Captain America is one of my favorite characters. Full stop. Number three with Superman being number one and Batman and Hulk sharing the number two spot because I can’t decide between the two of them.

Between my podcasting work and my sites, I haven’t done a whole lot of content about Cap. Now that Bailey Planet is up and running it’s time to change that. To kick things off, I thought it would be fun to trip hammer through some of the Cap runs I’ve read over the years and break them up by era. Nothing too deep. Just something to get things going.

Golden Age

A few years ago, I took advantage of a Comixology year end sale and picked up a bunch of Marvel Masterworks for like a buck or so a piece.

(Sidenote: I really miss those sales.)

Anyway, I picked some of the Golden Age Captain America Masterworks and made my way through of them and, overall, they are a lot of fun. In my very limited experience Golden Age Marvel (known as Timely Comics at the…time) hits different than Golden Age DC does, but in the case of Captain America it hits a lot like Golden Age Batman. The stories are driven by action and the dynamic between Cap and Bucky is lot like the dynamic between Batman and Robin. The villains are largely forgettable and because Steve Rogers is in the military there is a lot more military type action. It was interesting to see the original Red Skull stories as well, especially with how that character evolved from the Silver Age to the present.

The Fifties

Atlas (as Marvel was known at the time) era Captain America is wild. Just…wild. Captain America and Bucky return to fight the communists, including a rebranded Red Skull. The stories are extremely jingoistic and are as much about Cap and Bucky telling us how evil those commies are as they are about the action.

I mean, when the strip went from Young Men to a short, three issue stint in Captain America the words, “Commie Smasher” were right beside Cap’s name.

The strip begins with Steve as a teacher and Bucky as one of his students, but they are quickly back in the military with very little in the way of explanation. From there the action ping pongs from stateside fights to international adventures, some of which take place in Korea. There is no subtly when it comes to jingoism, but that makes it a strangely compelling read.

To me, there are two ways to look at this era. The first is as an artifact from a very specific era. The stories are very much of their time and while some of the things that went on have become…less socially acceptable they’re kind of fascinating at the same time. I mean, at the end of one adventure Cap and Bucky take in an atomic bomb test as if it were a movie or a concert, which was a thing in the fifties.  

The other way to read it, which requires some mental gymnastics, is that these are the adventures of William Burnside and Jack Monroe. Burnside discovered a copy of the super soldier serum and through what became a circuitous route injected himself and one of his students (Jack) with the formula. The problem was that the serum was only part of the process. The subject also needed to be exposed to vita-rays, which William and Jack weren’t, and they eventually started going a little mad and were put into suspended animation.

Because comics.

The mental gymnastics are needed because that whole thing was a ret-con on the part of Steve Englehart. The original stories make no mention of any of that and are presented as straight-ahead adventures of Cap and Bucky in the fifties. To be fair, if you follow any character that has a long publishing history you have to make some adjustments because of how comic book storytelling evolved over the decades, especially when it comes to retroactive continuity. So, it’s not a huge deal, but it is something that needs to be considered.

The Sixties

Cap was given a spot in Tales of Suspense (where he roomed with Iron Man) and that whole run is very uneven. The first story is very strong, but it’s followed by several meh stories and it’s evident that Stan was struggling to find a direction for the character.

This isn’t an isolated thing in Silver Age Marvel. The Fantastic Four got its act together pretty quick and Spider-Man came out nearly fully formed, but most of the other characters (Hulk, Iron Man, and Thor for example) took some fine tuning. Again, this isn’t meant to sound like I’m trying to badmouth Stan, Jack, Steve, and crew. It was just one of those interesting realizations as I read more and more from that era. It’s easy to think that these characters were all awesome from the beginning and while the original stories could be fun what we think of when we think of MARVEL took some doing.

