cap_ironman | Canon Question about Steve

616 Steve went to art school for at least a year, so I assume he finished high school. He seems to have worked his own way after his mother died.

That's just what I thought, but I still can't work out in my own mind how that worked. Even assuming he was very nearly 15 when he was orphaned, everything I've found is telling me that a 15 year old boy really shouldn't be able to support himself. One source claimed a newsboy could make as little as 15 cents a week, and most never made more than about $1.20 in a week. Even in 1937 that's not going to stretch too far. Even if he got a night job, something that let him go to school every day, I can't figure it out.

They did a little of Steve's background in the latest Marvels Project. It mentions him being orphaned at 16 and shows him working in a diner.

There's a reference in Cable and Deadpool to having worked on WPA art at some point. He was also highly literate and well read, which he could have marketed. Mostly, I suspect it's best not to think too hard about '60s comicbook canon.

He finished high school, but went to work with 'the dames' making rivets for the war. He was rejected by the army because he was so frail. They do say he's smart before he takes the serum though (although Bruce Banner in Ultimate Human says that Steve was the dumb, but I'm inclined to go with smart).

Yeah, I reckon Banner is either 'he was dumb compared to me' (which, okay, probably fair, most people are) or 'I am totally jealous of him so I'm going to attribute all his good qualities to the serum. AND HE DYES HIS HAIR'.

Banner was very much down though. In addition, you got the feeling that he resented Captain America for being the success while he just mutilated himself and became The Hulk. But in Ultimate Origins the recruitment officer says that Steve is smart, so I'm going with canon. :)

Oh, Ultimates. Yeah, whatever Ult!Steve's flaws, he's very clearly not stupid.

As

jazzypom said, he went to art school, so likely he finished school somehow - or possibly he got in with a portfolio?

I'm pretty certain he got training in tactics and military history and so on.

616!Steve has a high school diploma and at least one year of art school. How he got the money for art school post his mother's death is never explained in canon as far as I know, but then, Golden and Silver Age canon often fails to explain things.

Possibly applicable detail: high school in the 1930s in the US often did not last until age 17/18. The US public education system now consists of twelve years of primary&secondary education plus kindergarten, but back prior to WWII, people often graduated after only ten or eleven years. So Steve could very well have finished high school at sixteen.

But IIRC art school isn't Golden or Silver age thing is it? I always thought that was introduced in the 70's at earliest (or wait that is sometimes this silver age isn't. erghh ages confuse me)

I don't know about the Marvel world, but in our world my mother graduated from one of the NYC high schools(grade 12) at 16 years of age and was awarded a full scholarship to NYU in fine art before the end of WWII.

Her older brother, who would be about the same age as Steve (early twenties during the war)also was awarded a full scholarship. So Steve may have been able to attended college they same way a lot of other poor depression era New Yorkers did, someone saw their potential and was willing to support it.

616 Steve's past has been a mystery at times, even to him.

Before he was deployed to the European theater as Captain America, The Army doctored his personnel records to make it look like he'd come from an upper-class family (in Maryland, I think), and that he'd dropped out of art school at Empire State University to enlist in the Army after his brother was killed in the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

More than just doctoring Steve's official records, the Army brainwashed Steve into BELIEVING this... apparently with his full (though uneasy) consent.
...So Steve REMEMBERS being a freshman in art school, but it never really happened.

Steve's REAL past is in many ways more interesting, and it makes one wonder why the Army saw fit to alter it in the first place... seeing as both of Steve's REAL parents were already safely DEAD.

Steve Rogers grew up in a very poor neighborhood of New York city.
His father was a frustrated writer, a dreamer who once joked that stepping in dog crap was good luck, and thought that the great depression would only last a few weeks. He was a speech-maker, an inspiration, and an alcoholic.
Joseph Rogers died around the time Steve was six.
Steven's mother Sarah did her best to raise him alone, but even with Steve's part-time job as a newspaper boy, it wasn't easy. Sarah pushed herself with a determination and strength of will that her frail son would later exhibit as one of his greatest weapons, but by the time Steve was a teenager, the effort of working that much was literally killing her.
She died of Pneumonia when Steve was 16.
Steve wanted to go to art school, and had spent most of his childhood (when his best friend Arnie couldn't talk him into going outside) reading fantasy stories, sketching and drawing.
He never got together the money for college, though.
Instead he survived, working dead-end jobs like being a delivery boy... eerily reminiscent of the Red Skull's early days in Europe during the Nazi party's rise to power.

It was a black-and-white newsreel documenting that rising evil, an intuition of sickening dread, that finally moved him to action.
Steve's convictions, however unsupported by his physical abilities at the time, became too strong to ignore.
He tried to enlist soon afterwords, and was wrangling with an Army doctor over his 4-F (rejected) classification, when one of the officers connected with Operation Rebirth happened to be passing by... and the rest, as they say, is history.
Much of Steve's formal education took place shortly after he survived the super-soldier serum. The Army spared no expense making him a master of hand-to-hand combat, tactics, and strategy.
...He'd probably qualify for a degree in military history by now, if his entire knowledge-base could be properly quantified.

