Captain America: Brave New World was a good movie.
But The Falcon and the Winter Soldier was a very good television series. I might actually be inclined to say that the Falcon and the Winter Soldier was the most interesting thing anyone has done with Captain America since Ed Brubaker violated the ultimate taboo, brought Bucky back from the dead, and rewrote the mythos so comprehensively that no-one quite realised what he was doing. The TV show drew very deeply from the history of the comic books: Isaiah Bradley, the black man who the American government experimented on, comes from a relatively obscure 2003 comic called Red, White and Black; The USAgent goes right back to a 1980s storyline about Steve Rogers quitting his Captain America gig. But you didn’t need to have read any of the comic books to understand what was going on: it was simply mining old stories to create new ones.
I grok that Brubaker was a bit annoyed by this. Twenty years on, “everybody knows” that Bucky became the Winter Soldier, where perhaps they ought to still be saying that Ed Brubaker had the audacity and chutzpah and creative disregard for canon to come up with the completely bonkers idea that Cap’s long deceased kid sidekick was alive and well and operating as a mercenary. Writers and artists have got a right to be annoyed by this kind of thing. But Marvel Comics exists and the Marvel Cinematic Universe exists. Jack Kirby threw the ball and Steve Englehart caught the ball and Brubaker only gets to hold the ball on condition he passes it on to someone else. This is why it is nonsense for fans to insist on comic book accuracy. There are no comic books to be accurate to. There are multiple traditions.
“I want it to be comic book accurate” is usually code for “I don’t want there to be any black people in it”, in any case.
Some Star Wars fans deplored the fact that the (very good) Mandalorian TV show included some hardware lifted from an old computer game. This was a symptom of a condition called “being up yourself”, apparently. Other Star Wars fans felt that they were debarred from watching the (also very good) Ahsoka TV show because it utilized a character from a cartoon show that they had not, and did not want to, watch. But some of us positively like the baroque complexity of a narrative which emerges non-sequentially, over decades, in more formats than one person can possibly hold in their head.
CS Lewis said that what the human imagination likes is either taking in a harmonious and self-explanatory form at a single glance; or getting lost in a hugely complicated maze that it will never fully grasp. The Parthenon and the Fairy Queen are both great works of art. So perhaps this kind of fan schism is simply a new iteration of the old, old war between the classical and the romantic.
Still other fans objected to the (also pretty good) Skeleton Crew TV show because it didn’t have much bearing on the Star Wars metaplot. It’s certainly got lightsabers and spacecraft and recognisable aliens but it doesn’t notably impact on the sacred timeline. I myself have some doubts about whether “the Famous Five, only space pirates” was a great premise for a series, although I smile wryly when people complain that it is “like a children’s show”. My main problem was the paucity of imagination that envisions a galaxy far, far away in which middle-class suburbs look exactly as they do in the American midwest. But that problem has been brewing ever since Obi-Wan went into a diner and put Anakin and Amidala on a greyhound bus.
And some Star Wars fans objected to the Mandalorian, Ahsoka, and Skeleton Crew because they had black people in them.
There is Wim and his little friends, trying to extract their spaceship from a garbage crusher. If you don’t think that was the most exciting sequence to appear in a Star Wars spin off since a long time ago, I am not sure I have anything else to say to you. And there are the Sith and the High Republic and Darth Plagueis and Groku’s true identity. There is plot and metaplot; there are movies and franchises; there is this movie and all the movies together. There is chess, and there is a game of chess. Only yesterday I heard someone say that Ncuti Gatwa is not very good as Doctor Who and the solution is, and I quote to reboot the franchise.
The solution is never to reboot the franchise.
Ncuti Gatwa is, incidentally, a black man.
Superheroes are archetypes. There is a mild mannered science geek who turns into a fierce green monster if you rub him the wrong way. There is a Norse god stuck in a crippled mortal body until he learns humility. There is an apparently hopeless GI who personifies the stars and stripes and punches Hitler.
Superhero movies are action-packed entertainments, whose target audience wouldn’t know an archetype if they stubbed their toe on one, in competition with Mission Impossible and Harry Potter and the Rings of Power.
