The Sleeper Awakens (Tales of Suspense #72-74, Cap #101, #148) – Captain America fights a bunch of the Red Skull’s giant Kirby robots. They are awesome Kirby robots.
The Cosmic Cube (Cap #115-119) – the Red Skull gains the powers of God, Cap fights him and wins, thanks to Cap’s determination and the power of love.
MODOK! (Tales of Suspense #94, Cap #119, 124, 132, 133) – Kirby’s giant Olmec baby head assassin is hilarious and surprisingly socially conscious, if still evil.
Cap vs. Nixon (Cap #166-176) – Captain America is targeted by the Committee to Re-Elect the President, foils the Secret Empire’s attempt to overthrow the U.S government, unmasks Nixon as the head of the Secret Empire, Nixon commits suicide rather than be arrested. Cap resigns and goes in search of America.
Madbomb! (Cap #193-200) – Captain America and the Falcon team up to save America from a bomb that will turn all of America into mad rioters, a conspiracy to restore monarchy to America, an underground murderball league, Captain America travels through time, and Arnim Zola tries to transplant Hitler’s brain into Captain America. One of the best Kirby runs ever, therefore one of the best comics runs ever.
In the comics, Steve Rogers’ 4F condition was described in vague terms as “frailty,” and his visual depictions usually suggested mal-nourishment, which isn’t surprising given the poverty of his early life.
The MCU expanded upon this, showing us his medical intake report:
It’s a pretty comprehensive list – asthma (which cannot make the scarlet and rheumatic fevers or the sinusitis or chronic colds any easier to bear), a whole cluster of heart problems which were probably due to rheumatic fever having caused rheumatic heart disease, a generally poor immune system, and a family history of tuberculosis.
And a lot of these conditions – especially asthma, heart disease, scarlet fever, rheumatic fever – are illnesses associated with poverty.
I absolutely adore the Marvel Captain America movies. They certainly have some shortcomings – there’s not enough about Cap having domestic politics as well as opinions on foreign policy and civil liberties – but they really capture the essence of Steve Rogers.
Captain America: First Avenger isn’t a perfect film, but Joe Johnston gets Steve Rogers at a bone-deep level and understands how to make American pop culture of the 1930s and 1940s sing like no one else. (Seriously, everyone should watch the Rocketeer) The Cap origin story is rendered perfectly – skinny Steve standing up to bullies, Erskine and Steve’s discourse (”The serum amplifies everything that is inside, so…a strong man, who has known power all his life, they lose respect for that power. But a weak man, who values strength, and love, and compassion?… Whatever happens tomorrow, you must promise me one thing. That you must stay who you are. Not a perfect soldier, but a good man.”), the wonderful camp sequence of “Star-Studded Man With a Plan” wonderfully evokes both the good and bad of 40s Captain America and WWII patriotism. The rest of it is a fairly decent action movie and love story, even it it’s not spectacular.
Captain America: Winter Soldier is one of the best Marvel movies, and the Russo brothers being at the helm of Civil War and the next Avengers movies gives me a lot of hope. And they absolutely nail Steve Rogers and Cap America – both the good and bad sides of him being a man out of time, the way that someone who really believes in America as an ideal not as its institutions is not a boring or conservative person but a genuine rebel, his secret super-power being weaponized ideology, using Operation Paperclip and HYDRA to reflect on the moral compromises that came out of WWII, all of it. A perfect adaptation of the 1970s Captain America comics.
I feel like a lot of the time Captain America is in X-Books, he’s there to fill a very particular authoritarian role and that role pretty much requires him to be a dick. It puts him out of character a lot of the time, which is unfortunate. Maybe he has some latent unreasonability superpower that is activated through proximity to mutants?
I mean let’s be real it’s about the most plausible excuse for someone as liberal and morally oriented as Steve Rogers fighting the mutant cause
Steve Rogers comes from the New York Left. While FDR’s New Deal may have be explicitly written to exclude Black people Steve Rogers has always stood against bigotry.
Folks should def read Attewell’s follow up essays @graphicpolicy about Cap in his new series: A People’s History of the Marvel Universe.
It’s canonical that Captain America doesn’t have any anti-mutant prejudice at all and never did:
So says Magneto’s prejudice-erasing helmet. And so powerful is Captain America’s belief in the inherent equality of all that he retains this belief, even when he’s been mystically transformed into a Hyborian warrior:
To answer OP’s question: Cap is a dick when he interacts with mutants when the people writing him don’t know dick about Captain America.
