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I got Marvel 1602 out from the library last time I went, because I wanted to reread it. (For those who don't know it, it's a Neil Gaiman-written alternative Marvel universe, in which many of the characters from Marvel superhero comics are transformed into characters in Elizabethan England. Also there's some timey-wimey.) I enjoyed it the first time, but I wanted to see if it stood up. Plus, I now actually know more about some Marvel characters, due to fannish osmosis, so I thought it would be better on a second read.
Much of it was, and I did enjoy it. (Isk also likes when I read to him from my comic books, and long stretches of this one are Isk-appropriate. I'm keeping him away from Alan Moore for a while, though.) But, one of the reasons I wanted to re-read it was that I wanted to see if the character of Rojhaz was as fucked up as I thought it was.
Surprise: oh fuck yes.
If you haven't read it, here's the deal with Rojhaz. When we meet him, he's the protector of young Virginia Dare, on her way from the colony of Roanoke back to London, to ask for more investment in the colony. He's a Native American, but is also blond-haired and blue-eyed. (Virginia explains that her father thinks Rojhaz is proof that the Welsh got to the Americas first.) He speaks in broken English, the stereotypical pidgin of American Indians in popular media. He wears a buckskin loincloth, wears his hair in two plaits, and has feathers on the back of his head. He's also shown as being responsible for saving the white folks from their own stupidity and keeping them from starving, showing them how to protect themselves from the dinosaurs (oh yeah, there are dinosaurs in North America in this universe? Don't mock, I am down with the dinosaurs) and also being the only person who can protect Virginia from her own mutant superpowers.
In other words, he's every inch the Movie Indian.
So far, so absolutely typical. Rojhaz is, at minimum, competant, and no more offensive than most portrayals of Native folks in popular media. The blond hair threw me, the first time I was reading it: why bother with making him blond? Why couldn't someone who looked a little more, well, Indian be serving this role?
The reason he's blond, of course, is revealed eventually. Rojhaz is a mispronunciation of the name Rogers. As in Steve Rogers. As in Captain Fucking America. He's been sent back in time because Reasons (look, it's a complicated book) and his existence is kind of causing the end of all universes (see previous parenthesis), and there is drama at the end, whatever. That's not the point.
Here's what Steve says about arriving in pre-colonial Virginia:
So let's lay this out. Steve Rogers arrives among the Powhatan, who take him in, stop him from starving in the marshes of coastal Virginia, and accept him as a foreigner who is staying among them. But nothing matters until the colonists arrive. Being Captain America, and therefore heroic as fuck, he makes sure these colonists don't die. But it's only when a pretty little white girl baby is born that he can suddenly see how important it is that he protects America. Because his America is pretty little white babies who need to be saved from the terrifying powers of the place they're in.
He never saw His America among the Powhatan or any of the other Algonquan communities he might have encountered. He never saw His America in the land itself. No, His America is the one that's poised to systematically slaughter those people who kept him from dying when he popped through a temporal rift. I'm guessing His America won't include the folks who'll start arriving soon in slave ships to pick the tobacco that's already growing, either.
You guys, this isn't even What These People Need Is A Honky. This is What These People Need Is A Honky From The Future With Superpowers.
Here's the thing that gets me: I love the idea of Captain America being a Native American. Because, of course, the America of 1602 is, for all intents and purposes, America before any of the moments we count as making "America"--the Mayflower won't land until 1620, William Penn won't export Quakerism to my hometown until 1677, there essentially is no European settlement west of the Mississippi (there's St. Augustine, but it's small, and not part of the narrative of "Americanness" as it's taught). In this moment, if there's going to be an American hero, he's going to be Powhatan, or Lenape, or Iroquois, or whoever, the point is he's not going to be Steve Rogers. Steve Rogers is a function of the four hundred years of colonialism that comes after 1602.
And what would a Captain America from Native America be able to give us? What sort of America would he protect? Not the America of Virginia Dare (whose name, I've learned via Wikipedia, has apparently been appropriated by anti-immigration activists in Virginia, which I gotta say is fucking hilarious), that's for damn sure. I want that story.
