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My Aunt, My Sister...
2007-05-29 16:58:16

CAPTAIN AMERICA #25 page 7

Received a letter on CAPTAIN AMERICA #25 that I wanted to share with everybody, along with my response to the letter writer. And no, this one isn't about Cap's death.

>Anthony Padilla
Lake Elmo MN 55042

Do you think I'm angry you've "killed" Captain America? NO! I'm more angry over the comment Sharon Carter makes that Peggy Carter, Cap's beloved "Mademoiselle," is her aunt! Peggy Carter is Sharon's sister not her aunt!!!! This has been established in too many older issues and not justified in changing. I am annoyed by this "sliding timeline" mentality and nonsense you yahoos practice when you start messing with continuity because you think readers need to worry about how old characters are in order to accept a comic's plausibility! Figure out the Marvel Universe is a fictional reality where our laws of time and history don't and can't apply and it's the grandest excercise in imagination to suspend disbelief and not just enjoy a comic but to accept a comic's established history regardless of "contradictions" to our own world or logic. It just demonstrates a contempt on various levels to change a product of imagination to resemble reality when resembling reality wasn't an issue to begin with. Peggy is Sharon's sister. Always has been, always will. And just consider, changing continuity erases a previous creator's efforts (it does, don't even think of denying that if you honestly care), people who were responsible for putting you self-same creators where you are today, working with their characters and the situations they conceived. Creators that come after you can erase your efforts too and make them seem not to matter, so practice some respect and reverance to continuity because it's respect and reverance to previous creators and because it has an infinite amount of imagination to use. Excelsior.>

Anthony,

I hear what you’re saying, but honestly there’s not much else that can be done about this, other than updating the reference. Sharon is maybe in her early thirties—for her to have a sister who was in even her twenties in 1944 completely throws plausibility out the window. This only barely worked when Steve Englehart brought Peggy into the book in the 1970s, and it’s worked progressively less well as time has gone by—which is one of the reasons you’ve seen Peggy so rarely in the last decade-and-a-half.

And honestly, I don’t think this is disrespectful to the creators of the past or to their stories. Nobody at the time had any inkling that these characters would still be in continuous publication decades later—if they had, they would in all likelihood made different choices about how they progressed certain elements within the Marvel Universe. And in terms of respect, I think it’s far more respectful to continue to use a character that a previous creator put time and love and energy into making readers care about than to consign them to the dustbin of history simply because of an inconvenient fact. To me, this is no different than updating Reed and Ben fighting in World War Two.

And in point of fact, Peggy wasn’t “always” Sharon’s sister. When she was introduced in TALES OF SUSPENSE in the 60s, she was just “the girl Cap left behind in France in WWII” who happened to bear a striking resemblance to Agent 13. it was ten years before Englehart established that they were in fact sisters.

You say that readers don’t care about the plausibility of time and history in the Marvel Universe, and you’re right that some of them don’t. But many more of them do, as witnessed by the fact that when any discussion of the passage of time and the updating of historical references is mentioned in conversation, fans of all beliefs are quick to chime in, long and loud. The situation isn’t as simple as you make it out to be (and if I had to hazard a guess, you feel the way you do because you first encountered Peggy in those 70s stories as a young reader.)

In any event, thanks for the feedback.

Tom B

To be honest, I didn't even buy that Peggy could realistically be Sharon's aunt. I would have thought it would take a Great-Aunt to have a secret service romance in the 1940s. Although I suppose there is the get-out that some people refer to their Great-Aunts as their Aunts...

Posted by Fetsur on 2007-03-13 17:35:42

I didn't encounter Peggy back in the 70s, but I do agree with Anthony.

I do not see how folks can insist on the whole 'sliding timescale' thing without complaining about the fact that Peter Parker can give a whole speech in the time it takes him to land a punch. :P

Clearly time is wacky in the Marvel Universe (or people speak/think exceptionally quickly).

