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Ditkirbanko! A cry for a forgotten generation. A review of Captain America: Who Won't Wield the Shield?

Forget Superman and Spider-Man or the X-Men vs. The Teen Titans, the new Marvel/DC crossover event I want to see is Superboy vs. The Forbush Man, the ultimate DC and Marvel fanboys. 

Comics have gotten dark, damn dark, over the past 20 years.  Considering it wasn't too long ago that we had a comic featuring Superboy punching the head off of a Teen Titan, something had to change.  Just think about that for a moment; Superboy punched the head off of another hero.  Do you think that the outside world really cares that it was the "Earth Prime" Superboy who did that?  They couldn't tell the difference between Superboy Prime and Tom Welling if asked.  Both kind of whine a lot.  So Geoff Johns did something kind of subversive; he made Superboy the ultimate fanboy.  Suddenly Superboy was simultaneously the voice of the fanboy in DC comics and Johns mocking that same fanboy.  He was the character you loved to hate because he was the dark mirror of your own soul.

And we all know that anything DC can do, Marvel can do better.

It's taken Marvel a few years but I think Marvel has found their Superboy and his name is The Forbush Man.  That's right, the guy who wore red longjohns and a pot on his head.  It worked for the original DC Red Tornado and it worked for...  No, I'm sorry but a pot on a head as a costume actually never worked.

Captain America: Who Won't Wield the Shield is a book that dares you to try and take it seriously even as it is probably the most purposely outlandish thing Marvel has published this year.   The Forbush Man killing Jason Aaron, who wrote the Forbush Man story: how messed up is that; Aaron performed some kind of sequential art suicide?  Who's going to write Scalped now?  Oh, crap, I just spoiled Who Won't Wield the Shield, didn't I?  Well, at least Brubaker survived and according to this book, he'll be writing a dozen more Marvel books.  I guess you take the good and you take the bad. 

The darkening of Forbush Man is a framing story build around two "undiscovered" classics from the Marvel vaults: Doctor America by Matt Fraction (Forbush Man accurately wonders "What the hell kind of name is that for a man?") and Brendan McCarthy and the Golden Age Deadpool by Stuart Moore and Joe Quinones.  Fraction is doing his best impersonation of 80s Peter Milligan, who with McCarthy created the wonderfully surreal Rogan Gosh.  Doctor America, a mashup of Captain America, Doctor Strange and a wonderfully freaked out 60's/70's culture, is a mad, mad comic, complete with classic Marvel characters chanting "Ditkirbanko" over and over again, trying to channel the spirit of Marvel's golden age to defeat Richard Milhous Manson.  Teamed with Fraction, McCarthy is probably one of the only artists around who can out-Fraction Fraction.  There's probably nothing to crazy, wild or unexpected that McCarthy couldn't make even crazier.  A goat boy sidekick for Doctor America?  You almost get the feeling that that's just all in a day's work for McCarthy.

Ditkirbanko indeed.

In the golden age Deadpool story, Moore and Quinones mash together the golden age Sandaman, Looney Tunes, Nazi spies and French cartoonist Jacque Tardi.  After suffering nerve damage in WWI, Deadpool has to wear a gas mask and ends up totally isolated from the rest of the world, eventually seeing the world as a giant cartoon make up of "crude, bizarre images" like those seen in early Disney cartoons.  That makes him a perfect dupe for fifth columnist spies.  Really, I don't know what this story is anymore than I know what the Fraction/McCarthy story is.  And that's the point, I guess, to show the newly dark Forbush Man the power of the House of Ideas.

No good character ever dies, no matter how many bullets Ed Brubaker may put in his back.  In Jason Aaron's framing sequence, the one where he killed himself without actually killing himself in real life (it all gets so confusing) is the dark mirror of fandom or, at the very least, the Marvel dark mirror of DC's Superboy.  In the Twitter age of fandom, we get the stories and characters we deserve.  I guess Marvel thought we deserved Forbush Man.

And where's Captain America in this book.  I call "foul" on Marvel for is obvious ploy to try and get the money of hard-working and patriotic Captain America fans in a book where Matt Fraction's deliciously subversive Doctor America is the closest thing we get to our World War II legend.  Just disgusting.

Captain America: Who Won't Wield the Shield?
"Marvel Comics Proudly Presents: Forbush Man: Forbush Kills"
Written by: Jason Aaron
Art by: Mirco Pierfederici
Lettered by: Todd Klien

"Doctor America: Occult Operative of Liberty"
Written by: Matt Fraction
Art by: Brendan McCarthy & Howard Hallis
Lettered by: Todd Klein
Edited by: the love of Freedom!

"The Golden Age Deadpool"
Written by: Stuart Moore
Drawn by: "Jaundiced" Joe Quinones
Colored by: Javier Rodriquez
Lettered by: Todd Klein