Superhero franchises—and there is really only one successful one—are great big huge vast overarching metastories. Soap operas that wish they were actual operas.
When Nick Fury popped up unannounced at the end of the first Iron Man movie, it was a jaw-dropping cinematic conceit. We are now as far removed from that first Iron Man movie as Iron Man was from…something which came out seventeen years before Iron Man. Batman Returns, possibly. There had been sequels before, and captions that said “James Bond Will Return”. The people in Jaws 3 knew about Jaws 1. But the idea of one movie bleeding into another movie was a huge, self-affirming pat on the head to all of us who were bullied and belittled for reading obscure American publications when we were kids. It was even more surprising when Robert Downey Jnr and Samuel S Jackson turned up a year later to recruit Edward Norton. Hell, they are serious about this? Twenty years later we still piously sit through ten minutes of credits (hi, Dan, you are definitely my second favourite set-dec-gang-boss) to find out—what? That there will be another movie, with another baddie, and that it will have something to do with the effing sodding bloody multiverse?
It used to be said that some movies only had highlights so there was something to include in the trailers. Now we suspect that some movies only exist in order to be teased at the end of other movies. The world’s second richest man recently bought James Bond and everyone assumes that he is going to make, not a new James Bond film, but a whole series of interconnected movies set in the 007 Universe. I understand that the Beano now has an internal continuity. Donald Duck has had one for decades. Any day I expect to see Macavity the Mystery Cat teaming up with Oliver Mellors because they are both part of the Faber and Faber extended universe. Which would, I grant you, be awesome.
General Thunderbolt Ross definitely comes from the comics. He was J Jonah Jameson to the Hulk’s Spider-Man, or, at times, Captain Ahab to the Great Green Whale: the non-player character who hates the main good guy for no very good reason. That was very much part of the Format: Chris Claremont felt obligated to supply his pisspoor Captain Britain with a bad tempered British peeler who hated superheroes because his daughter or possibly wife had been killed by one. The Red Hulk was one of those very-last-thing-you-expected twists that comic books love to do. The Green Hulk was being menaced by a Big Red version of himself, and it was eventually revealed that Red Hulk was his old foe General Ross come back from the dead to haunt him. Not a bad twist if you were there: but there is something quite tiring about watching every single member of every single supporting cast—Gwen Stacey, Flash Thompson, Jane Foster—gradually being transformed into either a superhero or a supervillain.
Ross was a major character in the Incredible Hulk movie. It followed Stan Lee’s excellent plot-engine: Ross despises the weak Bruce and hates the strong Hulk; his daughter Betty is scared of the strong Hulk but loves the weak Bruce. There is a big scene at the end of Captain America: Brave New World in which Ross and Betty are finally reconciled. Because in the Incredible Hulk she was mad at Dad for trying to kill the Hulk even after Dad learned he was really Bruce.
But that was very nearly twenty years ago.
I mean, maybe I am the wrong sort of nerd, or maybe I love Tolkien and Star Wars too much and the Marvel Cinematic Universe not enough. Apparently Thunderbolt Ross has appeared once or twice since 2008. And very possibly when Harrison Ford is introduced as President Ross, maybe you thought “Cool, that politician guy from Avengers: Civil War who had a brief cameo in Endgame, I have been wondering what happened to him, I sure hope he makes it up with his daughter.”
And maybe I should have thought that too. But I didn’t.
A very long time ago I was inordinately rude about a TV show called Babylon 5 because (I said at the time) it was a story arc in search of a story; a sequence of weak, sub Star-Trek episodes which moved fairly interesting playing pieces around a quite well developed science fiction backstory. It probably had more merit than I gave it credit for, although, god knows, I have no intention of ever watching it again to find out. It made clever use of early CGI to create an iconography which was neither exactly like George Lucas nor exactly like Gene Roddenbury. And the backstory that was unfurled at such tortuous length was relatively interesting. But I think I would stand by the very rude essay: it aspires to a condition where the person who has only read the Wikipedia page was no worse off than the person who had watched the TV show. The factual summary was just as interesting as the actual episode. It was a back-story delivery mechanism.
