A meeting with Doctor Doom in Latveria forces Steve to confront the realities of the harsh new world he’s awoken in. Meanwhile, Dave Colton and the Howling Commandos infiltrate Doom’s fortress to rescue hostages, but instead they uncover a sinister truth behind Doom’s rise to power. Captain America #3 is written by Chip Zdarsky, drawn by Valerio Schiti, colored by Frank Martin and lettered by Joe Caramagna.
About halfway through my writing this, I read that the hatemonger Charlie Kirk had been shot dead in Utah. I feel this is an extremely upsetting moment – though I am not sure if somberly denouncing political violence will do anything to change what the forces of white nationalism and authoritarianism and political Christianity are already doing in this country. I feel political violence is terrifying, and I utterly deplore it as a decent human being, though so many on what we still very politely call the “other side of the aisle” are not in fact decent, and would indeed only grudgingly deem me to even be a human being. This article is more or less precisely a statement of what I am thinking and feeling – a statement of why I deplore what has happened, and why I deplore the man it happened to.
I deplore it all the more so because I know that rage and violent hate – the rage he created and the rage he was killed by – are frankly all-American.
Honestly, this assasination doesn’t make me have to change much about this review – but I figured I should mention what’s going on in America in an article about Captain America. But then, this isn’t really the false dream that was America anymore: no more America the normal, America the hegemonic, America the post-racial, America the opportunity. This is what comes after that: This is, to quote Leonard Cohen, what comes after America.
Cohen wrote this poem in 2016, shortly before he died – and to the end, he had his poet’s voice and what his son beautifully called his “burning soul.” And in 2018, pages from that burning soul’s final notebooks were published in The Flame, a posthumous collection of portraits, lyrics, poems, including this one, “WHAT IS COMING 2.16.03.” I hope you’ll allow me to quote some of it, because it reads like prophecy set on fire and it scares the shit out of me. It gives you an idea, I think, of what I mean by “after America”:
What is coming
ten million people
in the street cannot stop
What is coming
the American Armed Forces
cannot control
the President
of the United States
and his counselors
cannot conceive
initiate
command
or direct
everything
you do
[…]
you have no understanding
of the consequences
of what you do
oh and one more thing
you aren’t going to like
what comes after
America
I must say that for all I very frankly did not like America, I really very truly do not like what has come after America. The only people who seem to are not people with whom I would care to associate myself, nor would I care to associate myself with people who would associate with them. What we are seeing is an America that does not even care to pretend its pretenses: a post-American America, that which, as I say, comes after.
Again, I am writing this the day the hatemonger Charlie Kirk was shot dead in Utah.
At the very, very least, Captain America has outlived the America he was created to epitomize and fight for, stalwart and true – he is the Man Out of Time, out of the Golden Age, the “Fighting Forties.” But since Leonard Cohen is right, then I think the character of Captain America, created in 1940, has in fact outlived the United States of America as it was recreated in 1964 with the Voting Rights and Civil Rights acts.
It is no surprise that in a world like this one both Chip Zdarsky and Deniz Camp are writing Captain Americas who are essentially post-American. Of course, Camp has been able to terrifyingly literalize this in a canon and a continuity siloed off by – well, a new universe, what’s really a gimmick, though that’s such an ugly word for such triumphantly incisive and smart comics. But the only protection Zdarsky’s work has is its being ostensibly set in the past.
But it came out Sept. 10, 2025, the day the hatemonger Charlie Kirk was shot dead in Utah. It is not really legible as something set in the past to me. It is a post-American issue of Captain America, after all.
Or perhaps it is actually something else entirely: a ghost story.
David Colton is in his own words a ghost – the deaths he has dealt made him a ghost of a man. Once again I think we see the ideas of imperial boomerang: what we deal out to the world comes back to kill us, only we do not die.
We have become David Colton – the American ghost, and he serves a country that is itself a ghost. Doom, like so many revolutionaries – and dictators – in history, has nothing but praise for America’s ideals. And though he says otherwise, he has nothing but praise for American practice: the ideal of speaking morality and doing atrocity. Latveria is ghostly, too: a ghost of a democracy, a Napoleonic costume-state masking the imperious will of one man as a popular mandate. (Remind you of anything?)
Against that we have Steve Rogers: He is a good man, and he knows firmly that Victor von Doom is not. He tells the truth, of course – but so do many bad men.
Cap, too, is a ghost of himself – lost, adrift, a specter of a world that once was, further bereft by the death of his Bucky, the loss of his good right hand.
Pointedly, he’s also lost his iconography – in this arc, he’s clad in some hideous tacticool special ops garb with a black asterisk where a bright white star should be. I hate this outfit – for me it’s head wingies and buccaneer boots or nothing (and did you know those wings can be taken out as stabbing weapons? The Golden Age was a fascinating time). But beyond my aesthetic sense, it’s wrong – it’s not a star, and so this is a flagsuit hero without a flag.
Chip Zdarsky hates it, too. He knows that it’s wrong – it’s meant to be wrong. It’s the suit of David Colton, in spirit if not in actuality – and once again their stories and their deeds and thoughts merge as Steve sees that the devil Doom has said some very true things, as the devil is wont to do. He sees that the flag he and Colton wear is a “colder, darker one” – a ghost of a flag.
To not be David Colton – to oppose him and his flag in every way (just look at the coloring here; Frank Martin is doing such a tremendous job) – Steve has to be the light. He is a ghost, yes, but he is the ghost of America – he has to be a Captain America who exists after America.
This week, I think we’re lucky to have him.
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Margot Waldman
Margot Waldman is a Mega City Two-based scholar, researcher and writer. Her great loves are old comics, Shakespearean theater and radical social justice – in no particular order. One day, she hopes to visit the 30th century.