As I mentioned in Week 3, Marvel had a lot of work to do to
update Captain America for the 1960s. That was true enough for the early 60s,
when the U.S Army was the undisputed good guy in the comics, when Professor X
worked with the FBI to track down mutants (more on that in a future issue), and
when beatniks were an easy comedy bit. By 1968, when Captain America graduated
from Tales of Suspense (where he double-billed with Iron Man) and got his own
book, things had changed even more so. The comics industry had to deal with the
counter-culture’s influence on visual media (both through hiring a new
generation of writers and artists influenced by the counter-culture, but also
as older creators like Jack Kirby got interested in surrealism, mixed-media,
and other trends), and at the same time the counter-culture started to show an
interest in comics.
And what was true for the industry
and Marvel as a whole was even more so for Captain America; as the
super-soldierly representation of all that’s best in
the U.S, Cap had
to respond to changes in America’s political culture. So how did Cap face the
60s?
To begin with, by experimenting
artistically so that Cap’s image kept pace with the times. Jack Kirby continued
to draw giant robots and intricate machines, but he also pushed his art to
become ever more elaborate and strange – the Cosmic Cube allowed him to bring
in some of the cosmic weirdness that we associate more with his run on
Fantastic Four and MODOK (more on that in a future issue as well) continued his
interest in giant Olmec heads. In addition, Jim Steranko was brought in as a
regular artist and brought with him a new interest in psychedelic art and
surrealism, an emphasis on flowing and contorting movement, and experimental
paneling:
Counter-cultural art can only get
you so far when that art is depicting a man literally dressed as the American
flag in the midst of the Vietnam war (more on which in future installments). So
Stan Lee and Jack Kirby (and Jim Steranko, and so on) had to deal directly with
how Captain America was viewed by the new generation:
Between Captain America #120 and
#130, Steve Rogers is suddenly made aware of the generation gap, the
counter-culture, and that he himself is viewed as a giant square. But where
most people opining on Captain America go wrong is that Marvel didn’t have Cap
respond to this by becoming a reactionary, lashing out at the damned hippies.
Rather, Lee et al. leaned into their already-established trope as Cap as a man out of time in a different way, as Steve Rogers
takes the critique seriously:
This is how Captain America engages
in political analysis. Rather than writing off the baby boom generation, he
draws a direct link between the “injustice, greed, and endless war” that he has
observed in this new world and the rise of the “rebel and the dissenter,”
taking their complaints seriously. Moreover, as a good ally should, Steve
Rogers doesn’t stop at the structural level but also absorbs the
counter-cultural critique on a personal level, asking himself why he hasn’t
been more of an individualist and a dissenter rather than just a soldier.
On a meta-level, I think we can also
see this as a kind of generational reckoning as well, with Steve Rogers
standing in for the Marvel staff in their 40s who had spent their youth in the
U.S Army in WWII, confronting a new culture that valorized the “anti-hero”
rather than Marvel’s more straightforwardly earnest style of protagonist. Without
backing down on his insistence that the values he believes in are timeless and
that there is important things that his generation has to offer the youth – in
#122, Rogers will namedrop Martin Luther King Jr., JRR Tolkien, the Kennedy
brothers, and Marshall McLuhan as examples of “establishment” types who have
influenced the youth movement – Cap nonetheless starts to experiment with a
more counter-cultural way of life, suggesting that the counter-culture might be
right about his generation.
Not only will Captain America begin
questioning authority (usually in the form of Nick Fury of SHIELD) more, but
he’ll also take to the road on a motorcycle to carve out an identity as Steve
Rogers apart from the mantle of Captain America, setting up a big part of his
Easy Rider-inspired Nomad persona in the 1970s:
When Steve Rogers rides off into his
bike, looking for the Real America, he finds not just open road and existential
quandary but the radical student movement of the 1960s. And both Rogers himself
and his creators interact with the student movement much in the way that
mainstream liberals at the time did, sympathizing with student demands but
viewing radical direct action as dangerous and illiberal:
Thus, Steve Rogers in his civilian
guise goes into action to protect a professor from being kidnapped by dangerous
radicals, but also takes the campus administration to task for not listening to
their students. Meanwhile, Stan Lee and Gene Colan depict student radicals as
unrepresentative of their peers and threatening the destruction of the larger
institution. At the same time, however, when it comes down to a clash between
campus protestors and the police, we know which side Captain America will come
down on, and it’s not the police:
While this might not rise to the
level of Denny O’Neill on Green Lantern and Green Arrow, it’s still an
important symbolic statement. Despite how wildly unpopular the New Left had
made itself by the late 1960s (71% of Americans believed that the “country
would be better off if there was less protest and dissatisfaction coming from
college campuses” in 1968) here’s Captain America siding with the kids against
the cops – as we’ll see, an association that will be enduring across issues.
