Captain America series is about the moral decline of the United States

It started as a simple comic book storyline: Steve Rogers, unable to fulfill his duties as Captain America, passes on the mantle to his best friend of many years, Sam Wilson (The Falcon). But after an unexpectedly fierce backlash from readers, the story morphed into a thinly veiled social commentary on the moral decline of one of the world's most powerful nations.

The first volume of Sam's foray into the role was collected into a graphic novel titled Not My Captain America -- borrowed from a direct quote from the thousands of comments and letters that poured in before the first issue was even available. There have been many Captain Americas besides Steve Rogers, but none received a fraction of the hate mail that Wilson did. The reason: while all of the other Captains had been white, Sam Wilson was black, and took on the iconic costume amid the backdrop of Barack Obama becoming the first black president of the US. So, writer Nick Spencer brought back the original blond, blue-eyed hero in Captain America: Steve Rogers -- as a Hydra agent. It read like an in-joke: 'You racists want white Captain America back? Okay, here he is? AS A NAZI.' But when the US elected its first president in a generation to be openly endorsed by neo-Nazis and the KKK, the joke turned out to be horrifyingly prophetic.

Then, in April this year, Marvel launched Captain America: Secret Empire. Get this: an evil, fascist Captain America takes over the US, fills his cabinet with Nazi super villains and proceeds to wipe out every trace that the heroes ever existed. (Although he can't quite seem to erase the memory of black Captain America, Sam Wilson.) But the ending last month was decidedly un-heroic, and prompted by the economics of the real world.

Marvel had, in the run-up to the 2016 US presidential election, suffered a slump in sales and stock price. Responding to a question by comic industry blog ICv2 on that issue, David Gabriel, vice-president of sales at Marvel, said: "What we heard (from retailers) was that people didn't want any more diversity." Donald Trump's victory, it seems, had appeared as a rebuke of Obama's presidency and a clear indicator of America's current moral tenor. Amid fears of damage to the franchise, Marvel rushed Secret Empire to a speedy end this August-substituting what appears to be a hastily rewritten resolution to cater to the white fear of demographic change. Though the obvious choice to defeat Nazi Steve Rogers would have been Sam Wilson, the writers instead bent time and space to pit the 'true' Steve Rogers against himself.

Isn't that how evil wins?