Okay, I am going to start off this post saying that despite my recent problems with Marvel, I was actually really excited for Secret Wars to end so that I could start reading Marvel again. Despite all my misgivings with the company, Marvel has made a number of wonderful series, many of which I have loved since my childhood. One of the recent series that Marvel has released, The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, was nothing short of fantastic. Funny, cleverly written, and with a fantastically diverse cast, there werenāt enough praises that could be heaped on this series. Even when I was having problems with a number of Marvelās series and editorial decisions, at least this was one series that I could open up and enjoy.
That all changed when I read The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl #1 (volume 2), which as the title says is āonly our second #1 so far yearā. Based on the previews, I was expecting something funny and witty, a good way to de-stress. While I had gotten it when it first came out, due to school and personal issues it was not until yesterday morning that I could actually get around to reading it. Rather than a relaxing read I gotā¦ I canāt even think of a polite term. My sinuses must really be acting up since I couldnāt smell the steaming pile of dog feces that I was holding in my hands.
There, I said it. Iām not going to sugarcoat the fact that this issue was horifically racist and nothing short of downright terrible. The funny thing is, the comic didnāt start out that way. In the beginning it was all humorous jokes (admittedly some seemed a bit forced, but if it were just those then I wouldnāt care) and characterization. Getting to meet Doreenās mom? Cool, not enough superheroes spend time with their families in comics. Nancy saying that sheād rather spend her day knitting while watching bad movies? At least someone has their life priorities straight. Squirrel Girl, Koi Boy, and Chipmunk Honk not bothering to make hiding their secret identities a big deal? Well, itās certainly nice to see a comic that doesnāt just involve āOh no, I have to hide who I really am!ā angst.
Things started to go downhill when it was revealed that Doreen was not a mutant, and sheād even had testing to prove it. Considering Marvel seems to just love erasing mutants identities these days, it didnāt come as big of a surprise as it could, but it was still shocking all the same. In volume one of the series there had been nothing to disprove her being a mutant, and that was one of the things that I had enjoyed about the series. It may not have been an X-Men related title, but I could still read about a mutant character.
As mentioned before, it didnāt come as big of a surprise as it could have. The writing, while trying to be humorous, also stank of an editorial decision. I get it, comic writers have to change things in their stories when the big bad boss man says so. Iām not pointing fingers and claiming that North had some evil plan to erase Doreenās identity as a mutant.
Still, it irked me. Considering all the hype Iāve seen on comics websites, it has bothered other people too.
(From Doreenās most recent appearance.)
(From her first appearance.)
Yet there was something far worse, something that Marvelās editorial team likely had no decision making in.
In The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl #1 (volume 2), a Nazi character was treated first in a humorous light and then redeemed. Yes, a Nazi, a character who usually in a majority of Western media is given all the depth that they deserve (which is, rightfully, none). If you ever need a big bad, as cliche as it can be in many cases, people turn to Nazis. And really, it doesnāt take that much to paint Nazis in a bad light considering they historically started a global war, killed millions of people (with Jewish and Romani people as their main targets, along with LGBT people, non-white people, the disabled, and European groups such as Slavs and Poles), and turned a former liberal democracy into a totalitarian dictatorship. Honestly, when people think of evil one of the first faces they think of is Adolph Hitler.
Funnily enough, the creative team of The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl does not.
Brain Drain, otherwise known as Werner Schmidt, is one of Marvelās many Nazi villains. Normally, I wouldnāt oppose Nazi villains so long as they are portrayed as the human scum that they are. In The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, Nazis are jokes.
It all started out with Doreen using one of her āDeadpoolās Guide to Super Villainsā trading cards. For Brain Dran, it read:
-āFunny Story: In the 1940ās this dude was just a German scientist called āWerner Schmidtā who was minding his own business when an alien spaceship crashed on top of him.ā
Okay, if the words ā1940āsā and āGerman scientistā donāt sound bells ringing off in your head then please open a history book. Those words never go well together when spoken of in the same context.