The strip took off like a rocket when Stan and Jack started retelling Golden Age stories. These are fun, dynamic tales that Jack put a lot of heart into artistically. I particularly love the origin of the Red Skull. After going through a series of flashback stories Stan and Jack moved into the present and Stan started leaning into the “man out of time” thing to bring the drama. The stories could be hit and miss, but the first Cosmic Cube tales are great. The strip settled into telling action driven stories that were formulaic but fun. Lots of Cap teaming up with S.H.I.E.L.D. with an ongoing romantic sub-plot involving Steve and Sharon Carter, who looks just like a former love of Cap’s named Peggy Carter.

It was a whole thing.

The Late Seventies and Eighties

I haven’t gone through a lot of Cap’s early Bronze Age adventures. I finally read Englehart’s first storyline, which I mentioned earlier, and it more than lived up to the hype.

Back in the early 2000s I put together a run of Captain America that started with issue 241 (the one with the Punisher) and ended with the first storyline of the Marvel Knights series from 2002 and made my way through it over the course of a few months. It was interesting, because up until Mark Gruenwald took over the writing chores in 1983 there was this weird cycle that consisted of a series of fill in stories followed by a writer coming on with a strong direction followed by a series of fill in stories followed by a writer coming in with a strong direction followed by…you get the idea.

Roger Stern and John Byrne’s all too brief run is fantastic. I can’t recommend it enough. Stern fixed some weird continuity issues and gave Steve a supporting cast in the form of his neighbors. After the previously mentioned fill-in issues J.M. DeMatteis came on board and continued with the supporting cast, particularly Bernie Rosenthal. DeMatteis’s run had big ideas without ever losing sight of Stever as a character. My favorite part was the run that went from 290 to issue 300, which is an amazing Red Skull story.

Issue 298 is my personal favorite. It is one of the few Captain America books I read in my early, early comic days and one I read and re-read over and over again. It retells the origin of the Red Skull and was such a thing for me that my sisters still mention it from time to time.

Then, after a handful of Mike Carlin written issues, Mark Gruenwald comes on board and suddenly Cap fully enters the eighties. Gruenwald initially leaned into using the title to comment on Reagan era America. The Serpent Society was a way to talk about labor unions. Super Patriot was a way of talking about how all-in patriotism can be problematic. Flag Smasher was a way to look at the idea of anti-nationalism. Scourge explored vigilantes.

Then Gruenwald took Steve out of the costume and replaced him with Super Patriot (a.k.a. John Walker) and once again one of the best Cap stories is when Steve isn’t Cap for the bulk of it. I absolutely love The Captain era. I love the costume Steve adopted and I love how it showed that Steve was, at the time, the only man for the job.

The Nineties

The post Captain storylines start out strong, but as much as I hate to write it, Gruenwald’s run does fizzle out towards the end. The early nineties Cap stories have a lot going for them. Crossbones made his first appearance. The Red Skull is a regular villain. Ron Lim starts drawing the book. Around this time many of the regular Marvel books would go twice monthly in the summer, which led to several six issue storylines that were, for the most part, a lot of fun. The only real misstep, to my mind, was Streets of Poison, which saw the Super Soldier serum getting removed from Steve’s body for very ham-fisted anti-drug reasons. Gruenwald’s heart was in the right place and there was this fantastic, bare-knuckled brawl between the Red Skull and the Kingpin, but the “Drugs are bad, m’kay?” overtones were a bit much.

Once the title crossed the 400-issue mark the book got a little hard to read. Cap Wolf makes for a fun thing to say, but the story was…not the best. Gruenwald’s final storyline, Fighting Chance, (where Cap is dying and has to don a suit of armor) was a mess, but, in a weird way, it was kind of epic.

Mark Waid took over for Gruenwald starting with issue 444 and right away the book is back on track. Waid brought a modern sensibility to the story without going full early nineties. He brought back both Red Skull and Sharon Carter. The first storyline was great and the second one, Man Without a County, saw Cap getting exiled because of things that happened during the first storyline, was even better.

Then Heroes Reborn happened.

And I am going to stop there because this thing is getting a lot longer than I thought it was going to.

So much for this not being too deep.

Come back the day after tomorrow as I finish out my thousand-foot view of the Captain America books I’ve read over the decades.

More to follow…