dive and read more appearances of this character, maybe foolishly to try to do a deep analytical analysis of what they were trying to say when they created this character. But there is nothing deeper in a character rooted in hate and fear.
And to be clear as I write these words, I am against the Israeli occupation. I am against the continued slaughter of hundreds of thousands of people daily. Every day I wake up and I see some new horror in a photo or a video. I can hold that truth, and have the knowledge that it is increasingly more dangerous to be Jewish in this world as well.
People always ask those big hypothetical questions of what you would do if you lived through a major crisis or devastation or catastrophe. Well, we are living through one. The people of Gaza are not all members of anything, they are humans. Being killed for simply being Palestinian. Speak up, don’t stop talking about these terrible things we see every day. Because while we are only seeing them through a hand-held screen, this is the reality for almost two million people.
Be better than your fictional heroes, be a real ones.