Major Spoilers Question of the Day: Superhero or Super Soldier Edition

When I first began reading Captain America in high school, writer Mark Gruenwald took some criticism for his insistence that Captain America had NEVER, not even during the Great War, killed anyone.  While it made for a good story, even my fifteen-year-old self chalked it up as something that seemed highly unlikely and ran counter to the depiction in actual Golden Age comics.  Interestingly, though, I found myself troubled by the helicarrier sequence in the Avengers movie, when Captain America began firing a fully-automatic weapon at the ship’s saboteurs, clearly ready to kill if necessary.  While I understand the an action movie has to have action (and whether the superheroic ethos of comics is actually part of superhero films is another argument), it seemed that the balance between superhero and super soldier was off, which leads us to today’s times-a’changin’ query…

The MS-QOTD (pronounced, as always, “misquoted”) doesn’t think it’s a stretch to say that American soldier Steve Rogers may have killed enemies during wartime, but blasting away at Loki’s mind-controlled henchmen seemed like a different deal to me, asking: Do you prefer your Captain America to be more superhero or super soldier?