-āOh, I almost forgot! Heās a member of Hydra! Surprise!ā
Deadpool also states on the card:
āRemember: If he whispers āHail Hydraā in your ear, tell him āCool, I too hail Hydra, like, all the time!ā and he wonāt get mad!ā
Haha, Deadpool, so funny. Itās not as if Deadpool already has antisemitism problems considering its use of Bob, a Hydra agent, as a regular character (the writers of this series have no control over that however). But the writers of this series did have control over how they phrased the trading card. Is it really hard to guess just what phrase āHail Hydraā is based off of, especially since Hydra is a subset of a Nazi group? And haha, saying you āHail Hydraā so a guy wonāt hurt you or your family, itās not as if actual people who refused to do so were murdered or tortured for not pledging their allegiance to Nazis or anything, haha. So hilarious. (Obvious sarcasm.) Just Google: āJehovahās Witnesses persecution by Nazisā, ācommunist persecution by Nazisā, āThe White Roseā, āzazou resistance against the Nazisā (and possibly the āGoyā and āSwingā stars as well that were commonly worn by them, along with āswing kidsā [not the Christian Bale movie], the āEdelweiss piratesā, and the Czech āpotĆ”pkyā group), and āresistance to Nazisā. Really, both the writers and most of Marvel comics itself needs to sit down and read up on history because they are desecrating the memory of people who actually suffered under the Nazis (and those who still do due to the rising number of neo-Nazis and white supremacy in the world).
It only gets worse of course. This comic is a snowball that keeps spiraling downwards.
Then, because Doreen apparently cannot rub two brain cells together or does not realize just how big of a threat that the Hydra organization actually is in the Marvel universe, she thinks that maybe it was just the ancient robotic parts in Brain Drain that were making him act evil and proclaim that large groups of people should be murdered. Because, you know, a guy who lived in Nazi Germany as a member of the Nazi party, worked alongside Red Skull (who actively worked alongside Hitler and shared his ideals), would totally be a pacifist, progressive type were it not for the fact that he was a cyborg. Yep, he totally screams āprogressive social activistā and āflower childā to me (again, sarcasm).
So guess what Doreen and Nancy do? They decide to bring Brain Drain back to life with updated tech! And do you know whose phone they use? Why, none other than Nancy Whiteheadās, because a Nazi could never use the information stored into a black womanās phone for evil. Nope, he could never use that target her family in any racist way whatsoever, not all. (At this point half my post is dead serious and the other is drowning in bitter, angry sarcasm.)
Also, that doesnāt even begin to mention the jokes made about Red Skull.
From a bottom page near the end (the physical copy of this book is unnumbered for some reason, probably to fit in the bottom lines): āOther books in that series include Well āReadā: The Hydra Essays of the Red Skull (haha, that doesnāt sound like any other abysmal writing of āpolitical theoryā such as, eh, Mein Kampf?), āPaint the Town Red: The Red Skullās Guide to Small Town Infiltrationā (do I have to start listing off small towns in Poland, France, Czechoslovakia, etc. where similar stuff actually happened?), and āBone Appetite: The Red Skullās Favorite and Most Evil Recipesā.ā
Haha, isnāt the Red Skull just the funniest guy to joke about? The guy who wears Nazi outfits? Who called Wanda Maximoff, a Jewish-Romani woman (at least until the horrific Axis retcon) who is the daughter of Holocaust survivors, an anti-Romani racial slur? The guy who literally ran a concentration camp? Who admitted that his end goal was to make a Fourth Reich? Yes, when I think of him I think of only the finest humor. He fills my otherwise cold, humorless soul with laughter. Again, I am being sarcastic, and I know that my stressing of this fact may be annoying, but I do not want to risk even the slightest chance that someone might take my words seriously.
Here are some more choice panels and drawings of Red Skull:
What uniform is that heās wearing?
Not even other villains like him:
Not even the Joker, the guy who across multiple canons has killed and tortured hundreds of characters:
And here are some choice panels for Brain Drain as well:
Honestly, Iām pretty sure a guy who flies around in a freaking metal swastika isnāt worth redeeming. Brain Drain even admitted in this issue of Squirrel Girl that though the aliens had put the Hydra manual into his machinery, he had voluntarily been a member of Hydra before this. This isnāt like Bucky, who was brainwashed and abused by Hydra, nor is it a case like Zatanna in DC Bombshells (who is Jewish) who is being forced by The Jokerās Daughter to work for the Nazis or be deported to a ghetto and/or concentration camp. No, this guy voluntarily signed up for Hydra and went so far as to call himself the āsupreme intellect of the Third Reichā.
