80 Years Ago: Captain America Comes Out Swinging

The most amazing thing to me about the debut of Captain America in Timely Comics in March 1941 is that he appeared ten months before Pearl Harbor. Joe Kirby and Joe Simon had the foresight and the strength of character to envision him prior to our war with the Axis, yet he is a red-white-and-blue patriotic super soldier whose premiere heroic move is a right cross to Hitler’s ugly cake hole. People actually wrote to complain when this happened, and some looneys even hung around the door of the office building where it was published to intimidate the people responsible for creating the comic. Those of us who grew up in the period between World War Two and 9/11 always assumed that was a given, a no-brainer that Americans END Nazis. That’s what we do, by definition. But the reality is, no, we were divided on that topic prior to Dec 7, 1941, and um, now we appear to be so again. Go figure.

I’ve often been vocal in blaming superhero/ action movie culture for this moral backsliding we seem to be doing. Not just MCU but the vigilantism in the DC movies as well. The North Germanic mysticism of Thor, for example, has made me uncomfortable, with all this white supremacy around. But to be fair, it’s not all some kind of a Neitzsche trip. Captain America hates tyranny and he punches it on the jaw. And the MCU films have remained true to that aspect of the character. I genuinely liked the 2011 Captain America film, enjoyed it much more than most of the other movies in the MCU cycle.

I also love that Cap’s alter ego Steve Rogers was originally from the immigrant enclave of the Lower East Side, although later that was readjusted to Brooklyn. I’m good with either one — love ’em both! There’s a bit of a Charles Atlas flavor to his origin story — he was a 90 lb weakling, who was biologically altered to be a super soldier. Obviously I’m not fond of the notion of building an army of bio-engineered killers. It just so happens that this one is pretty good about only foiling bad guys.

When World War Two kicked off a few months after his debut The Captain America character was hugely successful for years. In 1944 Republic Pictures hired Dick Purcell to play Captain America in a movie serial, following the success of similar series featuring Superman,Batman, and Captain Marvel. Captain America was the first hero from the future Marvel Comics Universe to make it to the big screen.

After the war, Captain America turned his attention to Soviet Communism, a worthy adversary as well. The comic book was finally cancelled in 1954.

A decade later, Marvel Comics was the corporate entity which inherited the stable of properties that had belong to its predecessors Timely and Atlas, and Captain America was revived in 1964. In 1966 he first appeared as an animated cartoon on TV, voiced by Sandy Becker. There was also a 1979 TV movie starring football player Reb Brown. By then, Cap had moved on to supervillains like the other Marvel heroes. But, ya know, Nazis are back. It’d be a real sweet act of corporate heroism if the producers of these movies would sic Cap on a bunch of homegrown Fascists. But I’m not holding my breath.