Hey there! I’m sorry updates have been scarce lately. Last week I started a new job, and a lot of my focus lately has been on getting that job, then preparing for it, then getting settled in (it’s going great so far!). I’ve also been playing Breath of the Wild to the detriment of everything else in my life. I’ve actually sat down a couple of times over the past few weeks to try to write, but the words just weren’t flowing even when I had ideas I wanted to write about.
To be honest, I think I just needed a bit of a break. When I started up this newsletter, giving myself a deadline to put out a newsletter every Wednesday helped motivate me to write, and put out work I was proud of, even when I really didn’t want to, but recently the deadline has felt more stifling than anything. I’m probably going to be a bit more flexible and sporadic in my updates for a while, but rest assured that I still love writing and love all of you, and I plan for this newsletter to continue on. Thanks for sticking around.
One of the more interesting ideas intrinsic to superhero comics is that of reinvention. If you’re gonna keep a character interesting for decades on end, you’re gonna have to do something new with them every once in a while, or find new aspects of their personalities to explore. At their best, the endless narratives of superhero universes keep finding new facets of classic characters to mine.
Unfortunately, this seems to work best with “simpler,” or older, characters, be they ones with basic origins and motivations that can be reinterpreted in hundreds of valid ways like Superman and Batman, or characters like Archie and the rest of his Riverdale pals, whose archetypical qualities have, in recent years, allowed them to slot effortlessly into a number of new genres and mediums.
Most modern comic book characters, though, have more complicated or specific personalities, origins, and even origin stories, often tied to other events or characters from the get go. These are characters who are richer when first introduced, but more difficult to reinvent as time goes on; not that it stops creators and editors from trying, with sometimes frustrating results. Modern comic stories also take longer to tell1, yet each new creator still wants to put their own stamp on characters who have often only been around a few years, barely given a chance for invention before being reinvented.
That brings me to the character I want to discuss this week: America Chavez.
Originally created by Joe Casey and Nick Dragotta in 2011’s Vengeance mini-series2, America really took off as a character during Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie’s run on Young Avengers in 2013, where she won over fans both for being a stone-cold badass and for being a Latina lesbian in Marvel’s sea of straight, white characters.
While America’s appeal as a character is simple and obvious, though, her origin is anything but. Rather than type it all out, I’m just going to let this one page story from Marvel Comics 1000 explain it for me.
Now, when I say America Chavez’s origin is complicated, I don’t mean that as an insult. I love America’s origin, and think it has several doses of pure, inspirational heroism in it. But it’s not an origin story that just rolls off the tongue like Batman’s or Superman’s, the kind of origin that can be summed up in four panels. It’s actually far more complex than this story makes it out to be — for example, the Demiurge who created the Utopian Parallel where America was born is actually a future version of her teammate Wiccan3, and the reason she joined the Young Avengers in the first place was to protect Wiccan and make sure he safely grows up to eventually create her home at all. I love that kind of silly, convoluted stuff, but it can be a turn-off to new fans looking for an entry point to the character.
Thankfully, a complicated origin didn’t stop America from being the breakout character of Young Avengers4, and she’s popped up all over the Marvel Universe ever since. Where America has shone brightest has mainly been in team books, as a part of an ensemble (be it as a Young Avenger, part of Vengeance’s Teen Brigade, the Ultimates, the West Coast Avengers, or even brief, alternate reality stints on the A-Force or Secret Wars’ Seige team), which I suppose makes sense; her kinda aloof, strong silent-type act plays better as part of a team than it does when she’s the spotlight character. The fact that America ends up talking way too much has certainly been one of my criticisms of her solo, starring stories, but the bigger problem with those series loops back around to the start of this piece; the creators working on these stories keep insisting on tinkering with America’s origin, attempting to reinvent a character who really doesn’t need it, and, in fact, is often hurt by their efforts.
In 2017, Chavez had her own ongoing series, America, that lasted 12 issues, and unfortunately, it never worked for me as much as I wanted it to. Some of that was just growing pains, as the book was novelist Gabby Rivera’s first attempt at writing comics. Her America certainly talked too much for my taste, yet Rivera had an ambition I couldn’t help but to admire, attempting to cram several issues’ worth of story into each issue and tackling complex, weighty themes and ideas; even when they didn’t land, I appreciated the attempt. It was also refreshing to see America finally written by a Latino woman for the first time.
(Back in my days as a full-time comic critic I covered all but two issues of America for Retcon Punch, so if you want to see my more in-depth thoughts on the series, that would be the place to check.)
The problem with America that has stuck with me all this time, though, has to do with the changes Rivera made to America’s origin. Well, maybe “changes” isn’t exactly fair — it’s more like an addition, which doesn’t sound so bad until you remember that America’s origin was already complex and a bit overstuffed to begin with.
Turns out that while one of America’s moms was born in the Universal Parallel, the other was actually born on Planeta Fuertona, and she and her mother were refugees in the Parallel. Much of Rivera’s America revolved around America’s newly revealed Grandma, Madrimar, the culture and mythology of Fuertona, and the discovery that most of America’s powers come from her Fuertonian heritage rather than from the Parallel.
