CAPTAIN AMERICA

Captain America isn’t the guy; Steve Rogers is the real hero here. That skinny kid from Depression-era Brooklyn is someone who knows, deep in his bones, in a way that rich kids like Thor and Tony Stark never will, what it’s like to be at the mercy of a cruel and unjust world. He was standing up to bullies before it was cool, and certainly before it was effective. And yet there was a strange resignation to even his doomed confrontations in back alleys and behind diners, a sense that he had to do it because it simply had to be done. “You start running, they’ll never let you stop. You stand up, push back... Can’t say no forever, right?” Steve Rogers never let his diminutive size, asthma, chronic colds, scarlet fever or general heart trouble stop him from trying to do the right thing then; why would a few mere godlike beings stop Captain America now?

He may be called an Avenger, but it’s empathy rather than rage that lies at his heart. That’s why he turned out “not a perfect soldier, but a good man”, as Dr Erskine said before giving him the super-soldier serum. No matter the scale of the threat he faced once he bulked up, up to and including Thanos himself; Cap rarely forgets to stand up for the little guy first and worry about orders later. As a soldier, though, he’s terrible, being far too independent of thought and suspicious of those in power. He’s the guy most worried about evacuating civilians during the Battles of New York and Sokovia; he’s the one refusing to trade lives in Infinity War. He doesn’t have any rules about not killing bad guys, but he has lots about saving innocents.

There are blind spots, of course — notably an unfailing concern for his brother from another mother, Bucky — but he is rarely distracted for long. Any time he is tempted to deviate too far from the path of truth, justice and the American way, he has a compass in his pocket with a picture of Peggy Carter in it, pointing him back in the right direction. There’s something to be said for a Mr Reliable.