If they had named him Battlestar right off the bat, then it’s possible legions of fans would have stood up and shouted that this was a betrayal of Marvel history and they were distorting the legacy of Captain America to appeal to some political correctness bug, angry letters would follow and possible sales would have tanked. So instead they came out of the gate naming him Bucky, and a few issues later changed his name, all the while explaining it with a very succinct and powerful page that even a white 15 year old kid from the stone cold white New England suburbs could understand and empathize with. There was no way an argument could be made that Marvel was changing history with no regard for character. They were honoring history and moving forward into the future.

Please understand that I am not saying they should have kept the name, I’m only saying that they have a bottom line to feed based on a majority of people that openly despise change of any sort. Money is a powerful motivator They needed to trick these people into accepting the change, and at the same time they taught them (and me) about how language can affect perception, however unintended.

Given the obligations to make money and be more culturally aware, I think they did a good job. Of course, they could have made John Walker black in the first place and avoided this whole problem. But then when they turned him crazy a few issues later, how would this have played out?

The timely response by Gruenwald and MARVEL was a solid move on their part and it would seem Battlestar had a decent run post-Bucky. Thanks for the link on the Nina Simone joint, too. Be easy.

I remember reading the “apology” comic and being kind of shocked. As a pre-teen in Alabama, I’d already heard a host of derogatory terms for African-Americans, but I’d never heard “buck” before, and I was a few years shy of hearing Nina Simone’s tribute song ( http://www.boscarol.com/nina/html/where/buck.html ) . By this time, the term had largely fallen out of any use.

Of course, just because a 12-year old white kid didn’t know it doesn’t mean a thirty-something New Yorker shouldn’t have.

I think Battlestar was a great character–I thought he was awesome and hoped at the time that he would become the new Cap–and I wonder if Gruenwald just stumbled accidentally into an offensive term because of how archaic it was. He seemed to care for the character and its development, but there’s something more at work here–just not paying enough attention to the larger cultural implication of the comic as a work of art. Far too often the standard response to informed race-and-gender criticism is that “it’s only a comic,” or “it’s written predominantly for white males, anyway.” This is a weak attempt to side-step owning up to outdated attitudes and ignorance.

(Yeah, I have a real problem with the casual racism that plagued the industry in the 80s.)

I want to say that it was Priest, but I checked his site and couldn’t find anything on it. Maybe Kurt Busiek? I’m not sure.