Now, I’ll start this by saying that I see a little more merit to this storyline now than I first did four years ago; it paints America as the child of immigrants who doesn’t get to learn about her own culture until she becomes an adult, and I know that’s a topic that resonates with many. I still have a lot of problems with it, though. First of all, as I mentioned, it really complicates an already complicated origin story; “I’m a refugee from a magical utopian parallel dimension created by my friend in the future inspired by my two moms” didn’t need the yes, and of “and I also have a grandma from a mythical alien planet that I’m a destined savior of.” I appreciate that Rivera at least attempted to integrate this new aspect of America’s past into her already-established backstory rather than retconning it outright, but America’s original origin was only three years old at that point and really only explored once — why reinvent something that’s barely been touched in the first place? Maybe this is uncharitable of me, and admittedly I’m overprotective of the Gillen and McKelvie Young Avengers series, but this just felt to me like Rivera was just really enchanted with her take on America’s past rather than the one that already existed.
Still, I much prefer Rivera’s approach to what’s come since.
A while back, a new mini-series starring America — America Chavez: Made in America from writer Kalinda Vazquez and artist Carlos Gomez — was announced, with the initial press release promising a deep look into unexplored parts of America’s past. Readers, I rolled my eyes. This officially made a pattern of solo America stories being obsessed with tinkering with her past rather than moving forward. Still, I like to give stories the benefit of the doubt, especially when they haven’t even come out yet, and I actually ended up really liking the first couple issues. At least at first, the “unexplored parts of America’s past” were the years she spent living with the human family who found her when she first escaped the Parallel, literally showing how she was “Made in America.” I found this a rich area to explore, revealing a lot about who America is and what it would be like to be a normal person growing up with someone so incredible.
Issues 3 and 4, though, suddenly hit me with the exact kind of reinvention I was dreading. The retcon, in short, has revealed that the entire Utopian Parallel was a figment of America’s imagination, a story she created as a child to explain the truth, that her moms put America and her (newly introduced) sister in an experimental facility to try to cure a fatal illness, and it ended up giving them superpowers, and freeing the kids from the facility cost America’s moms their lives.
I legitimately do not understand why Marvel felt the need to tell this story, or why they felt the need to get rid of an origin story that was still relatively new and unexplored. It doesn’t even really simplify America’s origin, as to explain the new one you still have to first explain the original, if only to then say that it was all a lie. It also feels like a particularly mean-spirited turn of events, not just for people who had found something inspiring in America’s original origin, but for America herself; a running thread throughout Made in America has been how America’s adoptive human family never believed her story (despite living in a world where literally anything can happen), and this turn of events vindicating them is a legitimate bummer. Also, devoting the majority of two full issues of this mini-series to flashbacks to when America was a small child has oddly sidelined her in her own story, yet another indignity.
As of writing this there’s still a couple issues of Made in America that have yet to release, so there’s always the chance that this new origin could be some sort of lie or trick, even if issue 4 really did go out of its way to have America confirm that her new origin is true. This new origin also doesn’t address Planet Fuertona or Madrimar at all, and we know Madrimar wasn’t a figment of America’s imagination, as she interacted with several of America’s friends throughout Rivera’s story. Is this a sign that perhaps Made in America still has a few tricks up its sleeve, or just that Marvel doesn’t care enough about America Chavez to even keep track of all their unnecessary attempts to redefine her? Am I crazy for even attempting to theorize about it?
As pissed and frustrated as I am by Made in America, I don’t want to blame Vazquez and Gomez. Take a look at this thread recently Tweeted by Jeremy Whitley, who wrote the one-page America story from Marvel Comics 1000 I posted earlier in this piece.
Given the timing of the thread and Whitley’s history with the character, this feels like a subtweet aimed specifically at Made in America, and while I appreciate Whitley’s insight into how comic books work, he also has a very valid point about “big media treatment.” America Chavez will actually be making her live action debut in the upcoming Marvel movie Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness, where she’ll be played by Xochitl Gomez.
Of course, the title Multiverse of Madness sounds tailor-made for the Utopian Parallel origin story, making the Made in America retcon all the more baffling and frustrating.
I dunno. All this reinvention isn’t helping the character. I kinda just wanna walk into the Marvel offices and shake whoever made this decision. Why can’t we just tell a story where America Chavez beats a bad guy? Why do we have to keep trying to reinvent a character who has proven to be popular just the way she is, and who’s barely been around a decade to begin with? The decision to put America in the next Doctor Strange movie shows that the company has faith in the character, but I wish that faith was trickling down to the comics as well.
HERE, IF I HAD TO LOOK AT THIS THIS GARFIELD, THEN SO DO YOU
ABOUT
“Do You Know What I Love the Most?” is a newsletter from Spencer Irwin about his relationship with the stories he loves. Spencer is an enthusiast and writer from Newark, Delaware, who likes punk rock, comic books, working out, breakfast, and most of all, stories. His previous work appeared on Retcon Punch, One Week One Band, and Crisis on Infinite Chords, and he can be found on Twitter at @ThatSpenceGuy. If you like this newsletter, please subscribe and share with your friends!
In the 60s you’d usually find several complete stories in a single comic book, while nowadays it often takes six issues, over the span of six months, to tell a single complete story. The trade-off, of course, is that the latter method has allowed for more complex and mature stories.
America Chavez is technically a legacy character, a modernized version of the character Miss America/Madeline Joyce, who was around way back when Marvel was still called Timely Comics in the 1940s. This legacy has never really had an effect on Chavez as a character, though, and her Ms. America codename vanished by the time Young Avengers concluded, never to be seen again.
Wiccan, of course, is Billy Kaplan, one of the twin sons of Wanda Maximoff/Scarlet Witch. You may have seen him, as a child, in WandaVision!
Okay, Kate Bishop has probably done the best out of all the Young Avengers aside from Kid Loki, but that’s more because of her appearances in Hawkeye than her time on the team. Of all the characters on Gillen and McKelvie’s Young Avengers, America is the one who suddenly became popular specifically because of their work on the series.