....On Captain America, Secret Empire and Nazi Punching.

Y’all. Marvel’s latest event, Secret Empire is good AND bad all at once. I say that because it’s handling a unilaterally stupid and insulting premise very well. I’m not going to elaborate on the “insulting” part of the concept of a designated Nazi punching superhero created by two Jewish men (one of which was an official Nazi puncher himself) being a secret Nazi so….well, I kinda just did, but moving on.

From this point on after the jump, it's spoilers all the way down. If you care about actually reading how this clusterfuck works out in the comics, go ahead and stop here. Otherwise, details after the jump.
First off, Marvel hasn’t done a great job of handling the backlash as far as the press goes. First of all, the level of backpedaling and flip flopping they’ve done trying to convince people that Captain America isn’t a secret Nazi requires a level of athleticism not witnessed yet in modern sports. Then, the fact that Nick Spencer (who is writing a book about a Nazi punching superhero and taking a hard stance against punching real life Nazis simultaneously) is even allowed to have social media while all this is going on counts as an institutional failure all unto itself. I say that anyone on Marvel’s payroll that has even seen him with a phone in his hand and not proceeded to hit him on the head with newspaper like a puppy who shit the carpet should be escorted from the building on sight.

But the real mystery of this series is that this book isn’t going to age well at all. I mean….this book isn’t going to age well within a month of its end, whenever that’s going to be (at this point, Marvel might as well say these events are slated to end “eventually”). I mean, we all know that Captain America is going to be a good guy again...largely because Marvel has spoiled it before it’s even started while basically begging fans to not rage quit them altogether. But that means Marvel has a lot of digging Steve Rogers out of the narrative hole to do. I mean, this isn’t like that episode of Teen Titans where Robin was Deathstroke’s apprentice for an episode, he beat them up once and then turned good again.

I mean….Steve Rogers is an outright monster. He is what Donald Trump thinks he is when he looks in the mirror. He has brainwashed the populace into believing HYDRA is some great liberator that came into power in some non-psyfuckingchotic way. He’s rounding up Inhumans and locking them in internment camps. He’s keeping Sharon Carter hostage as his girlfriend/prisoner or something. He had Rick Jones executed by firing squad. He firebombed the whole of Las Vegas and plunged New York into the ninth level of Hell or some shit. Captain America is a fucking warlord. The last time I remember heroes turning this villainous, Ultimate Reed Richards tried to wipe out the universe because Sue Storm broke up with him because teenagers and Hal Jordan wiped out Coast City because Parallax. Since it’s already been spoiled that things are going to back to the way they were at the end of it, there’s no real way it can be done in a way that people would go for even in the context of comic book logic short of using the Cosmic Cube to do a DC level reset of time.

And this is only the first issue, folks. If Marvel is really sincere in its intent to dig Cap out of this convoluted hole, Secret Empire needs to start digging now.