I've been wondering about what could lead to this particular little moment of fail. (I mean, yes, I know Neil Gaiman is far from perfect--but I'm trying to figure out how this moment works.) And it occurs to me that the problem here is that America means something different if you're looking at it, historically, from the British Isles. Is it possible that it really does look, from where Neil's sitting, that American history started when those boats rolled up? Because I live driving distance from Ganondagan and my wife grew up having post-Meeting cookies in a room decorated with a cross-stitch representation of the treaty at Shackamaxon and I've got relatives living in the town where Last of the Mohicans is set and my son comes home from school in the third week of November with a bunch of paper feathers on his head and this is my history, the history of how people who look like me killed people who didn't because they didn't think they were quite human or didn't quite deserve to live or to live here or just because they didn't give a shit about them.
And if you're sitting on the side of the ocean where the boats come from, maybe that's not what you see.
tl;dr: I like this book, I want to read the next ones in the series, goddamn is there some racefail up in this joint.
(Feel free to get me started on the gender problems in comments.)
Also, fuck you, Neil Gaiman, you give me Marvel set in 1602 and I don't get to meet Elizabethan Tony Stark? Pssht.
Much of it was, and I did enjoy it. (Isk also likes when I read to him from my comic books, and long stretches of this one are Isk-appropriate. I'm keeping him away from Alan Moore for a while, though.) But, one of the reasons I wanted to re-read it was that I wanted to see if the character of Rojhaz was as fucked up as I thought it was.
Surprise: oh fuck yes.
If you haven't read it, here's the deal with Rojhaz. When we meet him, he's the protector of young Virginia Dare, on her way from the colony of Roanoke back to London, to ask for more investment in the colony. He's a Native American, but is also blond-haired and blue-eyed. (Virginia explains that her father thinks Rojhaz is proof that the Welsh got to the Americas first.) He speaks in broken English, the stereotypical pidgin of American Indians in popular media. He wears a buckskin loincloth, wears his hair in two plaits, and has feathers on the back of his head. He's also shown as being responsible for saving the white folks from their own stupidity and keeping them from starving, showing them how to protect themselves from the dinosaurs (oh yeah, there are dinosaurs in North America in this universe? Don't mock, I am down with the dinosaurs) and also being the only person who can protect Virginia from her own mutant superpowers.
In other words, he's every inch the Movie Indian.
So far, so absolutely typical. Rojhaz is, at minimum, competant, and no more offensive than most portrayals of Native folks in popular media. The blond hair threw me, the first time I was reading it: why bother with making him blond? Why couldn't someone who looked a little more, well, Indian be serving this role?
The reason he's blond, of course, is revealed eventually. Rojhaz is a mispronunciation of the name Rogers. As in Steve Rogers. As in Captain Fucking America. He's been sent back in time because Reasons (look, it's a complicated book) and his existence is kind of causing the end of all universes (see previous parenthesis), and there is drama at the end, whatever. That's not the point.
Here's what Steve says about arriving in pre-colonial Virginia:
I couldn't understand the words. Or the people. I told them my name...They thought I was from another tribe...I guess, in a way, they were right. They let me stay. They fed me...Nothing mattered. And then the white people came across the great water, and I found them starving, and I fed them. And then there was Virginia...She was a baby then. But I knew what she was. What she represented. What she meant. My America...I knew I had to protect her. The guard her. To fight for her, if I had to. I wasn't going to let her die.
So let's lay this out. Steve Rogers arrives among the Powhatan, who take him in, stop him from starving in the marshes of coastal Virginia, and accept him as a foreigner who is staying among them. But nothing matters until the colonists arrive. Being Captain America, and therefore heroic as fuck, he makes sure these colonists don't die. But it's only when a pretty little white girl baby is born that he can suddenly see how important it is that he protects America. Because his America is pretty little white babies who need to be saved from the terrifying powers of the place they're in.
He never saw His America among the Powhatan or any of the other Algonquan communities he might have encountered. He never saw His America in the land itself. No, His America is the one that's poised to systematically slaughter those people who kept him from dying when he popped through a temporal rift. I'm guessing His America won't include the folks who'll start arriving soon in slave ships to pick the tobacco that's already growing, either.
You guys, this isn't even What These People Need Is A Honky. This is What These People Need Is A Honky From The Future With Superpowers.
