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The Patron Saint of Superheroes

“Chris Gavaler Explores the Multiverse of Comics, Pop Culture, and Politics”

February 26, 2024 Look Black in Anger: 1999 Marvel Retcons 1971 White Supremacy

Late 90s Marvel continuity is the most chaotic of its eight-decade history.

Marvel Entertainment Group filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 1996, which ended when Toy Biz purchased and reformed the corporation as Marvel Enterprises in 1997. During the interim period, Marvel under editor-in-chief Bob Harras outsourced some of its longest-standing characters to other companies and published them under the “Heroes Reborn” banner, later retconning the events as taking place in a pocket universe. According to central Marvel continuity, the primary characters were always the same individuals, despite their not remembering their prior existence until returned to Marvel’s in-house titles the following year (though the numbering of previous titles would never recover).

Some characters, however, were newly created within the pocket universe. James Robinson and Joe Bennett, for example, introduced an alternate version of Sons of the Serpent in Captain America #8-11 (June-September 1997). As some readers may recall, I’ve been obsessively tracking the white supremacist organization’s every appearance in Marvel — which now extends to the multiverse. The newly recreated Marvel corporation created other alternate universes too. A-Next featured an alternate-world version of the Avengers, with an alternate “Soldiers of the Serpent” in #4 (January 1999) and #9 (June 1999).

The new Marvel also reexplored its previous history. Between the two Soldiers of the Serpent A-Next issues, the original Sons of the Serpent appeared in Marvel’s renewed central continuity in the new flashback-focused Captain America: Sentinel of Liberty. Issues #8 and #9 (April-May 1999) were written by Mark Waid and penciled by Cully Hamner and Doug Braithwaite.

The story stands apart as the only one to retcon a Sons of the Serpent story into prior Marvel history, roughly one year after their second appearance in 1970. Since Steve Rogers is employed during the day as a New York police officer and Sam Wilson wears his original green Falcon costume, the episode is set in the summer of 1971, presumably between Captain America and the Falcon #139 (July 1971), when Rogers becomes an officer, and #144 (December 1971), which features Falcon’s new red and white costume.

The timelines don’t match up neatly though. Issue #143 concludes with Falcon and Leila, whom Rogers calls the “militant girl,” kissing for the first time. But Waid’s retconned Falcon calls Leila “my lady,” which presumably should take place sometime after their first kiss.

Yet #144 continues from the same moment, with Falcon next revealing his new costume and ending his partnership with Captain America to focus on his role as a Black superhero fighting specifically for Black people.

In the subsequent #145-148 story arc, Gary Friedrich scripts Falcon’s temporary refusal to leave Harlem and help Captain America in another city. SHIELD leader Nick Fury argues: “I’m fightin’ for the whole country — not just one group of citizens!” and Falcon responds: “Maybe that’s because you’re White, Colonel — and don’t understand how it feels to be on the other side of the color line!” Leila would have been Wilson’s “lady” during this period, not earlier, which contradicts both Falcon’s costume change and Roger’s temporary police job.

I assume Bob Harras had way bigger problems getting Marvel back on its feet to notice let alone care about minor continuity glitches. Waid, who was nine years old in 1971, seems more focused on portraying the period’s politics as seen through Marvel of that time.

Stan Lee and Gary Friedrich’s 1971 scripts focused on racial tensions and the threat of riots—instigated in this case by a masked leader with a Black Power fist on his chest who declares in the chapter “Burn, Whitey, Burn!”: “Brothers, this is the night we’ve been waiting for […] Now is the time to hit the honkies where they live […]!” The leader is soon revealed to be the Red Skull. Lee and Friedrich also portray Leila as disliking Rogers “‘cause you’re White! And you’re the Fuzz!” and calling Wilson “a bigger Uncle Tom than ever” when he insists “revolution isn’t the answer.”

Waid picks up on all of that.

His script features Falcon as narrator looking back an unspecified numbers of years: “Race relations were at an all-time low in NYC that hot June […] We’d been busy all week busting terrorists of all sorts […] Weirdly enough, all our attackers had only one thing in common. There wasn’t a WASP in the bunch.”