I know people who adopted this exact approach to Harry Potter: reading Wikipedia instead of JK Rowling. There are people who sincerely prefer David Day to JRR Tolkien.
Now, I am a very long way from wanting to be inordinately rude about the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Captain America: Brave New World is perfectly penetrable, and loads of fun. There is a new President; and a new guy in the Captain America suit. The New Cap goes to Washington with New Cap’s New Sidekick and the Old Guy who the government once experimented on; and the Old Guy tries to assassinate the President. Although it is obvious to everyone that he has been mind-controlled, New Cap has to spend the movie clearing his friend’s name. (It turns out that he has been mind-controlled.) There is an absolutely stonking sky battle in which New Cap and New Cap’s New Sidekick have to prevent rogue American fighters triggering a war with Japan (over the body of the dead space god from the Eternals movie). It turns out that a Villain with a grudge against the President has been doing the mind-controlling. He has also been feeding the President drugs laced with PlotDevicium, the same substance that originally turned Bruce Banner into Hulk. So during a press conference, the President loses it completely, turns into Red Hulk and has an absolutely stonking fight with New Cap and New Cap’s New Sidekick. Lots of throwing people through buildings and destroying historical monuments and people staggering back onto their feet after they are down for the count. A real sense of Red Hulk being the strongest one there is and New Cap having huge amounts of guts to stand up to him. It’s a really impressive fight scene. But for anything to be really riding on it, we have to be keeping track of quite a lot of plot threads from quite a lot of previous movies. Otherwise it is just a really really impressive fight scene. Did I mention that I really, really like really, really impressive fight scenes?
Who is the film for? Audiences who just come for the fight scenes and don’t expect to know what is going on? Or people who do their homework and read the character studies in Brodie’s Notes the night before the exam? Or should we posit the existence of people who have watched everything in the franchise seventeen times and who know who Ruth-Bat Seraph is without anyone telling them?
Quite a lot of us are somewhere in the middle. You know that you know; some people don’t know that they don’t know. But I know that I don’t know, and I sometimes find that a little frustrating.
Disney is burning through the core Marvel Characters at a rate of parsecs; exhausting the mythic potential of the Big Names (Hulk, Spider-Man, Thor) and having to replace them with teams of Second Division characters.
The Second Division characters are pretty good. I liked the first Ant Man movie. Ms. Marvel (comic book and TV show) is some of the most superhero related fun I have had in years. I liked the Eternals: I suppose someone had to. I wish I’d liked Shang Chi more. Truthfully, I hankered for something more like the 1970s version, although I fully understand that the 1970s version was ever so slightly incredibly racist.
Kenneth Brannagh’s Thor movie was so good that it ruined Thor: he told pretty much all the Thor stories that there are and left his successor's with nowhere else to go. In a comic, you can throw a different villain at a character every month for six hundred and twenty one months: Thor fights a bank robber; Thor fights commies; Thor fights Loki; Thor fights commie alien bank robbers in league with Loki. When you only get one movie every two and a half years, that’s not going to be artistically satisfying. So the Marvel Cinematic Thor has grown into an entirely different character: which is in one sense Good, because it means the character has growth and development, but in another sense Bad because you sit through each movie saying “So, remind me, has Asgard still been destroyed, where is he living nowadays, is Odin currently dead, is Loki a good guy or a bad guy this week…?”
Batman and Superman reboot on an annual basis; but it always remains the case that Superman is an alien disguised as a journalist, and Batman is a screwed up rich kid with a cave in his basement. The endless multiple versions are even quite fun: what will the Joker be like this time; who will this year’s Alfred be? But Superman and Batman are myths, and myths are what Hollywood understands. Having exhausted the mythical elements of Thor and Captain America in the first couple of movies there is nowhere else for them to go.
The correct approach would have been to embrace the fact that superhero stories are really about the villains. The follow up to The Tragedy of Peter Parker is not The Tragedy of Peter Parker Part II: it’s The Tragedy of Otto Octavius, featuring Peter Parker as the personification of divine nemesis. That is one reason why the 1992 Batman animated series is still held up as an exemplar of how to adapt comics to other media.