Brain Drain is literally a Nazi.
Yet for some reason the creative team looked at this guy and thought that heād be a great character to redeem. Rather unsurprisingly, the attempt at redeeming a Nazi character is terrible.
All he does is make a little speech to Doreen, Maureen, and Nancy about how he could not change because of his robot body and try to redeem or atone for his actions and that the aliens took away his ability to learn from his mistakes. Admittedly, had this been a different villain who was not aligned with a group that actually did kill millions of real people then I might have been sympathetic. Itās not as if Hydra is Marvelās only evil organization after all.
Apparently all it takes is a somewhat philosophical speech and agreeing to sign up for college to redeem a character in this book, no matter how horrific their past or monstrous the organization they worked for. Brain Drain agrees to go to college and everyone is happy and does not question at all whether or not he is just being manipulative. Because a villain would never just smooth talk his way out of getting beaten to a pulp by a superhero, nope never (sarcasm).
So we got a Nazi villain redeemed while glossing over the fact that he was a Nazi - a white supremacist totalitarian. This guy was literally apart of a group that wanted to wipe whole ethnic and racial groups off of the earth. Iām pretty sure there needs to be a little more than just making a speech (he doesnāt even say that heās remorseful for what he did) and saying heāll go to college to redeem him.
Remember when reading this comic was fun? Yeah, I do too. But it looks like this guy just might be becoming a regular, or at least minor, character who will be popping up in later issues. Isnāt it delightful that we get to read about a Nazi again in later issues? Wonāt it just be delightful to open up a comic and see a Nazi character staring back at you and featured in a good light? (Sarcasm.)
Though Marvel has been very anti-Semitic and anti-Romani lately, glorifying Hydra and skirting around the fact that they are literally Nazis, I have to admit that it took me by surprise that this series would do the same. I read this series hoping to escape the mess that Marvel was creating in other comics and instead watched Doreen not even so much as blink at the idea of bringing a Nazi back to life. Neo-Nazis are bad enough, so why not just let the old ones rot?
If Nazis are the kind of characters that this comic is going to feature in a redeeming light then Iām out. This isnāt worth spending $4 bucks on, not when there are other comics that I can get for the same price or cheaper that donāt walk all over Jewish and Romani people and glorify Nazism.
Here are some panels from DC Bombshells chapter 8 which prove that you can make a comic without glorifying Nazism (who would have that?):
@unbeatablesquirrelgirl Why do you find Nazi characters redeemable? How do you manage to make such an otherwise fantastic comment and yet still do something so vile? And why do the words āGerman scientistā andĀ ā1940ā²sā not immediately make you realize that a character may just truly be absolutely and completely irredeemable and evil? I am begging you, please donāt erase just how vile Nazi characters are or ignore the fact that they are Nazis. I and many other comic fans know that The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl is a wonderful comic, yet I and other outraged fans will not buy this comic if you do not apologize for redeeming Brain Drain and trying to ignore the fact that he is a Nazi and do not change the comic in the future to not feature him or try and justify Nazism/Hydra. Other comic creators have apologized for messing up before (anyone else remember the Batgirl of Burnside creative team apologizing after the incredibly transphobic issue #37 and changing the way that the comic was worded in the trade paperback?), and surely you can as well. Please, please, please donāt be like other Marvel comics that try to justify Nazism.
And because I know these guys will get rightfully mad at this also:
@fandomshatepeopleofcolor
To those who see this post, please reblog and tag the creative team. Please help make sure that this issue gets addressed and not ignored the way that the outrage at Hank Johnson: Agent of Hydra, the erasure of the Maximoff twins Jewish identities, and the Secret Wars Red Skull series was.
Some people might wonder about why Iām making this post, especially those who donāt follow me. Itās because I am sick and tired of Marvel treating Jewish and Romani characters like crap while ignoring and/or skirting around the fact that Nazi characters are literally Nazis.
