Roland Barthes published an influential essay in 1967 called "Death of the Author." Barthes argued against using a critical framework that relies on aspects of the author's identity - gender, race, sexual orientation, age, historical context, and so on - because it creates places an interpretive tyranny on any text. Barthes compares text to textile, remarking that a text is made up of a fabric of quotations drawn from varied and indeterminate centers of culture rather than from the singular experiences of an individual. Every reading and re-reading is a new act of creation and Barthes is more happy to consider the figure of the author as a scriptor who produces but does not command the meanings of the work.
I don't often come back to Barthes, because I have so deeply accepted his ideas. But there are moments when I cringe a little at the dismissal of legitimate criticism or questions because the issues at stake were not "intended" by the author of the text (let's not even get into the fact that, with comics, you have enough cooks in the kitchen - writer, penciller, inker, colorist(s), editor(s), publishers, and so on - that any pure unanimity would be nearly impossible). I'm reminded of Brian Michael Bendis dismissing complaints about the assault of Tigra in New Avengers #35 because he didn't intend to make a comment about gender and violence in super-hero comics. Once the story is published, it's not really up to Joe Quesada, I'm afraid to say, just as it wasn't up to Bendis, what the story is about. It's up to readers what, if anything, the Death (and now Rebirth) of Captain America means as an allegory. From CBR's interview with Joey Q:
Jonah Weiland: When Steve Rogers died, was there one mainstream question that you kept getting where you had to hold back from rolling your eyes?
Joe Quesada: Yes. The one question was, "What are you trying to say about America and or American politics?" [laughs] I was like, "I don't know. We're just trying to tell a great story. There's nothing more to it than that!" But they were trying to get deeper, trying to find that controversial nugget where there really wasn’t any, and at the end of the day, if we were trying to say something about American politics, we'd never be able to time it anyway because the amount of time it takes to create a comic book, etc. etc. Things happen the way they happen. But that’s the tricky thing about writing stories with a character that wears the American flag as his costume, people are going to read stuff into his stories that sometimes isn’t there.
Let's ignore that Quesada didn't actually write or draw any of the issues that make up that storyline. Let's ignore the "we're just trying to tell a great story" because that's not true (it would be more accurately to say that he's trying to sell a great story). Any weird, unforeseen themes that appear, regardless of what the creators of Captain America intended, are fair game.
Joe Quesada is the Editor in Chief, and therefore bears the responsibility for any significant stories in the Marvel U. I can sympathize with his feeling that certain reporters were just digging for a sensational sound-byte or hoping to stir up controversy. And it isn't the place of reporters to make literary interpretations (they have other important things to do). But Quesada is quite mistaken to deny that someone could see an allegory (even a poorly constructed or thematically weak allegory) where one was not intended. It's ridiculous of Quesada to say that "people are going to read stuff into his [Captain America's] stories that sometimes isn't there [sic]." If they read it, then it's there. As readers, they have created that meaning in the text. Just because this long "Death of Captain America" story was not intended to be a comment on the transition from Bush to Obama, doesn't mean that it can't be read as such. It could even be read as a layered allegory for the relative merits of the metric system, if one were so inclined. It's then up to the person who sees the subtext to argue convincingly that it is, in fact, present and persuasive. This is how we reject the bad interpretations (the metric system one, for instance) and find the good ones. Joe Quesada might disagree, but I think that one could easily make a really compelling argument about the present political moment through the lens of Captain America's death and resurrection.
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