Captain America’s main enemies have always been Nazis. Sometimes Commies and sometimes Eye Rakkies, I grant you; but he always ends up fighting Hydra (thinly disguised Nazis), the Sons of the Serpent (thinly disguised Nazis) and the Red Skull (a not at all thinly disguised Nazi)
So. Here we are in 2025. The Red Skull is running America, and his minions are very cross indeed with Captain America: Brave New World.
Sam Wilson first appeared in the Captain America comic book as long ago as 1969: when it was still being directly written by Stan Lee. The two of them rapidly became partners; and the comic was called Captain America and the Falcon (on the cover, if not in the indica) from 1971 to 1978. A young black guy scripted by a middle-aged Jewish guy was always going to be problematic: the Falcon found it hard not to begin sentences with “Well, as a black man in modern day America, I…” But the writers’ hearts were generally in the right places. Steve Rogers personified World War II and the Greatest Generation; Sam personified the America of civil rights and racial equality. If superheroes are symbols then “a partnership between a negro and a caucasian” is a pretty good symbol of 1960s liberal America. And he was never obliged to go by the name of Black Falcon.
The idea that other people apart from Steve Rogers can take on the nom de guerre of Captain America goes back a long way. Fans can debate “how many canonical Captain Americas have there been?”: but we can all agree that William Naslund and William Burnside took over the role in the late 40s and 50s while Steve Rogers was missing presumed frozen; that Roscoe Simmons and John Walker tried out for the job in the ’70s and ‘80s when Steve was undergoing his bi-annual crisis of faith; and the newly resurrected Bucky took up the shield in 2007 after Steve’s death. (SPOILER: He got better.)
This stuff happens because it’s cool and interesting. Thor has been an alien horse and a frog, as well as a lady. In movie-land, where actors get older and want to move on to new projects, it’s a commercial necessity. The custodians of the Marvel Cinematic universe could have gone down the path of replacing Sean Connery with George Lazenby and hoping that no-one noticed. It could, indeed, have created an endless stream of not very closely related Captain America movies with an inconsistent cast. But having decided that all the Marvel Movies are part of one very long story, it was inevitable that Steve Rogers and Tony Stark would fade away and new Captains America and Iron Men would arise.
In 2015, comic book Steve Rogers had his super-soldier powers removed [SPOILER: He got better]. And so finally his best friend Sam got a turn at being Captain America. Previous incumbents didn’t advertise the change-over to the general public—the whole point of William Burnside is that everyone thought he was the original Cap. But the All New Captain America had an all new costume—a combination of Old Cap’s and the Falcon’s threads.
The film universe reflects this development, with Sam refusing to take the Super Soldier Serum and relying on his flying suit and robot drones to beat the bad-guys. I guess that the multiverse meta-plot is building to a total reboot of the universe, and we will eventually have a new series of films in which new actors get bitten by new radioactive spiders, discover new hammers in new caves and get injected with new experimental anti-Nazi steroids, and the whole thing reboots again in, say, 2048. When we’ll all be dead, or at any rate, incredibly bored.
Anyone saying that they have made Captain America into a black man as part of some nefarious DEI initiative is not only a Nazi who wants punching, but also terribly ignorant of comic book history.
Superheroes are symbols. Captain Democracy fighting Captain Commie with the Mighty Shield Of Liberty is not that far removed from Sir Purity riding out from Castle Chastity to fight the Dragon of Lust. If allegory isn’t to your taste, Captain Democracy can be a real person with a real personality who consciously knows he is role-playing a symbol for the benefit of his adoring fans. But wandering around in a spandex romper suit is not a particularly naturalistic thing to do.
You may think that I am making a circular argument here. You may think that “all superheroes are symbols” only works if you say that “costume wearing enhanced-individuals with no particular symbolic subtext don’t count as superheroes”. I am cool with you thinking that.
