Richard Delevan reports

ON the day earlier this month that senior White House official 'Scooter' Libby was convicted of obstructing an investigation into the CIA leak case over Iraq, a man named Steve Rogers, draped in the American flag emerges in handcuffs on the steps of the Federal courthouse in New York. As he blinks in the sunlight, a sniper's scope focuses on his chest. Shots ring out and the man falls. The crowd around him starts to panic. More shots, these from close range, from within the crowd. Steve Rogers's ragged breathing ends.

In the days that follow, the murder will be the subject of more than 830 newspaper articles (at time of writing), many of them obituaries, and some 26,000 posts to blogs. The man's alias appears, according to Google, on more than 1,010,000 web pages.

In a world that each day assaults our senses with some fresh atrocity, it struck some as odd that so much attention be paid to a single killing, particularly one that wasn't real. Steve Rogers was, after all, a comic book character, better known as Captain America.

Born in 1917 to Irish immigrants on Manhattan's Lower East Side, Steve Rogers was a 99pound-weakling art student when he tried to enlist in the US Army in 1940. Rejected as medically unfit for combat, Rogers volunteered to take an experimental government "super serum". It brought his body to the limit of human physical perfection. He could bench-press 800 pounds.

He could run all day and never get tired. Before being sent off to fight Nazis, he received another product of American scientific prowess, an indestructible shield made from an alien alloy, given to him by no less a figure than the American president himself, Franklin D Roosevelt.

After more than 600 appearances in comic books over more than 66 years, Captain America was finally killed because he led the comic-book world resistance to an American government trashing civil liberties following a terrorist attack. He was finally assassinated by Ed Brubaker, a mild-mannered 40-year-old writer. Brubaker was given charge of the character by Marvel Comics, the owner of the franchise as well as the characters of Spider-Man, the X-Men, Daredevil, the Fantastic Four and a number of other superheroes brought to the big screen in recent years as comics, re-christened as 'graphic novels', that broke out of their niche and found both a new intellectual respectability and a mass audience.

Captain America himself was never in the top rank of comicbook heroes, on the order of a Batman, Superman or SpiderMan. His narrative arc, however, has more closely tracked the public mood in the US than perhaps any other (see panel).

"I always saw Captain America as being much more of a character like Thomas Jefferson or Thomas Paine, someone who really thought about what America was supposed to be as opposed to what America is, " Brubaker told National Public Radio, recalling how he discovered Captain America when he was living on the US base at Guantanamo Bay as the character underwent a crisis of conscience over a Nixonian villain president. "So I always liked that about Captain America, " he added, "that he was sort of a voice for what was good about the American dream, and, at the same time, he could be a very strong voice of dissent. . . And I thought because he's Captain America and not just Captain UN or Captain World, his ideals are what America could be and what America should be as opposed to what America sometimes is."

The storyline leading to Captain America's death involves a civil war in the superhero world.

Following a terrorist attack that superheroes fail to prevent, the US government demands superheroes register their real identities under an Orwellian-sounding "Initiative" . . . or else be rendered to a Guantanamo-style superhero prison called "the Negative Zone". Half the superheroes, led by conservative billionaire defence secretary Tony Stark, aka superhero Iron Man, decide to support the government. Captain America leads the resistance, but when a battle between the two sides sees civilian casualties, he turns himself in to work for change within the system.

Brubaker insists that it is merely "a good story" that helps to sell comic books. On that score it worked . . . a normal comic by Marvel sells 50,000 to be successful.

Each edition of the Civil War mini-series has sold more than 200,000.

Some cultural commentators, including those at the Irish Times, expressed disbelief that the death of a comic book character could have such resonance, muscling the death of French philosopher Jean Baudrillard out of the spotlight. But the very way in which a comic book event . . . titled "Death of the Dream" . . . seems to have so captured the American zeitgeist, surely bears some examination.

Is it merely a highly successful marketing effort, or is there something deeper at work? Could it be that a repugnance against torture, Iraqi POWs sexually abused for sport on film, orangejumpsuited prisoners held perpetually without trial, suspects 'disappeared' off the street and 'rendered' to secret CIA prisons, ubiquitous surveillance, rampant incompetence in a war without end, a callous disregard for civil liberties and the rule of law has reached a tipping point in mainstream America? Some deep cultural pessimism, no longer confined to an elite niche, stirring in American popular culture?

There is a case for it.

Popular culture in the US has long been a trailing indicator of broader social trends, with the political system lagging even further behind. Sci-fi series Star Trek saw the first interracial TV kiss while miscegenation laws remained on the books of several Southern states. M*A*S*H* debuted at the height of the Vietnam War but was set in Korea.

Since 9/11 there have been some references in TV and film to Iraq and terrorism. The most notable was the terrorism drama 24 (Sky One), but its depictions of the hero engaging in torture were so frequent and uncritical the Pentagon has asked the writers to tone it down.

More critical examinations of recent US government policies have taken longer to materialise.

Sci-fi cult hit Battlestar Galactica (also on Sky One) features thinlyveiled allegories for real world fights over civil liberties and national security in a society facing an existential threat. Even a 2004 blockbuster remake of the paranoid Cold War classic The Manchurian Candidate seemed to occasionally pull its punches.

But a look at TV and film release schedules for 2007 suggest that Hollywood believes that there is a mass market for more bluntly critical fare. HBO, the network which made The Sopranos and Six Feet Under, will broadcast Generation Kill, based on the 2004 account of US Marines in the Iraq War with tales of Washington incompetence that foreshadow all that went wrong with the US occupation. Brothers & Sisters, airing currently on US network ABC and starring Calista Flockhart as a Republican lobbyist and former TV talking head with a brother in Iraq, claims it is the first mainstream US TV drama to have a character openly declare the Iraq War to be wrong.

"We shouldn't be in this war, " the Allie McBeal star-turned-lobbyist declares.

Rendition, scheduled for US cinema release in November, will see Reese Witherspoon portray the American wife of an Arab engineer disappeared into a secret CIA prison and tortured by CIA man Jake Gyllenhaal, it also stars Meryl Streep and Alan Arkin; American Gangster will star Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe in the story of a drug kingpin smuggling heroin back from Vietnam in the coffins of dead US soldiers.

Not every effort will find success. In the highly successful TV drama The West Wing, writer Aaron Sorkin only obliquely touched on the real world crisis bar one episode. He quit, reportedly in frustration, after the fourth series. His return to television, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip (now airing on TV3), follows a writer for a successful TV show who is forced to quit after he's accused of being insufficiently patriotic after 9/11.

He returns to the show four years later, now that President Bush's support is "confined to 13 guys in Alabama", in the words of the network executive who effectively sacked the writer. Perhaps the most extraordinary thing is that Sorkin's programme, which savages the spineless TV industry itself, returned to the same network that aired The West Wing.

But the programme was cancelled last month. The reason?

Besides lacking the edgy wit of The West Wing, it garnered only half the viewers of Heroes (airing on Channel 6), a live-action drama rooted in comic books.