Captain America will like America but, you know, not too much. Wouldn’t want a superhero fighting Nazis for the American war effort, named Captain America, to be too much of a “jingoistic American flag waver.” It reminds me of that scene in District B13 where the hero cop is quick to assure an ally — and the audience — that his values aren’t French values, they’re “human values.”

“He wants to serve his country, but he’s not this sort of jingoistic American flag-waver,” Johnston said. “He’s just a good person. We make a point of that in the script: Don’t change who you are once you go from Steve Rogers to this super-soldier; you have to stay who you are inside, that’s really what’s important more than your strength and everything. It’ll be interesting and fun to put a different spin on the character and one that the fans are really going to appreciate.”

In fairness, I never liked Captain America too much. I thought he was too much of a Boy Scout when he was an American flag-waver and I thought he became too much of a tool for bad comic-book political speechifying later. But is it really so crazy that a comic book character designed to be rah-rah for America actually rah-rah a bit? This reminds me of when they started to round out the Cookie Monster’s diet, because “cookies are only a sometimes food” — even for the Cookie Monster.