Spencer kind of shot himself in the foot by making one of his big plot points about the Red Skull, who has pretty consistently been portrayed as *the* Nazi supervillain, leading HYDRA and using the Cosmic Cube to make these changes in order to recruit Steve Rogers into the HYDRA group the Skull was running.

Spencer's writing against himself, in that case, because the plot of this story involves the Red Skull using the Cosmic Cube (magic whatsis) to do this to Steve in order to recruit into his new HYDRA organization, and the most recent issue of Captain America has Steve finally overthrowing the Skull so Steve can take…

This is fair, and got me to rethink what I was doing.

As I tried to explain, I didn't take your post as just expressing your own opinion. It read to me like a quick, casual dismissal of an opinion I hold.

It's several things that are hard to disentangle form one another. The fans who invest in the character see him as a symbol of certain political and ethical principles that they share or value more generally. Marvel has in the past strongly encouraged this.

You posted: "I think there are far larger things to be offended by. If they were wearing swastikas it would be different."

Essentially, Marvel spent decades of real time emphasizing the idea that Captain America reflects what the U.S. should be, to the point that past stories critical of U.S. policies or governments were always about Steve Rogers reacting to that from the perspective of someone whose ethical principles held true to that…

OK, here's the direct version, then: When people feel offended by something, telling them they're being silly really doesn't work very well, and tends to make things worse.

The joke's on you! I don't have a spouse or significant other!

Feelings, nothing more than feelings, / Trying to forget my feelings about feelings / Teardrops rolling down on my face, / Trying to forget my feelings about fee-hee-linnnnngs.

I feel feelings about the effects of my feeling feelings!

This strategy, too, will surely persuade us all of your rightness.

Thanks for letting us know what we should feel feelings about. I am sure this strategy will prove persuasive to everyone.

But then you're just doing the last issue of Moore's Miracleman followed by Gaiman's run.

Right, but the through-line has always been that Steve Rogers represents the ideal that America should aspire to, and he reacts when the country fails that ideal. Int he 80s, when they wanted to criticize Reaganism, they had him replaced by a Rambo-type. Rogers kept doing the actual right thing in a new identity. And…

Spencer is really good at comedy of error stories with protagonists who are semi-losers, which he proved in Ant-Man and Superior Foes of Spider-Man. But his take on politics is shallow and kind of dumb, and it's ruined his Captain America run.

It was likely to avoid problems with the international release, particularly in the EU, what with the laws about using Nazi iconography in Germany.

Spencer's story has them led by the Red Skull before Cap takes over, and in the comics the Skull is definitely an adherent to Nazi ideology, not the amoral super-scientist of the films.

I didn't care too much until this latest "twist," where the Allies lost the War and used the Cosmic Cube or whatever to rewrite history so they won. That pisses me off on the simple basis that it winds up implying that fascism, especially the Axis form of it, was something other than the dysfunctional, unsustainable…

Though the weird part is that Watchmen ends on an ambiguous note, not one of nihilistic despair or of unreasonable hope; it's the bad imitations that got things wrong and lacked nuance.