Captain America is dead! Shot by an assassin coming out of a courthouse! That’s not noble, or heroic!

Okay, I’ve abused my quotient of exclamation marks so I’ll stop now. But still, Captain America is dead. I’m not nearly as moved as I was by the loss of Superman, but that’s mostly because I’ve never been particularly close to Captain America. And anyone who grew up with X-Men learned to accept death in the Marvel universe at an early age. I now look forward to the release of Civil War in a graphic novel so I can read the whole story line—I wasn’t particularly interested but in a brilliant marketing move they’ve roped me in. Marvel and I have had a bit of a falling out, you understand, but perhaps they’ve reclaimed my patronage.

D.C. and I have been having a bit of a love affair recently, the Infinite Crisis was an extremely good storyline and I really enjoyed reading it. We’ll have to see if Civil War is as good—it seems to have possibilities. I really can’t wait until I’m tenured and can teach entire freshman seminars on comic books; I’ll have to be very clear to my students that we’re going to be doing that so none of them whine at me later, but I’ve learned that whining is what freshman do. No avoiding it.

But Captain America…can you kill Captain America? In some ways it’s the loss of childhood innocence—not a bad move, D.C. did it with Superman and it rejuvenated the industry, but I have been hanging on to Marvel as my last link to childhood. Now it’s gone. They aren’t the same comics they used to be. And for as many stories as they have had about racism, bigotry, responsibility, sacrifice and any number of other topics, they’ve never killed anyone I couldn’t let go.

This isn’t to say that I can’t let Captain America go; he was always a little to black and white for me. Captain America fought for the government in a way I never saw Superman. Perhaps it was the name, perhaps it was the origin story, perhaps it was the amazing propaganda, but I always found it difficult to completely put my trust in Captain America. To say he was “too good” seems odd since Superman ought to be the one seeming to be “too good” and, yet, that is exactly how I would describe my refusal to read Captain America comics.

But he has been a staple; something I could always count on. I have several professors who like to remind us that characters are not people, but maybe I would argue with them. Not because the characters are living or breathing, but because characters that move you, characters that are part of your life do become real people. They become friends, someone you think about, perhaps even write about or consider when attempting to develop what kind of person you want to be. They feel like a friend. For literary studies that doesn’t mean you can write about them as if there is a history there you don’t know, but it does mean, I think, that we can use them as touchstones for philosophical thought. They are symbols of our culture, icons. When we kill them it is (to borrow a word from my roommates thesis) iconoclasm and I think anytime you destroy a cultures icons that is a very real reverberation. That’s something that affects us that we are completely unprepared to deal with. We point fingers at “geeks” and say dude, get over it. He isn’t a real person. But that’s just it. Captain America is more than a real person, he’s an icon, an idea. And the destruction of that affects more than just your emotional well-being. It’s a sign of your culture changing, shifting.

People look at comic books and graphic novels and call them children’s literature, pop culture—without currency in true academic debate. The truth is that we imbue our heroes, in comic books, movies, or television, with iconic status and some trust that so long as Captain America, or Superman, or Batman is fighting the good fight we as people are still fighting the good fight. When they die or break or fail—it’s more than a story. It’s the destruction of one of our ideals.

So Captain America is dead. And even though I didn’t read his comic book often he was still my friend. And I’m sad.