Winter Solider - origin of the name?

[schmevil]

Has Ed Brubaker said what the inspiration was for Bucky's renaming as the Winter Soldier? There are two possibilities that I see:

THESE are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.

Thomas Paine, Crisis 1.

Or the Winter Soldier Investigation into American war crimes in Vietnam, which got its name from a paraphrase of Paine. Btw, the documentary of the investigation is available here.

Has Bru talked about this? Is it explained in the books (which I haven't read straight through)?

Comments

[schmevil.livejournal.com]

I'm pretty fail when it comes to warnings. I've been working on it though. It's not that I want to shock my readers exactly, but more that it doesn't occur to me to warn. There are certain warnings I've managed to make automatic: rape, extreme violence, naughty bits. Character death is a bad one for me, because I'm never certain when the warning is necessary. When you're killing off a character? When you're writing a character as dead, who is canonically dead, but only recently so? I've warned for dead!Steve in Avengers fandom because a) the canon is fluid and multiple; b) I know it's a Big Deal. So I'm learning. But warnings can be hard for some of us to grok.

My favourite warning is 'darkfic'. It tells me clearly to stay the HELL away, due to the high likelihood of florid, overheated prose.

Re teasing: yeah, I'm frustrated by this as well. Not as much because I've got to a point where I just dismiss it. "They're at it again. Meh." I think this is where it becomes obvious just how unprofessional, comics professionals really are. It amazes me that they think this is the best way to promote their work. I mean, honestly? They need to overhaul their whole promotion/marketing system.

It also plays into the too-close, incestuous relationship they have with fandom, and so often claim is a problem (if not THE problem) for the industry. "Because you asked for it!" and the idea that fans don't 'allow' them to take a more progressive tack.

[elspethdixon.livejournal.com]

It also plays into the too-close, incestuous relationship they have with fandom, and so often claim is a problem (if not THE problem) for the industry. "Because you asked for it!" and the idea that fans don't 'allow' them to take a more progressive tack.

That kind of reminds me of the time my undergraduate school cut almost two-thirds of the entire sports program in order to save momney and then told angry/concerned/upset students and alumnae who wanted to know why the championship-winning and extremly popular field hockey and volleyball teams had been cut that they were responding to a decline of student interest in those sports (the student body responded by actually raising enough money to fund the field hockey team's entire varsity season solely from student and alumnae donations, so it was very obvious that lack of student interest and support was not the issue).

If writers were actually giving fans what they asked for, recent Marvel and DCU canon would look very different, I suspect. For one thing, Steve would have come back from the dead over a year ago or never have died at all, Ted Kord would be permenantly back, lawsuits would be settled and Kon would be back, Stephanie Brown would have had a case in the Batcave, and there'd be at least one Marvel/DCU crossover issue a year entirely dedicated to Batman throwing down with Wolverine (I'm kind of surprised there's not one of those already, actually). The only examples I can think of off the top of my heas of writers truely giving in to fans' demands are Jason Todd dying and fanboy Jesus Hal Jordan coming back from the dead. Oh, and the X-Men titles bringing back Ilyana Rasputin - she's got a decent-sized fanboy following as well.

My impression has been more that comics writers do pretty much whatever they feel like/think would be cool without really worrying about whether or not fans will like it, trustng that those of us who are hooked on the characters will buy it anyway because it's Batman/Spiderman/whomever (or they have the confidence of all over-enthusiastic badfic authors that of course we'll think X thing is just as awesome as they think it is, which I suspect might be Mark Millar's problem).

If comics aren't taking a more progressive tack, I'm betting it's less because fans won't "allow" them to and more because the creative teams either just didn't think of a more progressive/original storyline or are using "what the fans do/don't want" as justification for what they've already decided to do anyway (you know, like how Hollywood claims people won't watch movies about women when actually people will and Hollywood just doesn't want to make said movies).

But then, I'm so bitter and cynical at this point that I make myself roll my eyes at me, and I have a profound personal dislike for several prominent Marvel writers (and Dan Didio), so my analysis is about as objective as Fox News talking about politics.

[schmevil.livejournal.com]

I don't think that writers need to give fans what they want, exactly. They need to write what they want, within the limits of what the market will support. What they should do to improve things, is establish new, cleaner lines of communication between fans and creators, and change the role of editors. Editorially mandated stories aren't always a bad thing. Sometimes creators go off the deep end, and they need to be reigned in. Sometimes they do something bad for the franchise, but good for the story. A good example is Morrison's work on X-Men: good story, bad for the franchise. Editors need to be clearer about what they want and need from creators. Creators need to be clearer too.

I'd just like to see... more professionalism, I guess. The franchise books shouldn't be treated like fanfic, even though they kind of are - there needs to be a distance between WANT and the stories that get published. Did we really need Barry back? Come on. Do what is necessary for the story, not what is necessary to satisfy your desires. I mean, I write fic. If I want to write the same damn story ten times over, that's cool. That's not a good business model, though.

Totally agree with you about progressiveness. I think it's obvious to everyone how insular the comics world is. It's not surprising that creators sometimes just... don't get it. They're in their own little world.