The Marvel mythology of Captain America (as I remember it from my years of comic reading) goes like this: During World War 2, scientists came up with something called the "Super-Soldier Serum", which could turn a sickly or ordinary man into a hero with super-strength, agility, speed, reflexes, and if not invulnerability, certainly a healthy share of toughness and resistance to sickness. Both the Allies and the Nazis were working on such a program; the Allies were slightly ahead. Steve Rogers, a young man who'd been turned away from military service because he was too scrawny/weak, was given the opportunity to test the Super-Soldier Serum. It worked, and he became Captain America, an icon of American patriotism.

It goes without saying that Steve Rogers was white, blond, and blue-eyed.

In 2003, Robert Morales (writer) and Kyle Baker (artist) put out Truth: Red, White, and Black, a story that adds a prequel to the Captain America mythology. The scientists were anything but infallible; they didn't create a serum and hit a home run out of the park on their first try. Instead, for years leading up to Rogers's successful experience with the Super-Soldier Serum, there were military experiments on black soldiers -- many of which were horrific failures, resulting in gruesome deaths. In the end, only a handful of soldiers survived the experiment, and that handful was quietly pressed into service, forced to carry out suicide missions, treated poorly, faced with relentless racism even from their fellow soldiers. Years later, even Captain America himself doesn't know the story of "the black Captain America" -- but when he discovers it, he goes looking for more information. And he's not going to let a forgetful, ungrateful government stand in his way.

Needless to say, comic fandom threw fits when this story was first announced. Comic fans are sticklers for their version of continuity, unable to tolerate it when something reboots or retcons a series. When one of their heroes turns out not to be a hero, they freak out and insist that he redeem himself. When one of their villains tries to seek redemption, comic fandom tends to resist it. Death, which ought to be the ultimate continuity-breaker (or continuity-definer, even) is treated as a mere inconvenience; living characters should stay living.

And a black Captain America wasn't in any continuity they'd ever dreamt of.

Never mind the likelihood that exactly that sort of experiment would happen; in real life, medical experiments on black people and black soldiers were absolutely fact, especially in the 1940s. Never mind the fact that the cover-up is exactly what would have happened -- even in the 1960s, popular black musicians were forced to put white people on the covers of their albums so they'd sell, because no one wanted black people to be visible. No one wanted black people to be heroes.

Much of the furor surrounding the original series boils down to the fact that in 2003, some people still weren't looking for that.

But Truth: Red, White, And Black is one of the most powerful, moving series I've ever gotten my hands on. It was reprinted as a trade paperback and has apparently just been re-released as a hardcover. You can probably also find it -- all seven issues of it -- in comic shops around the country. And it's well worth the read. This isn't just an adventure story about black men who got to play hero -- this is a well-written, well-researched, focused and driven story about the circumstances which made those men agree to serve in the military (in some cases, they were very much not volunteers), the lengths to which they had to go to survive both in the military in general and as part of the experiment, what the experiment did to them, and what happened to them years later.

It's a story that doesn't back off from the harsh reality of what it was like to be black in America in the 1940s, and it faces the ugly truth that many of the people who are heroes to the black community today are people the rest of the country has never heard of -- partly due to the fact that people who aren't black often go their whole lives completely unaware of the stories that inspire the black community, and partly due to the fact that there's a long-standing tradition of keeping heroes, and the definition thereof, in the hands of the people with the money and the power. And in the 1940s -- well, we all know who that wasn't.

There are historical events in this series I'd never heard of, and one place to read up on that history is Footnote Comics, which goes into detail about blacks in the military both before and during World War 2, human experimentation and informed consent (there's a link to Tuskeegee, which I had heard of), and Red Summer, which was shocking to me both because of the violence involved and because I had never so much as dreamed that such a time had existed. Reading about it in Truth was the first time I'd heard of it -- but there was no doubt in my mind, even for a minute, that it had taken place. The story is respectful, detailed, and well-told. If I had kids, it's one I'd absolutely read to them and use as a jumping-off platform for discussion and independent research.

Reviews of this story run from people like me, who think it's an amazing piece of writing that brings a valuable piece of history into the Marvel Universe, to people who hated it before they even read it, to people who, even while complimenting it, seem incapable of accepting it as part of the Marvel mythology. (In the Marvel universe, Truth is just that. It's canon. Calling it a "What If" story, even while giving it a five-star review, smacks to me of someone who doesn't even realize that phrasing it that way questions whether the events of the series really happened, someone who doesn't realize they're dismissing the story as no more real than "What If Spider-Man Had Eight Arms?" It is impossible to be respectful to black characters in the Marvel universe while still suggesting that it's up for debate whether their contributions really happened -- but that five-star reviewer probably doesn't even realize she did that.

If there's any complaint I'd like to make about the series -- and this is one I'm not alone in making -- it's that Kyle Baker's artwork is exceedingly "cartoony", with all character images exaggerated for effect. Black characters are given enormous lips and jutting chins; white characters end up looking like the short, stumpy villain sidekicks in Disney movies. I'm pathetically grateful that Baker didn't draw any Asian characters, despite this series taking place in World War 2, because I really, really did not want to see Japanese or Japanese-Americans depicted with those awful slanted eyes and front teeth that jut past the bottoms of their chins. I would have loved to see these characters drawn by an artist who was adhering to realism, partly because I think it would have been a better fit for the story, and partly because the horror of some of the incidents is downplayed enormously by the cartoony look of the artwork. I think the series loses a great deal of impact by having artwork that doesn't appear to take it seriously.

The best thing I can say for the art is that, while I'm continually frustrated with comic book artists who rely on their colorists to differentiate between white and black characters (I love Gary Frank, for instance, but if there were no color overlays on his books, you'd never know who was white and who was black -- and black characters with predominantly European features just bug me, in the same way it bugs me to see Asian characters who have teeny squinty eyes, stupendously bright yellow skin, but European facial features and body shapes -- you'd be amazed how many Asian characters in comics clock in at 5'8" and above), certainly that isn't a problem in this series. But I'm not sure that caricatures of black characters are really what I was hoping for.

I really read this series as a prequel to the one I was extremely excited about, The Crew -- a 2003 series written by Christopher Priest starring one of my all-time favorite comics characters, James Rhodes. I'm so glad I read Truth, though. The World War 2 era is one where my knowledge of African-American history really fails, particularly in light of how much I do know about the experiences of a completely different American minority in that era (during WW2, my grandparents were in the Japanese-American internment camps), but every new story about life in the 1940s for any other race is a revelation to me, and one I'm grateful to have learned about, no matter how hard the story might have been to hear.

This has been, by far, the best thing I've read this year. Maybe the best thing I've read in more than a year. I highly recommend it.

Tags: comics, historical, people of color, reading