The avoidance of a specific year reflects the continuity-challenging narrative effect of superhero characters not aging in sync with a real-world timeline. Though Falcon speaks from 1999, the 1971 events do not feature a Falcon understood to be twenty-eight years younger. More significantly, since Waid makes no reference to the influence of the disguised Red Skull, and penciler Cully Hamner draws Captain America and Falcon preventing an assassination attempt on White mayoral candidate “Hoch” (presumably a variation on Ed Koch, though six years too early) by Black gunman, the story establishes Black men as criminally violent. However, when Falcons points out that “the last eight or nine guys we’ve bagged” are “all Black,” Captain America insists he “hadn’t noticed,” which Falcon believes because: “The only colors he saw were red, white, and blue.” That evocation of Colorblindness-as-patriotism closes the narrative concern.

Waid also evokes Thomas’ 1970 Sons of the Serpent co-leader Dan Dunn (based then on real-world William F. Buckley), now the fictional Carl McDonald, a TV host whom Hamner draws to resemble Dick Cavett. McDonald interviews John Mason, “leader of the White supremacist group formerly known as the Sons of the Serpent,” renamed Sons of the Shield to associate themselves with Captain America because Captain America shows “the people how a White American is a strong American.”

Despite the indirect reference to the 1970 story, in which Sons of the Serpent was a known terrorist organization wanted for the bombing of an office building, Mason is apparently not wanted by law enforcement, and his Sons march openly on streets — though Braithwaite draws them in streets clothes with their new White supremacist shield logo rather than Heck’s and Buscema’s masked Serpent uniforms.

Waid also continues the trope of a non-White character leading or aiding the White supremacist organization. Ajanii Jackson, a Black businessman working for Mason, plants a bomb in the First Baptist Church to cause a riot in an elaborate plot to stage Captain America’s death, making him a martyr to the White supremacist cause, while actually kidnapping him and controlling his mind to train white supremacist soldiers.

Waid appears to be referencing the 1963 bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. The FBI reopened its cases against two primary suspects in 1997, the same year Spike Lee released 4 Little Girls, a documentary about the bombing.

Hamner draws Jackson seated in a church pew surrounded by ten figures, whom Matt Hicks colors Black, implying a congregation at least four times larger. Hamner draws a silhouetted figure caught in the explosion when Jackson detonates the bomb once at a safe distance, and the legs of a victim wearing torn pink stockings are stretchered into an ambulance afterward. Waid’s Falcon narrates: “It was chaos. Victims everywhere.”

Though drawn without gore, the depiction is outside the norm of superhero narratives, which would typically portray heroes preventing a mass murder rather than using the event as a plot point to initiate the apparently greater threat of a riot when Harlem residents respond by attacking the Sons’ storefront recruitment office.

Waid’s Falcon laments: “But there wasn’t much we could do about the rage.”

Earlier, Captain America considered countering Mason’s claim that he supported the Sons not on principle but “just to ease these racial tensions,” and Falcon met with community leaders to “organize a reasoned, peaceful response” to prevent a non-peaceful one, because, Captain America later shouts at the all-Black crowd, “Mob violence won’t solve anything!” Mason insists the rioters, which he secretly instigated and armed, “proves the destructive rage of the Harlemites cannot be contained.”

Waid, like Mason, uses the fear of Black anger to forward his plot, moving over the murder of dozens of Black church members (Waid’s script never mentions the incident again) to focus on the necessity for Black people to contain their justified rage in order not to aid White supremacy. While this may be true in the contrived story world, the message is directed at actual readers: because White supremacists stereotype Black people as violent and angry, Black people must never be violent and angry or they prove the stereotype true. Alternatively, this is Waid’s understanding of the historical period of the early 1970s, a time when early Sons of the Serpent stories depicted Black anger as detrimental to the progress of Black civil rights. This is the same message Marvel promoted in their 1975, 1991, and 1994 Sons of the Serpent tales too.

The second of the two-issue story features the most extreme narrative incongruities I have encountered in a mainstream comic book. And maybe that’s appropriate for a story about white supremacists?

More on that next week.