Truth: Red, White & Black by Robert Morales and Kyle Baker

Captain America: Truth

Collection published: 2022
Contents originally published: 2003
Read: September 2024

Writer: Robert Morales

Artist: Kyle Baker
Letterer: Wes Abbott

Truth: Red, White & Black is a 2003 miniseries published by Marvel Comics, about a group of black men who were experimented on with the same super-soldier serum that was used to create Captain America; it was later collected as Captain America: Truth, which I accessed via Hoopla. I read it as part of my ongoing Black Panther project (see link below) because its main character was the father of one of the characters featured in Christopher Priest's The Crew, which also featured a former Black Panther. Okay, so that's kind of tangential as a "Black Panther" comic, but it seemed to me I ought to read it before I ended up even further away from the point where I read The Crew.

The story is made up of two distinct halves. In one, a bunch of black men join the U.S. military after Pearl Harbor, all from various walks of life, all for their own reasons. They encounter, unsurprisingly, racism in the institutions of the military, and soon they are being experimented on in what is clearly a riff on the Tuskegee experiment. Writer Robert Morales and artist Kyle Baker introduce us to a diverse and sympathetic group of characters—and then put them through some really heinous, racist stuff. I've never read any other comics by Morales (he doesn't seem to have written many others, actually) but here he shows himself to be a thoughtful, interesting writer. I think this could have been pretty hamhanded, but the racial dynamics of it ring truly. I have read other work by Baker, who has a pretty cartoony style, and who I usually associate with more, well, comic work; his big claim to fame other than this is a Plastic Man miniseries, for what it's worth. He has more of a dynamic range within that cartoony style than I might have guessed, with some characters (usually the very racist whites) being drawn as almost literal caricatures, and others as fully fleshed out people. Some moments are quite horrifying even in his style. I don't think it's what I would have chosen, but I think it works.

from Truth: Red, White & Black #6

In the second half of the comic, though, the perspective shifts; it's the present day and Steve Rogers is investigating the events of the 1940s that he never knew anything about, which continue to be filled in as flashbacks. This, to me, diminished some of the potency of the whole affair. It seemed pretty clear to me that the experiments in the first half were meant to be forerunners of the experiments on Steve Rogers, it just doesn't make sense any other way. But to fit with Marvel continuity, it has to turn out that all this happened in parallel with what happened to Rogers, that he has to be the first super-soldier. To me, this really disrupts what was surely the whole point of the story: that we would want to do this to a person of color. But it turns out we did it to a white person first? It also turns the narrative focus onto a white person, the problem of the book becomes how does a white person find out about this injustice? Which is a marked difference to how the opening chronicles the black experience.

from Truth: Red, White & Black #5

All that and yet—I have often said superhero stories are power fantasies, and thus that makes the superhero stories that explore powerlessness particularly interesting to me. It's a powerful metaphor, and even if this comic doesn't make the best use of it, it's clearly trying to do something more interesting than 95% of the superhero comics out there.

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