[5] A connected story Yankee UFO, concerning a person from another alternative history where Ted Kennedy is President of the United States trapped in Captain Confederacy's world, was published online in 2008.
The first series, published in the SteelDragon Press run, tells how the first Captain Confederacy, a white man, becomes disillusioned with Confederate society after the death of his friend.
When his friend becomes fed up with his status as a second class citizen within the Confederacy and his own culpability in perpetuating same for his race through his participation in the propaganda, he refuses to continue in his TV role, and he is shot.
All of the superheroes/actors involved were given medical treatments which produced genuine superpowers (both physical and psionic), to enhance the realism of the propaganda news telecasts.
In the alternative history, the Confederacy won the Civil War, which resulted in a fracturing of the North American continent, mostly affecting what was the United States of America into eight nations.
In the 2018 trade paperback edition, Shetterly's afterward explains that he purposefully omitted an in-universe explanation, because he wanted to let the readers' imagination decide this.
Each of these nations has its own propaganda heroes similar to the original Captain Confederacy, though empowered through different means and technologies (armored suits, drugs, etc.).
A version of the Underground Railroad exists within the Confederacy to help oppressed minorities escape to Canada, the United States, or occasionally a smaller nation such as Deseret.
Commercially, McDonald's is known for its fast food burritos — although it has plans to introduce a new ground beef sandwich with cheese, while KFC sells catfish, not chicken.
In Reconstructing Dixie: Race, Gender, and Nostalgia in the Imagined South by Tara McPherson (Duke University), McPherson wrote: "From the retooled Stars and Bars of Captain Confederacy's costume to the mapping of urban and rural southern places, the series takes up the symbols of the South and imaginitively reconstructs them, shaking loose the stock figures, geographies, and temporalities of southerness.