As for The Truth itself:
This is Marvel's new prestige project (like Wolverine's Origin before it). Back in 1940, Joe Simon and Jack Kirby created Captain America, a skinny young army recruit injected with an experimental Super-Soldier Formula that turned him into a perfect physical specimen and a symbol of America.
The Truth adds to the story by saying that the Super-Soldier Formula was first tested on expendable black soldiers--"inferior races", in the words of the project's chief scientist. It's in direct reference to the Tuskegee syphilis experiments.
I flipped through it in the store. Baker needs to spend some time getting yelled at by an art director because he's all over the damn map--he's got really strong visual sense, but right now, he's not drawing with any vision.
I didn't buy it because a) I could have written it, it seems that trite (and I couldn't even tell you who's actually writing it); b) it's retconning to make a character (Captain America) less unique and original, and I hate that; and c) it has no apparent reason to exist other than the race card.
I'll also mention that in Simon and Kirby's original, the doctor in charge of the Super-Soldier project was clearly a refugee German Jewish scientist-- he was even named "Dr. Reinstein". For him to now be portrayed as a racist of this sort is distasteful at best, particularly given that this is all happening in World War II. I don't particularly want to read some kind of moral equivalence, that we were as big a bunch of evil racist jerks as the Nazis we were fighting, because we weren't.
Posted by Greg at December 6, 2002 5:17 PM