Well, now we know that Marvel's much-hyped "controversial" project is actually just going to be the origin of Wolverine. This will no doubt come as an enormous disappointment to all those of you who were looking forward to seeing Captain America, the black gay psychopath. But don't abandon hope just yet, because CAPTAIN AMERICA is still being packed off to the Marvel Knights line for a makeover.

This seems a bizarre choice, to say the least. Certainly Dan Jurgens' run on the book will not be missed. Combining the world's most derivative and uninspired superheroics with a tone of obnoxious and nauseating flagwaving, it is a stunningly bad comic, one of those books that is worth seeing if only to redefine your benchmark of badness. The current issue, for example, features a madman called David who wants to take over the world with a nuclear missile he's stolen from the former Soviet Union. The issue features a Soviet supervillain who still addresses the hero as "capitalist", and the utterly vomitous sight of a small Russian boy pointing at the hero's peril and crying, "He is America, papa! America!" It really does defy belief, and may well be the most unintentionally hilarious book on the market today.

So there can be no doubt that the book as it presently stands deserves to be axed, and indeed preferably incinerated. But the plan is not just to find a different writer, but to go one further and give it the Marvel Knights treatment. There have been rumours of hiring Brian Azzarello to write it. All of this sounds very unusual for Marvel's blandest character, and raises two questions in my mind. One, what's the Marvel Knights line for these days, anyway? Two, is it actually possible to do a Marvel Knights style Captain America without either trashing the character or changing him so far beyond recognition that you'd have been better off just axing him and creating somebody new instead?

When the Marvel Knights line was first launched, it was entirely clear what it was for. Against the background of a safe, conventional and unadventurous line of books, the Marvel Knights line was charged with reinvigorating stale concepts by putting them in the hands of creators liable to do something a bit different with them. It's at this point that words like "edgy" often get bandied about, though in practice nobody actually knows what "edgy" means. What does seem fair to say, though, is that the Marvel Knights line had a license to ignore the house style and aim for a more intelligent audience. They were still doing superhero comics, but they were superhero books with aspirations to genuine artistic worth.

Nowadays, with Knights co-founder Joe Quesada running the whole of Marvel, the need for a Marvel Knights line seems less clear. The sort of quirky creators that Marvel Knights drafted in are now finding work across the rest of the line. Grant Morrison has gone from MARVEL BOY to NEW X-MEN. Paul Jenkins, following INHUMANS and SENTRY, is now writing SPIDER-MAN and HULK. BLACK PANTHER has become a part of the main line without changing a great deal. Series that would have been pushing it even under the original Marvel Knights line are now turning up in the X-Men line, like Milligan and Allred's X-FORCE. The values and priorities of the Marvel Knights line have spread across the rest of the line, and obviously that's something to be welcomed.

But then, what's the Marvel Knights line still there for? It doesn't seem to have much of an idea itself. DAREDEVIL is still plugging away, but the rest of the line seems confused. The eponymous MARVEL KNIGHTS team book is one of the most conventional and safe titles in the entire Marvel line, and it's a surprise to see the current regime publishing it at all, let alone in their supposedly innovative imprint. There's an ongoing PUNISHER series being launched, which sounds worryingly as if it's missed the point that the character works best in small doses, and there's a GHOST RIDER relaunch that might well be okay but isn't what you'd call an exciting prospect. The news is elsewhere. Marvel has moved on, and the Marvel Knights line is left wondering what its purpose is.

Into this rather rundown corner of the Marvel empire (well, rather more rundown than the rest of it, anyway) comes CAPTAIN AMERICA. What the hell do you do with this bozo that can count as artistic or aspirational? Was there ever a character less suited for intelligent stories than Captain America?

I'm not a big fan of the character, to put it mildly, and I think the book has serious conceptual problems that make it extremely difficult to do anything particularly interesting in its current format, no matter how good a writer you are. But then, let's draw a distinction here between the concept of the character and the concept of the book. The concept of the character is that this guy's got the best possible human physique, he's got an unbreakable shield, he loves his country, he represents its aspirations (as opposed to its reality - if you take that line, you're dead in the water from the start), he's really a very good man, and he's a superhero. The concept of the book is that he's presented in rather simplistic superhero stories of such a nature that he's invariably portrayed as being morally flawless. During its more radical phases the book will sometimes have him become disillusioned with the USA, but only to indicate that the USA has fallen short of its aspirations. The character's own moral values are, with a handful of exceptions, left unquestioned.