Here's the thing that gets me: I love the idea of Captain America being a Native American. Because, of course, the America of 1602 is, for all intents and purposes, America before any of the moments we count as making "America"--the Mayflower won't land until 1620, William Penn won't export Quakerism to my hometown until 1677, there essentially is no European settlement west of the Mississippi (there's St. Augustine, but it's small, and not part of the narrative of "Americanness" as it's taught). In this moment, if there's going to be an American hero, he's going to be Powhatan, or Lenape, or Iroquois, or whoever, the point is he's not going to be Steve Rogers. Steve Rogers is a function of the four hundred years of colonialism that comes after 1602.
And what would a Captain America from Native America be able to give us? What sort of America would he protect? Not the America of Virginia Dare (whose name, I've learned via Wikipedia, has apparently been appropriated by anti-immigration activists in Virginia, which I gotta say is fucking hilarious), that's for damn sure. I want that story.
I've been wondering about what could lead to this particular little moment of fail. (I mean, yes, I know Neil Gaiman is far from perfect--but I'm trying to figure out how this moment works.) And it occurs to me that the problem here is that America means something different if you're looking at it, historically, from the British Isles. Is it possible that it really does look, from where Neil's sitting, that American history started when those boats rolled up? Because I live driving distance from Ganondagan and my wife grew up having post-Meeting cookies in a room decorated with a cross-stitch representation of the treaty at Shackamaxon and I've got relatives living in the town where Last of the Mohicans is set and my son comes home from school in the third week of November with a bunch of paper feathers on his head and this is my history, the history of how people who look like me killed people who didn't because they didn't think they were quite human or didn't quite deserve to live or to live here or just because they didn't give a shit about them.
And if you're sitting on the side of the ocean where the boats come from, maybe that's not what you see.
tl;dr: I like this book, I want to read the next ones in the series, goddamn is there some racefail up in this joint.
(Feel free to get me started on the gender problems in comments.)
Also, fuck you, Neil Gaiman, you give me Marvel set in 1602 and I don't get to meet Elizabethan Tony Stark? Pssht.
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Also I am not sure I entirely trust Gaiman's Elizabethan Tony Stark to be as awesome as the one in my head.
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Man, I was so sad that the genius in the dungeon turned out to be that Reed dude from Fantastic Four. I wanted Tony to walk out with some steampunk shit in his chest.
Clearly the answer here is genderswapped!Elizabethan! Antonia Starcus.
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Two days after his spies reported that Anthony Stark had returned to England—battered, they told him, but alive—Sir Nicholas Fury rode to Deptford.
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Other female characters: 1) a timid little girl who turns into a terrifying animal and can only be controlled by her Noble Savage; 2) Jean Grey, who spends the whole time in drag, dies a woman, and doesn't get to turn into Phoenix because I don't know, it would be too useful; 3) a mutant named Wanda, who might be Mystique, I'm not sure, who basically doesn't do anything but walk around in a habit after the Inquisitor/Magneto; 4) Queen Elizabeth, who dies. Oh, 5) Clea Strange, who serves as mouthpiece for her magic husband, and then sadly goes back to her own dimension, having served her purpose as devoted wife. And 6) invisible lady, who listens to Thor have manpain and then saves him.
In conclusion: fuck this!
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But yeah, collectively, that was not a set of good choices.
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If I felt like Natasha got her due, I'd have been fine with her. (I mean, my redheads-who-can-kill-me kink is absolutely bulletproof.) I was totally cool with her pushing Daredevil off the bridge. But everything from that point on? Bullshit.
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I have a general feeling that Natasha is one of those characters who is handled very inconsistently in canon. :-/
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There's this whole tension in 1602 between what's an intentional reading of the world, and what's mistakes being made by Gaiman et al--do they know how intensely false Rojhaz's costume is? Is it supposed to read as "off" to us, or are they actually that clueless? He's a hell of a writer, so I want to trust him, but I just don't buy him getting this right.
Daredevil icon! He is such a fucking badass. And I am displeased with the reading of Black Widow on this version, because I totally liked them as bros in the early bits.
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There was also that interview he gave a few years ago on the Graveyard Book where he made a comment about how in England graveyards have long histories, whereas in America, go back few hundread years and there's just "a few dead indians". So yeah, he does tend to think that the history of America starts with the settlers.
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