Captain America, Masculinity, and Violence: The Evolution of a National Icon by J. Richard Stevens (review)

The most surprising moment in J. Richard Stevens’s Captain America, Masculinity, and Violence comes not in any of its nine chapters, but on the final page of the endnotes, where Stevens recounts his difficulties obtaining image permissions from Marvel Comics, a subsidiary of the Walt Disney Company since 2009. After he yielded to Marvel’s demand that he not use an image of the character on the cover, they asked him “to reduce the number of illustrations from forty-four to ten and to resubmit [his] proposal” (340). He resubmitted, and then received “an objection to [the] book’s ‘scope’” (340). Marvel ignored his two subsequent permissions requests. “I did,” Stevens recounts, “manage to get a member of the Marvel staff on the phone who had working knowledge of the permissions process and was bluntly told that I needed to understand that ‘Disney is charge now’ and that ‘the rules have changed’” (340). Stevens’s final line announces, in defeat, “This book contains no images of Marvel or Disney properties.”

This telling moment, buried in the endnotes, warrants discussion here for two reasons. First, the anecdote’s position conveys much about Stevens’s priorities in the book. He has written a thoroughgoing longitudinal history of seventy-four years of a character appearing primarily in monthly comics magazines, and he approaches that character primarily as the protagonist of narratives and secondarily as the object of fan discussion. That is, he does not approach the character as a product of media-industrial labor or as an object of corporate management and exploitation, for if he had, his experience with the permissions office might have appeared as the book’s opening anecdote as a gambit for introducing questions of private ownership of this “national icon.” The permissions anecdote also warrants discussion for a second reason: both its presence and its attentiveness to procedural and textual detail signal Stevens’s methodological care in handling his archive—both comics and their surrounding ecosystem of letter columns, fanzines, and web forums—and in explaining the changing discursive and commercial practices that have shaped that archive. Captain America, Masculinity, and Violence performs a historiographic tour de force, offering scholars a model for both breadth and depth of research into mass cultural narratives.

While the book addresses screen adaptations of Captain America, from the Republic Pictures serial of the 1940s to the Marvel Studios Avengers (2011- ) franchise, it devotes few pages to cinematic versions of the character. The book divides Captain America comics into eight periods according to the hero’s stance toward serving as America’s “super-soldier,” and it reads his narratives against American cultural myths about national virtue, justice, and violence. Yet, even as Stevens attends to narrative and national ideology, he also attends to the publisher’s history of revising “Cap,” especially his origin story. In every iteration, a scientist uses a “super soldier” formula that gives Cap his powers, and a Nazi spy assassinates the scientist, but in some versions, Cap kills the spy while in others Cap tries, but fails, to prevent the spy from killing himself. Stevens reads these ritually re-narrated origin stories as symptomatic of each new version of Cap’s attitude toward the use of force. In his analyses of the method and manner of Cap’s violence, Stevens (and his research assistants) provide quantitative data that humanistic studies of comics seldom deliver, such as comparisons of Captain America’s kill rates between the comics of the 1940s (44 percent) and 1950s (56 percent) (62). This book sets a high bar for any subsequent historiography of comic-book characters.

Scholars interested in gender will likely feel disappointed that despite the “Masculinity” appearing in the title, Stevens spends little time analyzing Cap in terms of historically specific discourses of masculinity, although he does visit the topic of gender in each section. By contrast, the book delivers...