American Eagle (Marvel Comics) - Analysis

Analysis

In Native Americans in Comic Books - A Critical Study, Michael A. Sheyahshe notes that while American Eagle "may have some inherent stereotypic issues, the fact that American Eagle's powers come from a non-ethnically based source (and not, say, the Great Spirit) marks a significant improvement for Indigenous characters."

During an interview with Comic Book Resources, the assistant editor Lauren Sankovitch explains why she chose to represent American Eagle in Marvel Assistant-Sized Spectacular #1 (2009):

For a character whose total appearances I could count on my fingers, not to mention having some of the worst costumes in the history of tacky superherowear, I felt American Eagle had such a tremendous potential within the Marvel U as a whole. With his strong identification to his Native American heritage and disaffected attitude towards the larger superhero community, he’s a principled man with his own brand of justice. Pair that with his bone-dry sense of humor and take-all-comers power set, he is a force to be reckoned with.

In an interview, Greg Pak, the writer of the story "Homeland" in War Machine vol. 2 #6-7 (2010), told that Jason Strongbow, aka American Eagle, is easily his "favorite reinvented character of the past decade." Indeed, the modern character has undergone some transformations compared to its appearances from 1981 to 1994. At the beginning, the Navajo hero was wearing a stereotypical costume with feather headdress and buckskin boots. When the writer Warren Ellis and the artist Mike Deodato Jr. used the character in Thunderbolts, its new look is composed of ordinary clothes, a leather jacket and a helmet resembling the head and beak of a bald eagle. In its first appearances, Strongbow was running under his own power, at the opposite the new version uses a motorcycle.