It seems appropriate, as a Fourth of July firecracker, to write about the first out-of-the-gate adventures of Captain America on this Independence Day, as well as his intrepid young sidekick, "Bucky," a lad who, while not possessed of the genetically modified super strength and other abilities Cap enjoys, does not lack for spunk, spine, and the ability to kick a man in the balls when it's absolutely necessary. We're not damn sure just where the idea of costumed avengers and crime-busters originated, but it was the era of the vast, great Republic serials, when cloaked crusaders and masked men gave Hitler and the Japateurs what for.
Strangely, though, Cap was born before the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, but a full two years after the Nazis invaded Poland. It must have been an interesting interim period; this comic was already getting the country ready for the war that was still looming. Joe Simon recollected that, along with the adulation and fan mail, there were death threats and hate mail coming from isolationists and Nazi sympathizers. They may not have been too swift, either, picking a fight with an all-American costumed Avenger four-colored into comic-book life by a couple of Jewish creators.
Be that as it may, Cap begins life in a secret, though thoroughly mad scientist's lab beneath a curio shop, where a bunch of G-men show up, bringing an enemy agent in tow.
Steve is a skinny, scrawny, sucked-up punk who was 4-F (is that what they called it before the draft?) for military service, but the Doc's good old-fashioned secret super-serum turns him into Charles Atlas (okay, maybe not that buff—not in the same manner Cap would be depicted decades hence). Unfortunately, just the moment when the whole situation seems pound-for-pound sterling, the enemy agent pulls a gun and—blammo!—Professor Dr. Reinstein is lying in Cap's arms, and the fight is on! It's on!
Next, Cap and the Buckster are busting up a phony mentalist act, consisting of the weirdly dwarfish and Martian-like Omer, who has a huge, bald, Mars Man-like cranium and "predicts" certain acts of sabotage (today we'd use the term "terror") on behalf of his paymasters in Berlin. Cap gets wise to the mind-reading mumbo-jumbo and puts an end to the Führer's fortune tellers.
Then we get the old "The World Is My Chessboard" score from another ghoul-faced agent of the Hun, whose chessboard features AD&D miniatures of Cap and other fast players he wants to 86. To that end, he "speaks" his next move like a serial villain over a hidden microphone, and his henchmen and goons go out and execute it... literally. Once again, Cap races to the rescue, delivering right hooks and left hooks of Red, White, and Blue All-American JUSTICE, baby! Sis, boom, pow!
Besides Bucky, we're introduced to "Betty Ross" (har, har), a super-secret G-Woman agent of Uncle Sam who gets in on the action in the way only a spunky serial superheroine can.
X-13!
The artwork is incomparable, and by the time we're introduced to that Master of Mayhem and Menace, the utterly breathtaking, maniacal Red Skull (who appears wearing a swastika-adorned shovel helmet), we're convinced that we may have in our hands one of the finest examples of Golden Age comic art ever produced (albeit one colored by modern artists for its republication in 2011). Red Skull is a straight horror-influenced supervillain, a psychopathic walking monster in a bad quasi-fascist knockoff 1941 Air Corps uniform, who uses his psychedelic hypo to fill the veins of his victims with terror.
"Look into my eyes and see death! DEATH!"
But in the end, the whole situation backfires for the skull-headed serial slayer and saboteur, as Cap and Bucky rise up, in the American fashion, to regulate the Ratzi.
Which, God bless us, and God bless America, we need to do RIGHT NOW.
This comic book rock and rolls like apple pie, America, and kicking Ratzi ass, the way only Captain America can.
Happy Firecracker Day!
Author's website: http://tombakerbooks.weebly.com
Author's YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/@twistedtales99
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About the Creator
Tom Baker
Author of Haunted Indianapolis, Indiana Ghost Folklore, Midwest Maniacs, Midwest UFOs and Beyond, Scary Urban Legends, 50 Famous Fables and Folk Tales, and Notorious Crimes of the Upper Midwest.: http://tombakerbooks.weebly.com
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