Captain Confederacy (1991) [Comics]

Captain Confederacy had a fascinating premise: what if the Confederate States of America survived into the modern age of super-heroes? In an alternate history devised by writer Will Shetterly, what we think of as America fragmented into several pieces after the Civil War: the U.S.A. still exists (controlling most of the central and northeast part of the place), the South is controlled by the Confederates, and new countries have arisen such as the Republic of Texas, Deseret (Mormon country in real-world Utah), the People's Republic of California, the Great Spirit Alliance (a federation of Native American nations), Pacifica (Washington/Oregon), and the Louisiana Free State. The different countries have developed national symbols out of their super heroes, and the focus of the book is (as the title indicates), on Captain Confederacy.

The book originally ran for 12 issues on an independent press called SteelDragon--I haven't read these issues, instead coming across the four issues printed by Marvel's Epic imprint in 1991. The Captain Confederacy of the SteelDragon issues is dead at the beginning of the Epic series, with an interracial couple sharing the title of Captain Confederacy. The story of the Epic series concerns a summit meeting of the various countries in Central North America, along with mundane and super-powered representatives from other global powers like Germany, Japan, and Mexico. There's a lot of political intrigue, assassination attempts, espionage, and more, and the series as a whole has nice dialogue and characters that seem individualized and interesting. Artwork is serviceable but not amazing, and the fourth and final issue is a little bit of a talky letdown after the first three.

As much fun as the comics are the text and letter pages which are full of discussion and speculation about the alternate history Shetterly has created. I'm not a historian or Civil War buff, but I will say Shetterly seems far too certain that the war had nothing to do with slavery and that the South would have abolished it sometime in the 1870s anyway, eventually emerging with race relations similar to the North. The Civil War is thus portrayed in the classic "War of Northern Aggression" vein, and the bad guys in the story set in the modern day are meddling northern Yankees up to no good.

So . . . dicey politics, but a fun read nonetheless.