Calling Captain America

Captain America has hit the theaters, the summer genre comic superhero flick. I recall a conversation that I had with a comic book store owner in Elizabethtown a few years ago about comics.

He shared with me--a comic book novice--that many of the creators of comic book characters were Jewish. I found this article that provides additional details on this history. And the time period was the before or close to WW II for most of the lasting characters, Captain America included. In this first issue (1940), Captain America clocks Hitler with a right.

Besides a brief stint one summer and I where my brothers and I had a babysitter whose contributions to our well-being were to make us lunch, keep an eye for excessive trouble-making, and giving us access to her massive collection of comic books which I read for about three weeks straight and then moved on (I got burned out on Richie Rich, the poor little rich boy), I never really became a devotee of comic books. So I found the conversation with the comic store proprietor enlightening.

The owner commented that these Jewish comic book character creators, as outsiders and from immigrant families from Europe, used their imaginations to fashion characters who were both some variation on Everyman (Clark Kent) and a Superhero (Superman). Ethnic, social, cultural, religious, economic, historical, and political forces provided the spark for this creative era from outsiders who sought to illustrate power and goodness in a hero archetype, during an era that was dark and foreboding (one seemingly more like our own all of the time). Make the evil-doers pay.

The messianic parallels of comic books characters to Jesus are certainly startling. The confluence of power and goodness, the Everyman and the Everlasting. We need real heroes. We need Jesus.

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