Before you e-mail ...

... while many blogs are offering condolences to the Piper family, I've gotten quite a few e-mails about Captain America. Someone e-mailed and asked if this is the dumbest thing Marvel has ever done.

Why no: it's not.

It is one of the least-creative things they've ever done (they've done it once at least three times before*), but here's my list of the dumbest things Marvel ever did:

-- Making Jim Shooter EIC

-- Firing Jim Shooter

-- Devil Dinosaur

-- D. P. 7

-- Heroes Reborn

-- Taking Mark Wade off of Cap back in the late 90's

-- Not letting Peter David finish his Hulk plotline

-- Making Tony Stark into a teenager

-- that armor Cap wore the last time they tried to kill him

-- that armor they made Thor wear for a while

-- the purple costume Hawkeye still wears even though Carlos Pacheco clearly demonstrated that Clint looked best in tights and a yoke

-- letting Fox cancel the Avengers cartoon

This death of Cap thing is going to come out fine eventually. It's not like Cap is actually dead: he's a story. Someone else can write him back to life. Continuity is not the Gospel. It can be revised.

In that, be in the Lord's house with the Lord's people on the Lord's day, and try not to take comic books as seriously as your ought to take the Good News of Jesus Christ. They are not even comparable.

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* Three times: The back-story of Cap being fished out the Artic ice by the Avengers in Avengers #4 is that everyone thought he was dead; in the mid-90's, the SuperSoldier serum in Cap's blood created a degenerative condition resulting is him having to wear a really stupid suit of armor, and eventually caused him to die (he was revived by having a complete blood transfusion from the only other person on Earth who has the SS serum); in Universe X, Cap sacrifices himself to save the reborn Mar-Vell for the sake of that reality -- however, there's an afterlife in which Cap is one of 12 guardians. I think -- I think -- that Cap also appeared to die as a result of a massive explosion at the hands of a Red Skull nazi cult in Cap#50 back around '99, and also in a 4-issue limited series called "Dead Man Walking".

So: Dead? Yeah right. Get a better writer, and Steve Rogers will be back in action.