It can't be an aspect of his character that he's morally flawless, because there's no such thing. He's simply presented in stories of such a type that he appears morally flawless because the story never forces him into taking a view on anything controversial. He'll be opposed to murder, broadly in favour of being a bit more tolerant, and really quite firmly opposed to heroin. Ask him which political party he votes for, and he'll go and hide under a stone. Where does he stand on gun control? On abortion?

As a typical "active citizen" the character must inevitably have a viewpoint on these matters, but any viewpoint he expresses is not going to be universally held and so would shatter his position in the story as a character who is Always Right. The moment he starts voicing any controversial opinions, a large chunk of the audience will start complaining that Oh No He Isn't. For the most part, the series reconciles this difficulty by protecting the character from any situations that might force him to express such an opinion.

I think it has to be significant that most of the better-remembered CAPTAIN AMERICA stories are the ones that involved subverting and breaking with the format. Englehart having the character give it all up in despair after exposing Nixon, and going off to sulk in the avowedly non-patriotic identity of Nomad for a few months. Gruenwald having him basically kicked out by the Reagan administration and replaced by a psychotic racist. Hell, Mark Waid must be kicking himself that somebody got to these ideas before him. Yes, they all hit the reset button at the end of the day, but they're still pretty decent stories. And they work by screwing up the format and departing from it. Good CAPTAIN AMERICA stories that worked within the format are thinner on the ground.

All logic says that this character wants to appear in stories about the USA. After all, it's pretty much the character's central theme. If he's not doing stories about the USA, there's not much point to him at all. There's a wealth of story material there. It covers half a continent, for christ's sake. There's millions of the bastards living there. If you can't find something interesting to say about America, you're just not trying hard enough. But the only way to get to any of this material is to throw out the window one of the fundamentals of the series and allow the character to adopt some opinions that are not universally shared. And in order to avoid this becoming didactic, you need to stop implying that the character's views are necessarily always right.

This could potentially be interesting, since you can position the character anywhere within the mainstream American political spectrum and still have it make sense. Could be interesting to have the character as an anti-abortion Republican who supports the right to bear arms. Why not? There are millions of American voters holding those views - they can't all be mentally defective psychopaths, however much we liberals like to stereotype them. Writing him with conventional American viewpoints that the target audience is likely to disagree with cracks the character wide open and leaves you with all sorts of new possibilities. Or you can just make him a liberal and leave open the possibility that he's not always right - not quite as confrontational, but it still widens things enormously.

But what you lose, in order to gain all this material, is any sense of this character as truly representing America. By sticking to the bare minimum of universally held opinions, the series is able to maintain its fiction that there is any such thing as American values. If you start forcing the character into politically difficult areas, you expose the fact that it's just too diverse a nation for any single character to sensibly "represent" it without being reduced to a total cypher. There is no single American opinion, and there is no single American aspiration. What the character purports to represent is too vague and blurry to stand up to serious examination. You can open up some interesting dramatic areas by doing this material, but you're abandoning a central premise of the character in doing so.

The original concept of Captain America is not one that can easily work these days, at least in any vaguely intelligent work that aims to take it seriously. He was, after all, created as a patriotic hero during World War II. He's a propaganda figure rooted in wartime concepts of nationalism. What can you do with that, other than play it straight as a flagwaving kids book or mutilate the premise beyond recognition in the hope of getting something intelligent out of it? The former is a faintly sickening concept; the latter is going to need some pretty astonishing footwork if its not to come off as a cheap trashing of the character done for the sake of pissing on somebody else's work. Even if the work in question deserves it, surely we have better things to do with our time?

A Marvel Knights revamp for the character can go one of two ways: A pointless attempt to give the character a bit of "attitude", presumably with the usual set of ideas stolen from THE AUTHORITY, or a serious attempt to do some kind of political or even satirical series with him - which is theoretically viable, but insanely difficult and essentially turns him into an unrecognisable character. The truth may be that this character just doesn't have a place in Quesada's Marvel, and the worst case scenario is that Marvel may be about to prove that in a very ugly way.

Paul O'Brien is the author of the weekly X-AXIS comics review.

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