Captain America Officially Declared a Failure by Marvel's New Celestial

Steve Rogers’ Captain America may be a hero and an inspiration to millions, but that may not be enough to save him from Marvel’s new Celestial. Iron Man, Makkari, Ajak, and Mister Sinister’s desperate play to end the war between mutantkind and the Eternals was successful. But their gambit of birthing a new space god is already having drastic consequences, with Steve Rogers the first to face judgment.

At the outset of the Judgment Day event, Prime Eternal Druig persuaded the majority of Eternal society to consider mutantkind’s newly found resurrection protocol as excess deviation. Correcting excess deviation is a directive hardwired into the Eternals by their Celestial creators; hence the attempt by Tony Stark, Makkari, Ajak, and Nathaniel Essex to bring a new Celestial to life and alter the Eternal directives.

Preview pages released by Marvel for A.X.E.: Judgment Day #3 by Kieron Gillen, Valerio Schiti, Marte Gracia, and Clayton Cowles tease where the heroes’ best laid plans are leading. The end of the previous issue found the new Celestial forebodingly warning the people of Earth about their forthcoming judgment. As if that had not raised the stakes of the story enough, the three preview pages of Judgment Day #3 begin the judging with Steve Rogers, the Star Spangled Man with a Plan himself. As Cap tries to take the lead in the confusion, the new Celestial decides that Capitan America will be judged first… and the ruling isn’t good.

Comic readers often note that the point of Steve being Captain America is to challenge the nation he loves to be its best self. This is true even to his origin, with Steve was punching out Nazis before the United States had even entered WWII. It is by this logic that the Celestial deems Captain America a failure. As a being whose stated purpose is to reject oppression and inspire America to rise to its full potential as a free country, Steve’s failures doom him to being dismissed by the Celestial.

It seems that this new Celestial’s judgment is quite materialist in focus. It considers Steve’s morality and intentions only insofar as how successful he is at acting on them as well as how those acts affect others. This perspective is jarring as a way to evaluate characters whose flaws are often forgiven or sanded away in the vast time span of comics publication. If Captain America is a failure to Judgment Day’s new Celestial, it’s hard to imagine who in the Marvel Universe it will judge as a success.