Since July of last year, Marvel Publishing House has been driving behind the wheel, waiting for the storm to pass. The reason: they announced that Captain America, an American hero full of stripes and stars, is a member of the Hydra group, that is, a crypto-Nazi terrorist band. The character's followers have not been able to stand it and have shown their outrage on social media, to the point of demanding a boycott of Marvel.

Starting with saying everything, there are nuances: Hydra is not exactly a Nazi group, although it was founded by a former Nazi – Baron Wolfgang von Strucker – and in that task it was accompanied by Red Skull, the main antagonist of Captain America, and this one, the Nazi Peto. So, well, there are not too many differences, right? Thousands of fans don’t see the difference and their anger grows worse in March of this year, when Marvel sends Hydra’s tixerts to comic books stores, encouraging marketers to dress up to commercially promote the Secret Empire series that narrates the character’s change of side. “Anti-Semitic behaviors are spreading in the world right now. The last thing I want to do is wear a t-shirt that says ‘Hail Hydra’ to my Jewish employee,” a Utah comic book vendor told The Guardian.

The editorial version is different. They say that they are listening to the fans' complaints and ask them to wait and see what the end of this line of history will be and what conclusions they will draw then. Captain America's head of the Nazi twist, writer Nick Spencer, tweeted: “If we really say ‘don’t take us from the bad events of stories, even though everything is fixed at the end’, then stories won’t survive.” It is a good argument, which cannot be denied, and if the issue is dealt with from a fictitious point of view, it seems that Spencer is right.

But, at this point, one might ask if there are only discrepancies at the heart of this conflict about the limits of fiction or if, on the contrary, it has more to do with the American social climate, which has made Trump president in the last elections, normalize the extreme right and increase the presence of neo-Nazis that have been published under the trade name “alt-right”. These new Nazis are now using Captain America for white supremacism and, although Marvel says it has nothing to do with those uses, it has become unbelievable since it has been known that the CEO of the owner company, Ike Perlmutter, funded the Trump campaign with a million dollars.

With this in mind, it seems more understandable that comics don't want to put a penny more to pay for this supervillain's plans.