But what about Aunt May? Why does this not seem to apply to her? Surely by now she should have been retconned into Peter's "great Aunt"? ;)

Posted by Adrian J. Watts on 2007-03-13 17:52:12

Aunt May's defining characteristics do not tie her to a particular period or time. There might have been stories that do tie her to a particular period but none of them are considered fundamental to her character - whereas Captain America is exceptional in that his creation is completely tied to World War II, and his Silver Age introduction neatly allows him to exist in any time period after that.

Even though it brings his time in ice from twenty years to sixty years, it doesn't affect the credibility of the story one iota...

...it was unbelievable then and it's unbelievable now!! :)

Posted by Fetsur on 2007-03-13 18:14:23

The advantage of the "aunt" retcon is that it's as flexible as Marvel time--in 2007 Sharon's talking about her Aunt Peggy, in 2037 she's talking about her (great) Aunt Peggy, and so on.

I'm totally cool with the retcon of Ben and Reed's service in World War II, although I can't help but imagine that a cuter solution would be to reveal that Reed build a half-working time machine in college that stranded them both in the '40s for a couple of months.

Posted by jim_smith on 2007-03-13 18:18:13

I was just thinking the same thing, Jim! Great idea. Tom, get to work on that!
Here's the plot, national crisis, the nation needs Captain America to lead and to unite. Only problem is that he is dead. Solution: Ben and Reed go back in time to WW2 to find Cap and bring him out before the missile event. Time machine is captured (of course) so Ben and Reed must help Cap and Bucky hold off the Axis superpowered soldiers as well as hordes of enemies. 1945 Red Skull comes to 2007, kills modern Red Skull, and at the end, we all get Cap Back. Oh, and wolverine was there but doesn't remember any of it, even though his memories are restored.

Retcon all you want. In fact, tell the X-office to step it up. The continuity over there is WAY too thick.

Posted by bigdaddyhub2 on 2007-03-14 10:28:20

The title of your post makes me think of the film Chinatown.

Posted by ljacone on 2007-03-14 12:25:29

I would have loved it if Sharon was revealed to be Peggy's daughter. The question if Cap could be her father hanging over their heads would have been cool (I wouldn't have answered the question. I would have left it in the open).

Posted by Michael Heide on 2007-03-14 16:22:55

Personally I'd rather Sharon hadn't ever been brought back at all (wasn't that Wai'd fault?) although Bru has done wonders with her of course.

Posted by bomaya on 2007-03-14 17:03:33

Michael, you are sick. :)Anyway, the sliding timescale thing is one of my favourite elements of Marvel continuity. The change above seriously is not destructive at all. Yet if Cap's still being published in 30 years' time then he'll be a man out of time by almost 90 years! That's when the WWII element might have to stop being referenced so much...Here's one of my favourite continuity nitpicks. In FF#5, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby are shown contemporaneously as men in their 40s. Now, 10-15 years later (Marvel time) Marvel is depicted as it currently is, Stan Lee is an old man etc. Here's my explanation: in the MU, Marvel history has been condensed just like its characters' histories. (and Lee and Kirby were in their 60s in the early FF issues). That means in the MU, comics have gone from the Silver Age to right now in he space of only 10-15 years! (With an incredibly static period between the Golden Age and the 1990s).

Posted by skagandboneman on 2007-03-16 08:15:02

Just thought I'd lend my two cents. A column I wrote for the paper I work for. Basically, we do this type of thing for any prominent person, who lived in our coverage area and died.

John
www.zwire.com/site/index.cfm?newsid=18084530&BRD=1091&PAG=461&dept_id=346950&rfi=8

Posted by jsaccenti on 2007-03-19 10:04:02

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Posted by elvis222 on 2007-03-25 14:06:19

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About this blog:
Ramblings and musings from the mind of Tom Brevoort. "It won’t be clean. It won’t be fun. It mostly won’t be coherent."

About the author:
Tom Brevoort is Executive Editor for Marvel Comics, and oversees such titles as New Avengers, Civil War, and Fantastic Four.


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