Captain America Is Dead?

The other day a friend asked me why, since I'm such a comic geek, haven't I written anything about Captain America.

Simple: I read comic books. So I know that this death isn't going to stick. Either it'll be reversed through some plot twist (The going theory, I hear, is that it's going to involve body doubles and/or clones.) or there'll be a new character in the uniform.

And, frankly, I'm not very interested. The death of a major character might have been noteworthy back when it was Superman. When it was rare, untried, and exceptional. These days, death in comics has become way too cheap. It's not that, like mutant heaven, there's a revolving door involved so much as it's lost all its dramatic impact. It carries no meaning, no permanence, no sense of gravity, and nothing else that the death of a fictional character should bring. Instead, it's all hype.

A gimmick, a trick, designed to drive up sales that little bit to meet some kind of quarterly profit mark. And, lately, it seems that all Marvel is able to do is publish big hyped event after big hyped event. Just stringing them together and shouting into the darkness that, no, really, this time it's important, this time it's going to count, this time it's real. Well, I, for one, am sick of all the screaming. And it's gotten to the point where I'm so deafened by the constant buffering of mega-events that I can't even hear the noise anymore. In short, I could care less.