I gotta be honest. I am shocked by how much I love Marvel’s new show. In Disney+’s The Falcon and the Winter Soldier they take the Marvel formula of pitting superheroes against supervillains, and complicate it with a story about a black soldier dealing with the reality of race in America. I’m surprised it works. I did not love WandaVision as much as literally the entire internet. I found the show to be lacking in the emotional depth I thought that the narrative deserved. This, on the other hand, has what I’m looking for. Yet what is remarkable is that as it tells this story, the writers do something I did not see coming. It introduces into the Marvel Cinematic Universe one of the comic’s best-kept secrets, but before I tell you who that is, let me get to recommending books that will better help you understand the ideas explored in the show. Go watch The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, but know that the story it depicts is not just fictional, it is also deeply American. Go figure. This graphic novel tell the semi-true story of black soldiers recruited to fight in World War I, and the unmitigated levels of racism they experienced when they returned home. This is a captivating narrative because while the characters in this story are fictional, the reality it presents is not. It is impossible to not see that the Red Summer of 1919 and the race massacres in Rosewood and Tulsa are connected to black soldiers coming home from this war. That truth adds a deep level of poignancy to an already deeply emotional tale.
