I had other stuff planned for today, you know. I had planned to eschew the geek-stuff for a while, wax poetic on that scary portion of the world that doesn’t involve wearing capes or alien lineages or accidentally changing the timeline by punching a dinosaur after you’re transported into the Mesozoic by your arch-nemesis.
And then they had to go and kill Captain America.
In Marvel Comics’ Captain America comic series, issue #25 (released this past Wednesday, March 7th), Captain America was shot and killed, and not even in the glorious blaze of battle. For a superhero, dying anywhere but in battle is the equivalent of a regular person dying on the toilet. Cap had just admitted defeat in the Civil War between the heroes, conceded his true identity to the world, and was walking up the steps to a federal courthouse. It was there that he was shot by a sniper, unarmed, and presumably killed. This killing was orchestrated by The Red Skull, Cap’s most significant archenemy and a World War Two era Nazi.
While Marvel Comics’ editors are not admitting to any particular allegory between the Marvel Universe and our own, they’ve readily admitted that there is a significance, and that readers are more than welcome to draw their own conclusions. News outlets exploded in similar fashion to 1993’s Death of Superman event, and people came up to me at my workplace and asked me if I was in mourning, as I’d apparently spilled geek all over my shirt this morning and didn’t realize it. Certainly the death of a beloved fictional character can hit us just as hard as a nonfictional death, sometimes even more so. The intimacy of fiction has the potential to be far deeper, far more personal, and far more perfect than our intimacy with the awkward, real world.
There’s a certain four-letter word that comes to mind anytime a death strikes the media.
Indeed, Captain America #25 was published with two covers (one by Steve Epting and one by Ed McGuinness), both of which are currently fetching a significant price. These issues immediately sold out at comic shops nationwide, or equally as likely, were pulled from shelves and sold at twenty times their cover price on the ‘Bay by savvy comic shop owners, at prices ranging wildly from $15 to $100 for a first printing, depending on buy-it-now prices, migration patterns of circus clowns, and what I had for dinner. Honestly, I can’t make sense of the prices, but it’s clear that every copy has sold. People want to see Captain America get murdered, cry a little, and wait for Marvel Comics to inevitably bring him back to life in some unsatisfying way. Maybe the Super Soldier Serum that makes him so strong has some unknown property that will preserve him. Maybe a cosmic being from beyond will intervene. Maybe he’s food for some very patriotic worms. Other such Captain America collectibles, of which there are many, have not seem an increase in demand just yet.
So, how does the principle of ‘insider trading’ fall into investing in comics? Most of the world only found out about Cap’s death on Wednesday when the comic was released. Wizard Entertainament, however, was tipped early off by Marvel’s EIC, Joe Quesada. What makes this complicated is that Wizard also operates both online and brick-and-mortar shops (which was even more complicated when Wizard Magazine was primarily a price guide for comics). A quick eBay search reveals that WizardUniverse has an unusually huge number of unnaturally highly graded issues of Captain America #25 for sale. This is not the first time that this unnatural pairing of ‘news outlet’ and ‘retail outlet for the things that you report on’ had caused shady dealings for Wizard, either.
There are very few names that the average person would recognize in terms of superheroism, and Captain America is one of them, because he’s OUR guy. He’s not from space like Superman, he’s not a jerk like Batman, he doesn’t turn green and huge and he doesn’t shoot sticky webs and have ultrahuman agility. He was a scrawny nerd who beefed up and fought for the right of scrawny nerds to be scrawny nerds, or whatever you wanted to be free to be. And he’s named after where we live.
Rest in peace, Captain America, and thanks for making my very expensive Marvel Comics Encyclopedia completely inaccurate now.
