A mysterious force dares to tamper with the threads of history. Captain America and a squad of Marvel heroes leap into action to safeguard the founding of the United States of America. The fate of the nation hangs in the balance at the dawn of the Revolution, as these heroes must navigate the treacherous waters of the past to ensure a future that remains untarnished. Marvel’s 1776 #1 is written by J. Michael Straczynski, penciled by Sean Damien Hill and Ron Lim, inked by Jay Leisten and Roberto Poggi, colored by Alex Sinclair and lettered by Joe Caramagna.
Many of us know, or may even be related to, someone who is, as a hobby, fascinated by American history. Their bookshelves are lined with historical texts, biographies and accounts detailing the myriad battles, political maneuvering and statistics of the American Revolutionary and Civil wars. If we’re lucky, this person doesn’t just stop at the canonization of certain stories and delves deeper into the origins of the land that became America, including its troubled histories of colonization and enslavement, though many won’t. Many will simply be content with the valorization of famous names in powdered wigs or the landowners who owned other humans. Because history sapped of its context, sapped of truth, is a much easier story to digest and makes it far easier to maintain a level of pride for the nation Americans call home.
Plus, if you don’t learn about what really happened, you don’t have to feel bad about it. It’s the difference between sitting down with the 1619 Project to recontextualize basic narratives learned in school and adopting the attitude of this year’s Presidential Executive Order #14253, which said historical education should not be about “divisive narratives” but instead should “instill pride in the hearts of all Americans.”
Marvel’s 1776 #1 reveals one such superficial American history buff in septuagenarian Babylon 5 creator J. Michael Straczynski. His story — a bland semiquincentennial What If? involving Morgan Le Fay and a few lunchbox-selling Avengers interceding in Revolutionary battles for the fate of America’s very existence — seems more intent on name-dropping famous battles (the Battle of Freeman’s Farm, the Battle of Saratoga), historical figures (Ben Franklin, “Gentleman Johnny” Burgoyne, Horatio Gates) and statistics (multiple characters share accurate specific event years and numbers of casualties off the tops of their heads) than weaving a compelling example of speculative historical fiction.
Straczynski expects us to be excited at the very mention of Benedict Arnold or the Continental Congress, which suggests the audience for 1776 is his fellow Chernow-reading Boomers or maybe Hamilton-obsessed millennials whose tastes intersect with an MCU-level understanding of Marvel Comics.
Though there’s a third possible audience this book seems either purposefully or unconsciously geared toward, and that’s the folks who specifically are only interested in the “American pride” to which the president’s executive order alluded.
Let’s take a closer look at the most important exchange in the story. After our assembled Avengers learn of Morgan Le Fay’s plot to destroy America, it’s Hulk alter-ego Bruce Banner who has the gall to suggest, “Would it really be so bad if Britain won the war?” prompting Spider-Man to say, “What about slavery to start?” to which Bruce notes the years slavery was respectively “abolished” in Britain and the United States. Despite decades of canonically questioning the American establishment, Captain America is insulted by the very suggestion of Bruce’s point. Bruce goes on to give a passing acknowledgement of “a lot of awful things” done by Britain and the United States, but one panel later has already conceded that he’s “still in favor of going back and doing this.”
This is the closest 1776 is willing to come to engaging with the horrors of America’s past. The conversation lasts for less than three pages and is immediately put to bed so the story may continue.
Now that we know the central argument of this book is that the sins of the past were worth it for the continued existence of our present and its canonized history, let’s put that exchange into the context of this book. Its main cast consists of the following Marvel characters: Doctor Strange, Captain America, Hulk, Spider-Man, Iron Man and Clea. Despite the current lineup of The Avengers, you’ll notice there isn’t one character of color in that grouping, and only one hero who’s a woman. (One can only imagine how dramatically this narrative would change if current Avengers Storm or Black Panther were along for the ride.)
You will not see any characters of color in 1776 aside from a brief cameo by the sorcerer Cagliostro, or any women other than Clea and Le Fay. (Invisible Woman is notably absent, despite appearing on the cover.) Straczynski isn’t interested in the experiences of African Americans, Indigenous people or women here. This is a story almost exclusively about white men time traveling to save a white man’s privileged idea of what American history should look like and how it should be preserved from the meddling of a witch.
Art-wise, Sean Damien Hill as the illustrator of the “past” sections of this book makes perfect sense from a craft perspective. Paired with Jay Leisten on inks, the pages have an etched quality, as if they’re working to loosely evoke the surface of a dollar bill. His future-scenes counterpart is a very past-his-prime Ron Lim, whose art still looks quite classically Lim-y and fits appropriately with our superheroes’ foibles, but is nowhere near what it was in his Silver Surfer heyday.
But the choice of Hill as the primary illustrator is still an odd one. He’s a Black artist, who has worked on a variety of stories — The Hated, Is’nana the Werespider: Drums of Ogoun, Cyborg, Blood Syndicate and Bishop: War College — that explicitly centered Black protagonists. Yet here, Hill is drawing a story devoid of Black characters that seems uninterested in engaging with any of what made those stories interesting. (Whether War College worked for you or not, it was still undeniably refreshing and new to see the classic X-Men recast as African Americans.)
It would be fine if 1776 were just another middling Marvel dud. There are plenty of those to go around. The larger problem is why Marvel felt a book like this needed to be published at all. We are living in a very transparent landscape of those in power trying to return America to some nonexistent all-white past. This is reflected in the horrific daily attacks from a newly emboldened faceless secret police force, efforts to destroy the American educational framework, official government accounts promoting white supremacist ideology through propagandist imagery of pioneers, even attempts to erase our very history as I alluded to above. To publish a book that even potentially aligns with this ideology is irresponsible. If no one at Marvel made the connection, it shows an incredible amount of ignorance about the content they’re putting on the shelves.
In promoting 1776, Straczynski said he liked that Marvel comics happened in “the real world” and stated that, “At a time when so much of American discourse has become factionalized, it is a good time to look back and see where this began, and what it still means today.” This is a noble thought, but I suspect no one is going to read 1776 and feel like it reflects our real, very diverse, culturally rich world, nor will it cause anyone to reassess the meaning of the American Revolution, our “factionalized discourse” or what led to our current moment. Readers who bother will find nothing but a homogenized look at our past and our present that excludes much of what makes it interesting in the first place.
It’s clear Straczynski has a hobbyist’s interest in American history, but by letting this go to print, Marvel signals it’s only interested in a certain kind of history, one that avoids “divisive narratives” and concerns itself only with “instill[ing] pride” in a particularly narrow-minded group of Americans.
Buy 1776 #1 here. (Disclaimer: As an Amazon Associate, ComicsXF may earn from qualifying purchases.)
Adam Reck is the cartoonist behind Bish & Jubez as well as the co-host of Battle Of The Atom. Follow him @adamreck.bsky.social.