And here are some other posts about recent antisemitism in the Marvel universe for those who are interested in learning more:
-Here is my tag for Hank Johnson: Agent of Hydra, a one-shot comic released in August that starred a Hydra member as a protagonist and tried to make him a likable protagonist even while he was a member of a neo-Nazi group.
-A post about Brett Dalton doing the Hydra salute, which is based off the Nazi salute, which normalizes the fandomās Hydra fetishism and whose actions condone normalizing Nazism in the Marvel fandom
-A bitterly sarcastic post about Marvelās recent obsession with ignoring the fact that Hydra is a Nazi organization (a similar post without the sarcasm)
-Some posts about the Secret Wars Red Skull which literally had the Holocaust survivor Magneto team up with an actual Nazi Red Skull
-A post I made about how itās possible to make a comic where Nazis are the villains and history was rewritten to where they won without glorifying Nazis (as seen in Convergence: Plastic Man and the Freedom Fighters)
- A post where Tom Breevort tried (and failed) to excuse the erasure of the Maximoff twins Jewish identities
-A post about how Elizabeth Olson, the actress who plays Wanda Maximoff in Age of Ultron, used the g-slur multiple times to describe a character who is canonically Romani
-A post by a child and grandchild of Holocaust survivors on why the importance of Wanda and Pietro being the children of Holocaust survivors is so important, and why the erasure of that stings so much
-A post about the Marvel fandomās rampant anti-blackness to the point where a fan acted as if Sam Wilson, a black man, would somehow voluntarily work for Hydra
-A post where someone had the audacity to compare Wanda Maximoff, a Jewish-Romani woman who is the child of Holocaust survivors to Hitler
-A post about why if you would not wear Nazi garb then you absolutely should not wear Hydra garb or say āHail Hydraā because it is the same as saying āHail Hitlerā
And, just to remind everyone, Captain Americaās creators Jack Kirby and Joe Simon literally created Captain America to help encourage America to fight against Nazism and to help encourage America not to align with the Axis (which, considering there were a large number of American supporters of the Nazis, were it not for the Pearl Harbor attacks, might have happened). Because of this, both Simon and Kirby, along with Marvel studios, were harassed by American Nazi supporters.
I am going to end on these two quotes:
āNot everyone was happy with [Captain America]. This may surprise some people, but before America entered World War II there was actually a strong pro-Nazi sentiment in the United States. So much so that Simon and Kirby [Capās creators] received death threats and mail disparaging them in their creation, not helped by the fact that the two were also Jewish.
In fact, a pro-Nazi group called āThe German-American Bundā once marched in front of Timelyās offices [one of Marvel Comics predecessors]. The two called in the police for protection, and they sure as hell got it!
As it turned out, then mayor of New York, Fiorello LaGuardia, was a fan of Captain America and actually called them up to tell them āāYou boys over there are doinā a good job. The city of New York will see that no harm will come to you.āā
-From Linkaraās introductionn to the Captain America comics
āIn 1941, Jews throughout the Third Reich were forced to wear a yellow Star of David. That same year, the first gassing experiments were conducted at Auschwitz and 33,771 Jews were killed by Germans and Ukrainians at Babi Yar outside Kiev. At the beginning of the war, the U.S. media rarely reported on or even knew about these horrific events, but word of Jewish suffering at the hands of Nazis trickled down to Kirby, Simon, and other Diaspora Jews in the form of wrenching letters from relatives trapped in the old country. Simon and Kirby used Captain America to strike back and boost American morale while proudly alluding to their religious faith. In a later issue, Steve Rogers watches newsreels depicting Nazi atrocities ā newsreels Kirby and Simon surely must have watched as well.
āCaptain Americaās weapon of choice was a strange one ā not a machine gun, but a shield. The shield is a famous Jewish symbol, the Magen David, which means the āShield of David.ā (Itās also known as the āStar of Davidā because the Magen David is a hexagram.) The term āshieldā in Jewish prayer denotes the closeness and protection of God. In a sad twist of fate, Captain Americaās costume featured a star at the same time that Simon and Kirbyās European brethren were being forced to wear a star of a very different kind.ā
-From Up, Up, and Oy Vey! How Jewish History, Culture, and Values and Shaped the Comic Book Superheroes by Simcha Weinstein
