5. That Ultimate Cap Is A Total Jerk
Marvel ComicsMark Millar is a sad, small man. Mark Millar is The Narrator from Fight Club, a man who has bought into the idea of the emasculated modern male, who has to reassert his dominance by indulging in crass violence, language and treatment of women. Mark Millar is also fantastically rich, and doesn't care what we write about him, which means we can keep calling his manhood and/or sanity - certainly his good taste - into question as much as we want and it doesn't matter. Given his track record for creating thoroughly cynical deconstructions of the superhero genre (Kick-Ass being the most popular) it should come as no surprise that his take on Captain America differs a little from the norm. To be fair to Millar, his Cap was designed to be different from the off. As part of Marvel's Ultimate line of comics he was supposed to be a reimagining of the classic Steve Rogers, a character that makes more sense to readers in today's context, not a relic from the thirties who was literally thawed out and expected to work in the sixties, let alone in the radically different modern age. In The Ultimates - the Ultimate universe's equivalent of the Avengers, FYI - Iron Man becomes even more of a drunk lech, The Hulk becomes also kind of a lech, and Thor isn't a lech so much as he is an insane person who thinks he a Norse god rather than an actual Norse god. Or is he...? Captain America, meanwhile, is changed in a more subtle way. His costume lost the little wings on the mask and became more like body armour than a skin-tight outfit, as has become de rigueur and adapted into both his regular comics incarnation and in the films, and his origin was a little more fleshed out, but otherwise he was the same Cap: Steve Rogers, given powers by a super serum, thought in World War II, resurrected in the modern day. Oh except he's also a total jerk, the epitome of jingoistic idiocy, with a short temper and violent tendencies. A real American hero. Don't expect Chris Evans to ask anybody if the "A" on his forehead stands for "France" in the next movie.