At the same time though, Marvel also finessed this potential controversy with
some rather strange symbolic politics. That long-haired, pink-panted gentleman
standing next to Mart Baker and the megaphone isn’t actually a bona-fide
student…he’s an undercover agent of AIM. AIM is secretly infiltrating the
student movement and deliberately intensifying conflict in order both to weaken
American society, but also as a cover for the abduction of various professors
in the sciences whose research AIM wants to steal:
If you strip out the inherent Marvel
wackiness of MODOK’s giant baby head and AIM’s beekeeper helmets, this isn’t
too different from contemporary conservative arguments that the student
movement had been infiltrated by Soviet agents. At the same time, though, Lee
and Colan frame the situation as AIM having seized upon “legitimate grievances”
and show the students as unwitting tools rather than actively disloyal, and
when AIM’s involvement is unmasked, Cap and student radicals team up to take
them down:
It’s hard to look at this particular
storyline and not see the whole thing as condescending at best, but Marvel
Comics didn’t leave it at that. Hot off the heels of his intervention in campus
politics, Steve Rogers gets approached to become the TV pitchman for a “law and
order” backlash against the New Left that’s hiding sinister motives:
And because he’s Captain America,
and Captain America’s secret super-power is weaponized morality, Cap sees right
through the slogans of “law and order” to the sinister plot of men wearing
white hoods over their faces (not hugely subtle symbolism there, but some anvils needed to be dropped in 1968):
This is what I mean when I say that
Captain America is a progressive: he’s reframing patriotism and American
national traditions as inherently radical and de-linking the defense of the
status quo from the defense of the values that the status quo supposedly
embodies, while taking a strong pro-non-violence line with regards to protest. It’s also Marvel re-defining Captain America as a dissident, as
someone who will fight for America’s ideals rather than America’s establishment
(which will eventually lead Captain America to go into the belly of the beast
and confront Richard Nixon directly, a topic for a future issue).
So in the 1960s, Captain America
becomes the defender of youth (in a future issue, I’ll discuss how Captain
America saved rock music by fighting the Hells Angels at Altamont). And it’s
just in the nick of time too, because as it turns out, the man in the white
hood pushing for “law and order” backlash politics is none other than actual,
factual Nazi, Baron Strucker of HYDRA:
So there you have it, folks. The
political movement behind Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan is secretly being run
by a Nazi cabal, MODOK is heightening the contradictions, and Cap says the kids
are all right. However, we really can’t talk about Ca in the 1960s without
talking about one Sam Wilson, better known as the Falcon, which we will tackle
the next time A People’s History of the Marvel Universe covers Captain America…
Welcome back to A People’s History of the Marvel Universe, where I explore how real-world politics (and weird bits of pop culture) was presented in some of my favorite bits of classic Marvel comics. In this issue, I’ll be discussing how Captain America made the transition from his Timely Comics incarnation to the Marvel era.
Timely Comics’s
version of Captain America was (to be kind) rather crude, still in that stage
where superheroes as a genre are still emerging from pulp, so there’s a lot of
repetitious scenes where Cap and/or Bucky get tied to chairs because that’s the
only way the author can think of to get to the plot exposition, most of the
villains are pretty generic mobster types, and so on. However, Kirby and Lee
were able to go back and sift through the old material to find the stuff that
worked – Steve Rogers as Captain America, the uniform and the mighty shield,
the Red Skull, Agent 13 – while ditching the stuff that didn’t work (the secret
identity, Bucky to an extent, etc.).
At the same time,
there were a number of strategies that Marvel used to make the transition work.
First, in the very act of updating Captain America from the 1940s to the 1960s,
Kirby and Lee made Steve Rogers a man out of time, giving a previously rather
thinly-sketched individual a rich source of Marvel-style pathos and
interiority. The Steve Rogers who emerged in the pages of the Avengers, Tales
of Suspense, and Captain America is a veteran haunted by the memory of his
losses during WWII, a rare example in which PTSD is given its place in that
conflict. (Indeed, a lot of stories from this era involve Cap having vivid
flashbacks or hallucinations that make him question his sanity.)