In 1953, while Steve Rogers was still deep frozen, a substitute hero, the aforementioned William Burnside, went into action as, er, Captain America Commie Basher. In 1972, he came out of cold storage and fought Original Cap on the White House Lawn. He was working for a corrupt president, definitely not called Richard, who turned out to be (if I am remembering this correctly) an evil robot. Our Steve quit in disgust, temporarily becoming Nomad, the Man Without a Country. I think that is the sort of at right-angles to reality symbolic political cartoon strip allegory that I’d like to see more of. I am pretty surprised they’ve never introduced 1950s anti-commie Cap into the MCU. [*]
I’ve been reading some old 1970s comics. The Defenders, as it happens, one of the second wave of Marvel comics that came along after Stan Lee ceased to be actively involved. It was sometimes billed as a non-team: Doctor Strange used to call together the Silver Surfer, the Sub-Mariner and the Hulk whenever the world needed saving: they were good friends but had no formal team affiliation. Which meant that writers could play around with an endless stream of guest stars and crossovers. Maybe Daredevil is in it this month and the Son of Satan next month.There are frequent footnotes which say “It happened in the last issue of the Hulk’s own magazine” or “See Daredevil #123, still on sale if you hurry.”
At one point, Steve Gerber was writing both the Defenders and Marvel Two In One, and didn’t shy away from threading storylines from one comic to the other and back again. He also had the Son of Satan gig and accidentally created Howard the Duck. I pay Marvel Comics some money every month so that every Marvel Comic there has ever been can pop up on my I-Pad at the push of a button; so it is trivially easy, if rather time consuming, to read every single relevant episode. In the actual 1970s that would have been all but impossible, even if you had an infinite supply of pocket money. Comics came into shops in random piles and when they were gone they were gone. Which made them significant, precious objects to be read and reread until their resale value was diminished beyond repair.
Today-Fans get quite agitated if they are trying to read the Whole Canon and find that a story alludes to material they haven’t got access to. But I think in the 1970s the idea that the story spread out across many different comics and no-one could reasonably be expected to read all of it was part of the aesthetic. That, is, after all, how life works: Duncan’s story overlaps with mine insofar as we are both in Miss Griffiths’ class; but I don’t know that Duncan has quarrelled with Brett because we go to different Scout groups. At no point does Steve Gerber rely on you knowing extra-textual information. Daredevil might conceivably say “I can’t save the world with you today, Doctor Strange, because I am trying to bring down the Purple Prune’s crime empire, asterisk, footnote, see Daredevil issue twenty three, best wishes, Rhetorical Roy, end footnote” but those things were never crucial plot-points. The Marvel Universe was young and a lot of the characters were meeting for the first time. Luke Cage could say “Sweet Christmas, who is this Thor cat of whom you jive?” and Doctor Strange would bring us all up to speed.
But increasingly there is So. Much. Marvel. Universe. And so much data. So much revision. Echo, on the TV, about a deaf Native American who can talk to her ancestors and has previous with the Kingpin. Have we seen her before? Was she in that Hawkeye one I remember quite liking, the Christmas before the Christmas before the Christmas before last? I distinctly remember liking Wandavision, possibly in that era where we didn’t go to work and wore masks and were only allowed out of the house once a day? That was the one which starts out as a Bewitched skit and turns out to be kind of a Marvel Universe version of the Prisoner, only with in-jokes? I am pretty sure that Agatha Harkness was in it, and I am pretty sure that she was in the last Doctor Strange movie three years ago and I distinctly remember when someone of that name was Franklin Richard’s nanny. Agatha All Along seems to be working pretty well as a mystical road movie, nodding its head to American Gods. (Can we still mention American Gods?) The relationship between the witch and the very mysterious kid is rather cool. But I keep having the urge to freeze frame and find out if the next character they meet on The Road is someone I am meant to have heard of.
And sometimes it matters. I was disappointed with Marvels (the movie) because it seemed to reduce the very believable Kamala and her very believable family into components in a big superhero computer game; where I really wanted three more seasons about schools and mosques and conventions and town planning. But a lot of the time I was simply lost—why is it funny that the cat has tentacles? and what is the other Captain Marvel’s backstory again? And I have watched all this stuff. Me and sofa-buddy pretty much abandoned Loki Season II which seemed to be impenetrable without going back and watching Loki Season I all over again. Which we didn’t quite feel inclined to do.
