Marvel.com has revealed the new outfit for Captain America to mush gushing love from their PR department. Understandable, because that's what PR departments are for. It's a design by the undeniably wonderfully artist Alex Ross.
Personally, I'm of two minds of the thing. Part of me WANTS to like the outfit, but in the end, I fear it's just giving me a headache. I liked the chain-mail outfit, but I can see the appeal of this new body armor version.
What I don't understand is the need to include a gun and a knife.
Cap was supposed to be this great hero who embodied the American Ideal, which included not being an offensive hero, but rather a defensive, reactive.
But, I guess that's more the modern age, and even after a while, I can handle the gun.
At least until I read the article, and the reasonings for the inclusion of the gun. Ross said this about the new design:
It's a more brutish interpretation, at this point, for the modern age.That annoyed me. A lot.
Rather than having a hero that did things the old-fashioned way. The way of the non-brutes. We now have another dark, depressing hero who is willing to kill to defeat the bad guys. Ho-hum.
If I had wanted that, I'd have read the Punisher.
Bad form, Marvel.
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4 comments:
I always thought Captain America was kind of a nerd. :)
Their interpretation of this American hero does seem a little goofy. Is he supposed to be a cross between Batman and Indiana Jones or something? Heh.
lee - he was a nerd, that was part of the character. He was the forties/thirties-era nerd, a weakling, given the super-soldier serum.
And a cross between Batman & Jones makes sense
It's an interesting costume. There seems to be something uneasy about the tension between the black jumpsuit and Cap's classic stars-and-bars insignia.
The first thing I thought about was
Nomad, the disillusioned, post-Watergate "Man Without A Flag" identity that Cap assumed in the '70s.
But Stephen's picked up a sharp echo by contrasting Cap and the Punisher, too - look at the way the elements of the flag are arranged on the torso.
That essentially replaces the Punisher's skull motif, doesn't it?
Now, there's no hint of anything like that in the Marvel PR on this, so I'm not sure if it's conscious or not... but a little googling threw up an interesting parallel: since Steve Rogers' assassination, the Punisher's costume has been changed to evoke Captain America's own insignia.
*pause*
*blink*
Frank Castle as Captain America? You heard it here first!!
McEwok
Aye, the jumpsuit and the stars-and-bars motif do jar with one another, and it does appear as a definite second-take on the Nomad motif, except in reverse almost.
And yes, the flag does replace the punisher motif, as well as the batman motif. There's a reasonable answer for why these characters put bright icons on their chests, and that has to do with body-armor.
And I think Castle could manage to be Cap. If Marvel played their cards right, he could be a viable character to play against Batman...
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