Captain America - Agent of what now?

I realized that I haven't written a single blog entry about anything that WASN'T comic book movie related. Guess it's time to change that.

So apparently the new issue, Captain America #1 made the mainstream news due to some controversy. This book was already in my pull list so I was going to read it anyway. After hearing about this, I had to uncharacteristically put it at the top of my list. I just had to read it right away!

Now that I have, all I had to say was, "Meh". I mean, I get the controversy. Spoilers ahead. It is revealed at the end of the issue that Captain America is an agent of Hydra. Not that he just turned, but that he's been a Hydra agent all along.

What the what? Let's just forget the fact that they are ignoring 75 years of history that contradicts this very reveal. Let's also ignore the fact that despite what they say, there has not been subtle clues that lead to this. It came out of left field.

This is a dumb decision by Marvel, but I will tell you why I'm not as enraged as I should be. First and foremost, I feel like I can see the wheels turning behind such a move. You just had a Captain America movie that made hundreds of millions of dollars. The Captain America comics haven't been a big seller, so you want to make a shocking move that gets people talking. Congratulations, Marvel. It worked.

I wish companies would realize that negative attention isn't better than no attention at all. Or maybe I'm just wrong and now a lot of people will pick up this book based on this.

I got a little off my main point. This is comic books. Nothing lasts forever. I give this storyline one year to run it's course. Two years at best. Then it will be revealed that he's a Skrull or that he was brainwashed or they will grab some alternate reality Captain America that was never an agent of Hydra. Some comic book trope will be used to wash this whole thing away in due time.

To all my comic friends out there, hang in there. This will be another terrible decision that you will remember in a few years when a "Top 10 Comic mistakes of all time" click-bait article comes out.