Chip Zdarsky is someone who doesn’t understand what’s wrong with the comic book industry, but Marvel Comics has brought him back into the fold after a failed run on Batman to helm Captain America in the latest reboot.
Marvel Comics doesn’t seem to know what to do with Captain America. The character stands for everything the Disney-owned company doesn’t support—classic Americana, conservatism, and the values of freedom.
The first big problem Marvel Comics faced with backlash for Captain America came in the mid-2010s, when in an event in a book called Captain America: Steve Rogers #, they showed the character saying “Hail Hydra,” which is Marvel-speak for “Heil Hitler.”
At the same time, they launched “All-New Captain America,” with Sam Wilson, aka The Falcon, taking the mantle under Rick Remender, a man famous for telling Trump supporters not to buy his comics. This iteration was eventually the template for changing the character in the movies.
It created an uproar among fans who hated seeing Steve Rogers treated this way, and it was clear that Marvel and HydraCap writer Nick Spencer wanted to make a commentary on conservative America that they were “actual Nazis” by pulling such a stunt.
It got no better for Cap writers, as they gave the character to race-baiter and anti-white activist, Ta-Nahesi Coates, for a run they kept him on for thirty issues despite lackluster sales.
In 2023, they tried a reboot again with J. Michael Straczynski returning to Marvel Comics for the first time in years, and it was clear the Babylon 5 creator didn’t know what to do with a patriotic superhero. The first arc had plenty of anti-Trump insinuations, but he eventually took the character to go off and fight some faerie war that didn’t play thematically with the character at all. He lasted only 16 issues before this most recent reboot.
Meanwhile, Chip Zdarsky has been writing a Batman run that flopped at DC Comics. With one of the only characters that sells, one would think it would be easy to do simple detective stories, but it was something Zdarsky couldn’t manage.
His run spun out of Batman: The Knight, a mini-series in Zdarsky that implied Bruce Wayne was bisexual, upsetting fans in the process, much like has been done with Captain America.
Zdarsky has been another vocal leftist in the industry who has rallied against fan outcries against wokeism while inserting such content into his books, much like the rest of the mainstream industry.
Now, Marvel’s tapped Zdarsky to reboot the character again, showing that they’ve learned nothing over the years and are going back to the same well of the same pool of creators with yet another “collector’s item” #1 issue that will surely fade in sales a few issues in.
Why has Marvel Comics not tried actually to have a conservative or patriot write Captain America? That’s a question for the fans to decide. Leave a comment and let us know.
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Alphabet propagandists like this Zdarsky guy can't help themselves and will ruin any character they have in their story.