Articles with the Tag Captain America

Fifty Essentials in Fifty Days 07: Captain America Vol. 01

books and books review, Comix
Published on

cover of Essential Captain America vol 1


Essential Captain America Vol. 1
Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Gil Kane and friends
Reprints: Tales of Suspense #59-99, Captain America #100-102 (November 1964 – June 1968)
Get this for: Classic Captain America — five stars

Believe it or not, Captain America is my favourite Marvel superhero, largely due to Mark Gruenwald’s long run. What I like about Captain America is how leftist a patriot he is, a Roosevelt democrat and man of the people, punching out Hitler a year before America entered the war, always representing more the ideals of America than its government, in as far as a four colour hero can represent anything when he spents most of his time fighting leftover nazis, grotesque monstrosities wanting to rule the world and other sci-fi menaces…. Captain America is one of those characters who, like Spider-Man or the Thing always make a story better, almost as if writers try extra hard when they are working with them.

Essential Captain America Vol. 1 reprints Captain America’s complete run in Tales of Suspense, plus the first three issues of his own title. None of this I have read before and I therefore had no idea what was in store. Silver Age Marvel comics can be a bit hit and miss, especially the split titles like Tales of Suspense so I wasn’t expecting too much, but this was excellent. It’s clear Stan Lee has an affinity for Cap, as does Jack Kirby, who provides the majority of the art here, with only short spells by John Romita, Jack Sparling and Gil Kane interrupting his run. Inkers on the other hand change much more, from Chic Stone to Frank Giacoia to Dick Ayers to George Tuska to Joe Sinnott to Syd Shores, each making their own interpretation of Kirby’s pencils.

Artwise, what makes this volume extraordinary is the evolution in Kirby’s art. At the start of the volume he has already moved on from the clean, slightly slick understated look it had in e.g. early Fantastic Four comics, with more exagerration in movement and typical Kirby poses. By the end it’s full on Kirby, weird ultracomplex machinery, impossible anatomy, hunched poses, odd viewpoints, Kirby Krackle and all. Inbetween you can see one style mutating into the other. At each point along the way the same boundless energy slams from the page. Captain America is an action orientated strip even more so than the usual silver Age Marvel title and Kirby delights in showing Cap dodging bullets, slamming into villains and sprinting across the page to defuse a bomb in time.

The first issue is a case in point, in which Lee and Kirby introduce Cap to a new audience. Cap is minding his own business at Avengers Mansion, when a gang of toughs decide that this is the one night thye can rob the place with impunity, Cap being just a “glorified acrobat”. What follows is a quick demonstration in how tough, fast and strong he is. It’s great stuff.

Storywise Captain America took some time to find its feet, the first couple of stories being rather pedestrian, before Lee puts Cap back into World War II for ten issues, then moving back to the present for the first of several Red Skull storylines, this one featuring the menace of the Sleepers, rather silly looking giant robot menaces schaduled to wake up on Der Tag, tweny years after the end of WWII. Which rubbed my face in the strange fact that more time has now passed since these stories were first published than had passed between WWII and them. Captain America as a revived World War II hero was a much different idea when the people creating his stories had lived through it themselves than it is now. Back then the idea that Cap could regularly run into people who had remembered him from seeing him in action in France or Germany back during “the Big One” was quite natural, while by now Marvel’s floating timeline has progressed so far that you could’ve had the same effect by making him a veteran of the First Gulf War!

One of the things I feared starting this volume was that every other story in here would feature either Baron Zemo or Red Skull as the villain, which fortunately is not the case. Zemo only appears twice, while the Red Skull is used more, but each time he appears is special. Other villains include Batroc Ze Leaper, the Tumbler, the Adaptoid and Super-Adaptoid as well as the menace of Them, not to mention A.I.M. and MODOK. Cap’s allies include Nick Fury (and quite a few shared storylines with his own title in Strange Tales), the mysterious and lovely SHIELD Agent 13, Rick Jones and the Black Panther.

Great fast paced action, clever plotting and even some subtle (and not so subtle) characterisation — all that and Kirby at his peak, what more do you want?