I don’t wish to intrude on private grief. I have taken a leave of absence from Doctor Who, but someday I will come back to it… Yes, I shall come back. But the threatened Russel T Davies “Marvel Universe Style” Cinematic Whoniverse would kill my interest irrevocably.
Books are not dreams which you hold in your hands. Stories are not magical gateways into other worlds. You have not visited India from the comfort of your armchair because you once read the Jungle Book. Every cloud has a silver lining: perhaps the fall of Neil Gaiman means that the absurd fetishisation of STORIES that he perpetrated will wither away of itself.
But he was kind of right. The real gods, the significant mythic figures, were never Ophelia and Lady McBeth, nor even Robin Hood and Little John, or Jupiter and Prometheus. And except in some very narrow sub-cultures, no-child ever really loved Jesus and Mary to anything like the extent they loved Father Christmas. For centuries we have all really worshiped at the shrines of Mickey Mouse and King Kong and Charlie Chaplin and Dick Barton and Dan Archer.
If you want to kick a ball between two posts, then by all means kick a ball between two posts. Even if you aren’t very good at kicking balls and usually miss. Ball-kicking doubtless has positive side effects — you make friends and take exercise and develop stronger feet. But the reason you kick balls is that you like kicking balls. For some reason.
I would be skeptical of a PE teacher who said “It doesn’t matter if the ball never goes between the posts: kicking it is what counts.” I would be equally skeptical of one who said “Ball kicking will help you get a job at the department of trade and industry, or, failing that, Tescos.” And of course I am glad the ones who used to say “If the ball doesn’t go between the posts then I shall make you kick it in your underwear” are mostly retired or in prison. I don’t have that much time for people who write concerned essays in the broadsheets about the decline of ball kicking and what it means for the future of western civilisation, either. “If you put your weight back there and turn your toes out like this, it’s more likely to go straight” seems the correct way to go.
I think that it is silly to fetishise ball-kicking. But those of us who have never voluntarily kicked a ball and would certainly never pay money to watch someone else doing so are a bit over inclined to fetishise reading. Before JK Rowling turned out to be — what JK Rowling turned out to be — people used to say that even if the Harry Potter books were rubbish (and I reserve judgement on whether or not the Harry Potter books were rubbish) it was better for children to be reading something than for them to be reading nothing.
I am not sure if this is true.
I suppose if someone were a very extreme anorexic—if someone were refusing to eat at all and damaging their health—then it would be sensible to say “Well, I would rather you eat something than eat nothing at all.” But if I found that kids were spending their lunch money exclusively at Krispy Kreme Doughnuts, I don’t think I would say “Well, at least they are eating something.”
Is this snobbish? [Several Hon. Members: “Yes”.] Is it wrong for those of us who really like books to be worried about what kinds of books young people read?
Maybe it is honestly better to hang around with your mates in a tarmac quad idly having a kick-about. Maybe the fun goes away when a PE teacher (one of the nice ones) walks past and says “Good job! Some of you should try out for the team!” That would have been my mum’s attitude, I think. Can’t you just be allowed to enjoy whistling, or doodling? What right do these people have to tell you you should whistle in tune or learn perspective? Why does everything have to be turned into a job? Maybe Kick-About was spoiled when some kids from a posh-school wrote down the rules of Association Kick-About, and when it was possible to make a lot of money by being good at the Beautiful Kick-About.
I just can’t help thinking that maybe possibly if books are good then maybe possibly it is better to read, you know, good books?
The only good book I can positively remember my parents reading to me is Winnie the Pooh, and that is certainly a very good book indeed. They certainly did read Millie Mollie Sodding Mandy and My Aggravating Little Sister to my younger sibling, so maybe my memory is defective. Maybe Pooh is such a good book that I have forgotten all the others; maybe I liked it so much I demanded that it be read over and over again. Or maybe I was a bit precocious and learned to read for myself and thought bedtime stories were a bit babyish. With all due respect to Alan Bennet and Bernard Cribbins, I would like to put it on record that my Daddy is the only person to ever have nailed Eyeore’s voice. Kanga does not sound Australian: she sounds like Mary Poppins. Obviously.
