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March 4, 2024 Possibly the Worst Comic Book Ever Made? (Marvel 1999/1971 White Supremacy part 2 of 2)

Captain America: Sentinel of Liberty #8-9 (April-May 1999) is a useful reminder of how badly the comics production process can go and how remarkable it is that it rarely does. I wrote about #8 last week, but #9 is where things go off the rails.

Mark Waid scripts both issues, Cully Hamner pencils the first, and Doug Braithwaite pencils the second. Switching pencillers mid-story is never ideal, but it’s not uncommon and is typically unremarkable. (Avengers #74 (March 1970) provides an example with John Buscema taking over from Frank Giacoia.)

I would love to read Waid’s scripts to assess where exactly the process broke down. My best guess: the two pencillers worked from each issue’s script independently and simultaneously, unaware of many of the other’s visual decisions. At some point (during inking perhaps) someone must have noticed the incongruities, but the decision was made (presumably by Bob Harras as editor-in-chief) to proceed anyway.

As detailed in last week’s post, Waid introduces Ajanii Jackson in #8. As drawn by Hamner, the Black man appears middle-aged with a handlebar mustache and wears a suit and tie.

I suspect Hamner had Jesse Jackson in mind — especially since Jackson grew in national prominence during the period of the 1971 story arc. Martin Luther King, Jr. selected Jackson as national director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s economic-focused Operation Breadbasket in 1967, and Jackson’s own organization Operation PUSH (People United to Save Humanity) began operations in 1971. Jackson also appeared on William F. Buckley’s Firing Line in October 1971 — when Waid’s imprecisely retconned story appears to be set.

Yet in #9, Braithwaite’s Jackson wears tennis shoes and a t-shirt and appears to be a teenager.

I’ve not seen this sort of contradiction since 1939, in Action Comics #8, where Superman co-creator Joe Shuster first draws a gang of “juvenile delinquents” as though twenty-something hooligans and then later in the same issue as pre-pubescent urchins.

Back in Captain America, the first issue includes a one-page appearance of the Wizard, a seeming KKK reference, but he is instead a bearded and costumed supervillainous inventor who supplies the Sons with technological weaponry while declaring: “I have no interest in your racist agenda or goals, only in your cash.”

The character is not a Waid and Hamner invention. Lee, Lieber, and Kirby introduced the Wizard as an antagonist for the Human Torch in Strange Tales #102 (November 1962), and Lee and Kirby reprised him as an ongoing supervillain in Fantastic Four #36 (March 1965), where Kirby established his appearance with a costume and goatee, which subsequent artists copied.

Including Hamner (though minus the helmet, presumably because the character is not in action but seated at his desk):

Braithwaite seems to draw the same character (also minus the helmet):

Except in the second issue, that bearded and costumed figure is called and behaves as Mason in Waid’s script, and the Mason as physically depicted by Hamner in #8 is absent.

Though Matt Hicks colors both issues, in the first he gives the Wizard a red and blue costume, and in the second a purple and gray one. Previous colorists rendered the costume inconsistently, so neither is definitively accurate or inaccurate. Regardless, it is impossible to account for the contradictions narratively within the single story arc.

It is also impossible to determine how they occurred in the production process. Were the two pencilers working simultaneously and independently, preventing Braithwaite from following Hamner’s character design for Jackson? Did Waid intend for the Wizard to not appear in #9 but Braithwaite misconstrued references to Mason and drew Mason as the Wizard? Was Hicks’s color changes a late attempt to lessen the incongruities, suggesting that the now bearded Mason was not wearing the Wizard costume? Could series editor Matt Idelson not have noticed the errors, or did time or financial restraints prevent Braithwaite from redrawing Jackson and Mason/Wizard?

In a perverse sense, the incongruities are thematically appropriate for a retconning story that disregards the visual representations of the period it claims to integrate. While Hamner and Braithwaite contrast each other’s styles, both equally contrast John Romita Sr.’s, who penciled the 1971 Captain America and the Falcon issues. Romita, for example, rendered Leila tall, large-breasted, impossibly thin-waisted, and with an inches-thick Afro and supervillainously high and curved eyebrows. Hamner renders her with more realistic proportions, but also gives her a close-cropped haircut, low eyebrows, and rounder face.

The uncredited 1971 colorist assigned her standard Black skin, YR3B2, established shortly before the 1970 Sons of the Serpent reprise, but Hicks instead gives all Black characters multi-hued skin for a more naturalistic effect. However, because Hicks assigns all Black characters the identical set of browns, the effect suggests that all Black people literally have the same color skin, an intensification of the earlier Color norm which, because it ignored lighting effects, signaled lesser realism.

Hicks also switches the race of a character between consecutive panels on the opening page of #9. Though perhaps minor in comparison to other incongruities, the error stands out because the character is one of three White men attacking a Black man during a night of riots. When Captain America’s thrown shield strikes one of the men in the face, he is rendered in the same brown as the man he is attacking.

The apparent change in race, while presumably unintentional, mirrors Captain America. Sam Wilson assumes the costume and role after the apparent death of Steve Rogers. When first seen from behind, his skin is covered in red, white, and blue except for his ears—which Hicks, intentionally or unintentionally, colors the same White-denoting light pink as the skinhead attacker he’s punching. After the page turn, Braithwaite fills the full-page panel with Wilson’s Captain America, framed by towering flames lit during the riots in Harlem. Waid’s Wilson declares: “I’m Captain America. Deal with it.” While presumably celebratory in intent, expanding on Wilson briefly wearing the costume in Captain America #126 (June 1970), the image also links a Black Captain American with destructive anger.

Wilson as Captain America gives a speech that inspires the “Harlem activists”: “I will not rest until our streets are safe again! America belongs to all people – not just the White supremacists!” Though Waid presumably did not intend to argue that White supremacists should be accepted as co-owners of the nation, when Wilson’s listeners cheer in response, he wonders: “Huh. Maybe it is the suit …!”

After thwarting the Sons’ plot by battling and freeing Rogers, while also preventing the release of a “bioethnic virus […] engineered to affect only men of color,” Waid’s Falcon concludes the story by telling Captain America from a hospital bed: “I’ve learned a lot […] about the power of the colors. Not the black and the white. … But the red, white and blue.”

That patriotic Colorblindness is complicated by the failure of the virus, which killed not only Jackson, whom Mason/Wizard tested it on, but Mason/Wizard too. Though the failure could be interpreted as a critique of scientifically meaningless racial categories, the reference to “geneticists who’ve been refining sickle-cell anemia for us” suggests otherwise. Either way, the virus was Colorblind too.

However interpreted, the two-issue story arc is probably the worst of the dozen or so Sons of the Serpents tales in Marvel history –which, given the white supremacist subject matter, is a paradoxical compliment.

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