As an artist, Steve Rogers is nothing half so earthshaking. He has no formal art degree, his style is outmoded by several decades, and he's been criticized several times about his figures looking 'too stiff'. He IS genuinely talented though, and I have to wonder if the 'too stiff' complaint is in fact a tongue-in-cheek joke by the writers about Hitler (once also a frustrated art student) being rejected by the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna because a)the man couldn't paint, and b)Hitler only liked drawing buildings.

A far clearer irony in my opinion, is the fact that Tony very nearly died of a combination of drinking AND pneumonia... and Steve forgave him for it.

I really liked that run, but I think the brain washing think may have been retconned (or just resoundingly ignored by every author since).

So writing him as having gone to art school may or may not be canon, as the author likes.

Dammit, you're right. The canon on that one HAS been ignored often enough to become fluid.

I used to think that the current generation of Marvel writers were happily plundering and mauling a long history of otherwise consistent canon, but alas, this tradition goes -way- back.

It can very occasionally work though, as seen with the retcon of exactly when Steve woke up from the ice in the first place.
The Newfoundland story, about the ex-Nazi who transferred his mind into a 12-foot tall android version of Cap.
The page when Ameridroid trailed off in mid-monologue, horrified beyond expression as he suddenly realized that even if he DID beat Cap now, he would still be condemned to life as a 12-foot tall robot.
http://i49.tinypic.com/wmcci1.jpg
A ranting supervillian talking HIMSELF down, and being all but hugged by Cap afterwords.
...That was an amazing piece of writing.

Yeah, no I think they always pretty much acted like they do no. It's not quite like Doctor Who (where it's canon that they don't have a canon, and everyone likes it that way), but it's pretty close. Here's the options: pick what you like.

That is a FANTASTIC page. Though hey, talk your self down and get a hug from Cap. It's pretty good motivation.

That happened? 12-foot tall android version of Cap?

~~To the kink meme!~~

Yup. very big, very smart, repentant Ex-Nazi android guy.
http://www.marvunapp.com/Appendix/ameridrd.htm

My first and remaining thought is still; Tony will fucking love this?

Under the right circumstances... heh.
Cap has always been larger than life to Tony anyway, and I could see him with this brief 'OMG, for ME?' grin ...right before he realizes that's not really Cap.
Physically there's no way in hell certain things would work (part of why Decker/Ameridroid was crying on Cap's shoulder in the first place).

There are options, however. Ameridroid IS physically a machine, and I suspect Tony would easily have found a way to fit his memory chips into a more normal-sized android body.
Likewise, Hank Pym could have simply shrunk Ameridroid down to six feet tall and left him there.

Cap never mentioned either of these possibilities to Ameridroid, though.
...Then again, would YOU want a look-alike android with the mind of an ex-naxi spy bonding with YOUR closest friends?

Jealous/protective Steve? ...Or possibly just blonde Steve. Not sure which.

I'm going to go with blond!Steve. I think Steve definitely does get jealous, but he's more likely to be blond.

Okay, I second the Pym particles suggestion!

...and then the Sentient Armour can be jealous!

Jealous, HELL.
Can you imagine what would happen if the Sentient Armor could convince the newly-resized Ameridroid that it was really Iron Man, and that Iron Man is, (and has always been) a robot?
Can you imagine the fallout if THOSE two got involved?

Decker was an intelligent man, but he gets very confused and lonely after trapping himself in the Ameridroid body, as evidenced by the fact that an agent of the Red Skull was later able to talk him into turning back to evil, in canon.
The Sentient Armor, while not exactly evil, is sneaky as shit and has very few allies. You do the math.

Great, as if it isn't enough that I love the idea of Skrull!Steve and Skrull!Tony, we now have roboversions of them!

(G) My work is done.

...Wut. No. What? No. ...What?!
... 12-foot tall robot Nazi. Alright.

ohhhhhh I didn't know they tried to retcon that with brainwashing huh.
I think I'm happy if that's retconned out, which Marvel Projects seems to have just done (and also let us know that the Nazi's knew exactly who Captain America was and his whole childhood so ummmmm secret identity fail)

I know everyone says "art school" but that is so nebulous a term, it needn't even be a traditional college type thing (I don't have my Marvel's Project in front of me, but IIRC didn't that look more like independent art study thing, not like a traditional college? Also at that time there were some very non-traditonal art schools esp. in New York (okay I'm sure there still are).

My art history fails me though and at 3:00 am I can't think of any names ^^

Canon Question about Steve

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Hmm Ults Steve

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Yeah, in Ultimate Human

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Art School at NYU

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WTF CANON WTF?

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