Taking Captain America into strange places

Comix
Published on

Tom Spurgeon reviews Captain America: the Truth:

While this move/development/whatever takes away the juice of creating Captain America himself from the Tuskegee Experiment-style set-up, it also places the spotlight even more directly on the treatment of African-American soldiers during that period, with the American upper-class embrace of eugenics as a minor undercurrent. History tells us the treatment of black soldiers was routinely abominable, and in The Truth those abuses become the relentless, dour drumbeat of the narrative. In other words, Marvel traded an imaginary story that might have made a black man the first Captain America for an in-continuity one that super-sizes some of the worst behavior of the US government in its long history. Captain America is safe, but the government for which he works has a truckload of explaining to do. The better and more observant histories tell us the real-world abuses were horrible, but I don’t think they were quite as over-the-top horrifying as the exploding bodies and entire units massacred for the control of minor state secrets we see here.

[…]

In the end, this is a hard story to parse because it’s really about the history involved — and the notion of retroactive continuity as it gets portrayed in the press — more than it is a tight, well-paced story of its own. It’s fun to read something this ruthlessly negative about American history coming out during the Bush years, and some of the ideas are enjoyable to mull over, but it’s not something I regret having missed the first time around. It’s admirably odd, that’s for sure.

There’s at least one thesis to be had in analysing Captain America in the Bush years, especially after 9/11. The Truth was one response, the other was seen in Ed Brubaker’s “realistic” approach, a third in the last story in Captain America – Red, White & Blue, tackling the aftermath of 9/11 directly. In general I’ve found Marvel to have become very rightwing post-Bush, the outcome of Civil War going against everything Marvel always stood for (in so far as a obviously commerce driven company universe could stand for anything of course) and Cap shoved up to the right as well. That pseudorealism, with its acceptance of the evil in the world, is a rightwing look at the world, even if the hero is shown as a shining knight in a corrupt world. It’s a far cry from the idealism of the premature anti-fascism of the original Cap…

Which is not the case with The Truth, where as Tom notices, the corruption in the background doesn’t infect Captain America himself. It respected what Captain America always stood for: the myth of America, rather than the sordid reality.

A blog written just for me

Comix
Published on

It’s like somebody looked into my brain and made a blog especially for me: Captain America’s Been Torn Apart, devoted to reading and commenting on Mark Gruenwald’s entire ten year run on Captain America. David Fiore is a veteran comics blogger and he gets both Gruenwald:

One thing I do want to stress, re: Gruenwald, is how much I appreciate his refusal to join the “Comics Aren’t Just For Kids” sweepstakes of the mid-1980s. We can all agree how dumb that was, can’t we? What I love about these books (and about Squadron Supreme in particular) is the way they wade into the same contested super-political waters that Miller and Moore were then “braving,” without swaddling these ambitions in the cloak of the medium’s much-trumpeted “coming of age.” Basically, Gruenwald is saying that the genre was always concerned with these questions–damn the “prestige format,” full speed ahead!

And Captain America:

So… created by Jack Kirby and Joe Simon in late 1940, Cap was (and is) the preeminent symbol of “premature anti-fascism” (to use HUAC terminology) in the history of American literature. He is, quite simply, THE Popular Front (that’s a New Deal era coalition of communists, socialists and others leftists) icon. There cannot be any dispute about that. Punching out Hitler meant something very different in December 1940 than it means when today’s Neocons cum in their PJs while dreaming about it…

There have of course been quite a few writers attempting liberal superheroics: Steve Gerber, Don McGregor Mike Friedrich, Steve Englehart are examples that spring to mind, but Gruenwald is in a class apart. Nobody was as consistent in their approach as Gruenwald, whose favoured protagonists like Cap, or Quasar were liberal, friendly and approachable heroes whose politics were portrayed through their day to day adventures, rather than by doing Very Special Issues about the Klan or womens’ lib or whatever. Cap especially pays more than just lip service to the idea his opponents can be reformed, rather than are intrinsincly evil, and this during the Reagan Era when every other superhero title seemingly moved to the right, becoming “gritty” and “realistic” by depicting criminals as subhuman scum for the hero to blast away. It’s therefore great to see somebody willing to spent substained critical effort on showcasing Gruenwald’s run on Cap.