O Captain! Our Captain! Hero's Day Is Done

Recalls a character in Captain America #25, yesterday's landmark edition: "Even though he was a soldier, you could almost feel the kindness behind those eyes hardened by war. He'd fought through the worst days of the 20th century, and he was still the most decent man you could ever meet."

Ah, yes, dreamy-eyed dames liked their Real Men like that back in the day, and it was, of course, a metaphor for America's romantic view of itself: tough but fair, honest and undeniably studly.

Comics are essentially fables and myths, and the best ones are simple stories that explain something complicated about ourselves. Marvel and DC Comics had too many heroes and too many superpowers, but there was something comforting in that. You could pick and choose, and if one reality didn't suit you, there was another on the rack.

Captain America was thawed out of the ice in the early 1960s, as one of the Avengers. Superman famously died about a decade ago, before coming back a year later. A character named Phoenix (Get it? Phoenix?), one of the X-Men, has died about 15 times.

"It's known as the 'Marvel death,' " says Matthew Klokel, owner of Fantom Comics in Northwest Washington. "Somebody who dies, but doesn't really."

"Captain America? He hasn't died in 50 years!" giggled Tom Spurgeon, editor of www.comicsreporter.com. "It's an odd way to tell a story, but it's not peculiar in comics."

And yet, the death of the only comic-book superhero who still wore the Stars and Stripes seems to be worthy of pause in the blur of pop culture.

In 1969, Peter Fonda hopped on board a chopper in "Easy Rider," dubbed himself "Captain America," in that hey-man-everything's-groovy '60s kind of hash-addled vibe, and it said something about the careening way the nation was wobbling forward.

In comics, things got edgier, meaner, grimmer. Violence became more realistic, with more consequences. Superman died, Batman broke his back, Spider-Man took off his mask. The good guys were flawed.

And so was Captain America, much like his country. He started out a true-blue patriotic icon, but in recent years grew more complex. He had gone from always fighting for the government to sometimes fighting against it. The battle for American ideals had changed, and so, we learned yesterday, had the means of menace and treachery.

Dear Steve Rogers and the mythical mid-century America -- its front porches, decency and good manners -- are dead.

"Steve Rogers is gone, but it's likely Captain America will come back, but who he is, what he represents, and how he reflects American society, that's uncertain," said Dan Buckley, president and publisher of Marvel Entertainment.

There's a five-edition series coming up, with superheroes dealing with the stages of grief. It'll be a while before any new Captain America makes an appearance.

Who he will be by then, and who we will be, is an open question. We change in these little ways, in our myths and fables, and bit by bit we wake up to see a different nation, and different heroes, looking back out of the mirror.