#the racism been there from day one my friends
while looking up something related to comics last night, I came across a bunch of articles from 2021 about how Captain America apparently “would have changed sides in the Vietnam War” because of an alternate universe comic marvel had just released and it sent me into such a rage spiral that I wrote multiple long ass posts about it and luckily put them in my drafts because they’re kinda incoherent lol.
but like ok I am literally reading comics that were written during the Vietnam War and not only did Cap NOT switch sides, but he was explicitly used as propaganda to justify American involvement in the war. this happened in multiple instances, including mainline Avengers comics. and I would show the panels as proof, but they are also so fucking racist that I can’t post them. Avengers 18 is pretty much entirely this, if you’re really interested though
but this is why I’m so fucking fed up with people treating the comics as holy and universally good at dealing with race and gender and sexuality and world issues, because they LITERALLY started as American government propaganda and continued to be propaganda way past WW2. The propaganda is not confined to Cap punching Hitler. It wasn’t even confined to that in the 40s
like it just bugs me to do end when no one wants to acknowledge that fucked up history and help marvel contribute to their rewriting of their own history to hide the times they were on the wrong side. like they fucked up a lot and continue to do so, and I just fucking hate how few people even acknowledge the past fuck ups because they want to be able to use the comics’ supposed eternal goodness to criticize the next MCU thing that comes out. like yall can point out the fucked up shit the MCU does without straight up lying about what is in the comics and how the comics handled things, but people view even that as being on one team or the other