I certainly can remember watching TV with my parents: The Woodentops and Andy Pandy and the Trumpton trilogy; and Bizzy Lizzy which now exists only in my memory. (She had an Eskimo.) And this was the Golden Age of Children’s TV, when every morn brought forth a noble Clanger and every evening brought on something new to make out of sticky backed plastic.
But obviously, the really big story, the story which deconstructed my imaginative life and reassembled it, the single imaginative moment which I have never really moved on from, was Spider-Man.
If you probe my unconscious and look for the great stories, the ones which really matter — what you will find is popular fiction: Winnie the Pooh, Doctor Who, Spider-Man and Star Wars. And yes, as I got older, there was Mr Tolkien; and a thing that consisted of Roger Lancelyn Green and T.H White but which grew to include John Boorman and your actual Thomas Malory; and rattling in at a very poor third, Mr Shakespeare and Herr Wagner. But I only ever loved King Arthur and Siegfried because they reminded me of Luke Skywalker.
I have an image of myself in a quite different part of the multiverse, sitting in a wood panelled room, surrounded by withered brown copies of the Three Musketeers and Beowulf and the Iliad, and I suppose visited from time to time by newly scrubbed ex-public school boys who want to hear my profound insights. But on this timeline, I have an excellent collection of 1970s comic books, am re-reading the complete works of Steve Gerber, and have accepted that I will never read Sense and Sensibility.
Neither Mr Chips nor CS Lewis exist on my timeline. I would be no good at departmental meetings, grant applications, or SATS assessments.
Captain America is more than just a story. I care what happens to it. I probably shouldn't, but I do.
I don't really understand nationalism. “But how would you feel if white people were the minority in England?" they ask me "How would you feel if there were no white people left at all?” I literally wouldn’t care, and can't imagine how anyone else could possibly care, any more than I can really imagine how anyone could care about kicking a ball between two posts.
But I’m actually quite patriotic. In the sense of having an affection for my home. I’m English because I grew up in England; doubtless if I had grown up in France I’d be French. If I think of Sunday afternoon I think of people playing cricket, not on a village green but in front of the slightly smelly changing rooms in the rather muddy municipal park. Not that I like cricket: I think it’s the most boring and pointless sport ever invented, apart from all the others. If I think of politics and government and leaders I think of Big Ben and the houses of parliament. I think of the late Queen and the Silver Jubilee, but that sets me off thinking about sweary people with spiky hair who were really cross about her and they are kind of my home too. My country, yes, but with a small affectionate lower case C not a big threatening capital one.
By the same token, I have a "patriotic" affection for some stories; not a nationalistic wish to defend them nor a fascistic desire to freeze them in a particular form.
I don’t deal with moral quandaries by asking What Would Peter Parker Do, although that might not be a bad idea. I don’t pray to Captain America, although I believe some people do. (Use him as a symbol in pathworkings and vision quests, at any rate.) But when I think of heroism and integrity I think of Steve Rogers or Clark Kent. When I think of a scientist, I think of Jon Pertwee. If I try to envisage home and safety then I think of a rabbit pouring out condensed milk and a bear getting stuck in the doorway…
CS Lewis said that when he tried to describe his spiritual life, it made him sound more holy and pious than he could possibly be; that there were not any words in English small enough to describe the sense he sometimes had of God’s presence in a rainy sky.
I guess I read a comic book most days and I watch a comic-book inspired movie most weeks and my flat is full of iconic posters. I don’t know if there is an internal dynamic that makes stories created within the Star Wars milieu resonate with me more than other stories, of if something structural kicks off a Pavlovian response; or if collecting Star Wars canon is a habit like collecting greek statues and a jigsaws; or if the movies are somehow connected to a deep Freudian well of Platonic forms; or if I just kinda like them.
But here is the thing.
The great stories, the ones which really matter: Winnie the Pooh, Doctor Who, Spider-Man, Captain America, Star Wars. They have one thing in common.
They are all owned by Walt Disney. And Walt Disney is one of the companies that has pre-emptively complied with Donald Trumps’ anti-diversity, anti-equality and anti-inclusivity legislation.
So I could foresee a time when I could not, in good conscience, read them any more.
And I don’t know quite how I would cope with that.