However, with Kirby
there as the keeper of the sacred flame to ensure that the original spirit of Captain
America wasn’t lost, Steve Rogers’ status as a man out of time was never an
excuse to position him as a conservative or reactionary
figure. Rather,
Captain America’s position was that he would embrace these changes and fight
for the same progressive change that he had back in the New Deal:
And that’s what I
think people often get wrong about Captain America: while he was born into the
“Greatest Generation,” he’s not an old man. Rather, because of his variable
number of decades frozen in the ice, he’s a young man who’s traveled through
time, bringing the passion and idealism of youth into a new era.
Second, Kirby and
Lee kept much of the political edge of the original comics by making a
foundational element of the new Cap comics that Nazism was not dead, but had
continued into the present day as a hostile force that threatened liberal
values, often hidden beneath reactionary causes and movements (hence the
usefulness of HYDRA as a dark mirror through which to question and explore the
national security state in Captain
America: Winter Soldier). For example, early on in Tales of Suspense, they
posited that Nazi agents were at work in modern Germany:
To argue that
Nazis were hidden in German society, as if Himmler’s Operation
Werwolf had
really come to pass, was a pretty bold political statement in a Cold War world
only five years past the construction of the Berlin Wall and in which the
Western German government had yet to publicly grapple with the legacy of the
Holocaust. But Kirby’s political acumen shines in these issues, grounding these
stories in contemporary politics, as with this reference to West German laws
banning the display of Nazi iconography:
Third, another
thing that Marvel could bring to the table is a fully matured Jack Kirby. As I
mentioned above, the Timely Captain America comics were too close to the pulp
era to really be distinctively superheroic. But by the 1960s, Kirby was Kirby.
And so what the Red Skull’s sleeper agents were out to awaken was not merely a
coup against the Federal Republic of Germany, but a giant Nazi robot:
The Timely Comics
version of the Red Skull had been a petty saboteur and sometimes assassin, very
much within the wheelhouse of pulp antagonists. The new Red Skull (who’ll be
explored in future installments) was reimagined as a full-on supervillain with
a flair for giant robots, doomsday devices, world conquest, and grandiloquent
speeches complete with cigarette holder. And so Kirby gave the world not just a
giant robot menacing the free world, but a Nazi Voltron:
This was the
secret alchemy that brought Captain America into the contemporary world of
Mighty Marvel Comics: on the one hand, Jack Kirby’s larger-than-life visuals and
Marvel’s attention to interiority gave Captain America new life, but on the
other, the original political spirit of the Timely Comics was carefully
preserved, so that what made Captain America unique is a superhero is that his
power is essentially weaponized progressive ideology:
Hey folks, because this is the sort of thing I do for fun, I’ve decided to do some shorter pieces on the intersection between politics and comic books.
In A People’s History of the Marvel Universe, I’ll be exploring how real-world politics (and weird bits of pop culture) was presented in some of my favorite bits of classic Marvel comics, starting with Claremont’s run on X-Men and Captain America from the Timely Comics through the 80s. And thanks to my friends Brett and Elana over at Graphic Policy, which covers comic books from a progressive viewpoint and which you should be reading regularly, I’ll be posting them both here and there.
Today, I’ll be talking about the politics of Captain America, something I’ve discussedbefore. Political nerds and Marvel fans are probably aware that the original Captain America comics from the 1940s were explicitly political, as Joe Simon and Jack Kirby took an explicitly anti-fascist and anti-Nazi position in March 1941, ten months before the U.S was attacked at Pearl Harbor.
What they might not know is that that Captain America was also explicitly political – and progressive – on domestic politics as well. As proof, I present this panel from the very first page of Captain America #2:
Meet the villains of the very first story to feature Captain America’s now-iconic round shield – two corrupt bankers trying to evade Federal corporate income taxes. Now, yes, Benson the corrupt banker on the right happens to use “Oriental giants” he discovered in Tibet who are impervious to everything but sonic weapons to “raise havoc with the city – the nation! I want money-money!” but at the end of the day, he’s still a corrupt banker who kills people to hide his income tax evasion.
Joe Simon and Jack Kirby’s point couldn’t be clearer – wealthy businessmen who avoid paying corporate income taxes (and these would be FDR’s “Soak the Rich” taxes, specifically) damage America’s ability to wage war on fascism and require the same two-fisted justice that Captain America deals out to “Ratzi” spies, storm troopers guarding a concentration camp in the Black Forest, Adolph Hitler himself, and the evil Wax Man (who kills people with wax masks of themselves for some reason).
Then again, it’s also the issue where Captain America cross-dresses…to fight fascism.
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