In what shouldn't be a surprise at all, the Mainstream Media is giving ink to Marvel's resurrection of Captain America.
THIS incarnation of the "Living Legend of World War Two" has an odder history than usual, even for comic characters.
Follow me back to the "Golden Age of Comic Books" below the fold.
My friend, the late Jack Kirby, and his still-living partner Joe Simon created a number of Superheroes throughout their careers in comics. During the late 30's/early 40's they often followed the once-popular convention of young, almost always male, sidekicks assisting the super-humans.
Jules Feiffer said of Robin, the Boy Wonder: God, how I hated him!
As Jack Kirby and Stan Lee undertook the successful revival of Marvel Superheroes in the early 60's, they tried a sidekick named Rick Jones, who was involved in the Incredible Hulk saga. The whole riff was passe, and they knew it soon enough.
When Marvel's Avengers found Captain America in suspended animation, the back-story was that his WWII sidekick Bucky Barnes had been killed in Cap's previous adventure, which gave the reanimated relic some moments of fashionable angst and 60's-style psycho-drama. Artist Jim Steranko even tried making Rick Jones his partner for a VERY short time. I wasn't reading comic books when Cap had yet a THIRD junior sidekick.
Two generations after Captain A's revival, the Arctic ice gave up corporeal Bucky Barnes himself as the Soviet Winter Soldier -- now he's wearing the stars and stripes again.
As Jack said to me, and it bears repeating: "Marvel can use Captain America for a hundred years!"
McCarthyite Captain America & Bucky in 1954. (Inset) Bucky Barnes as the Soviet Union's Winter Soldier two generations later, soon to take over Captain America's job, after DYING for the chance over 50 years ago.
One ironic note in Captain America's publishing history is that this character, and his "dead" partner were used as a shrill, Anti-Communist hit team in a short-lived series circa 1953-54. Stan Lee was the writer/editor, and John Romita did the artwork. (See illustration)
This team would later take Spider Man to the heights of popularity a decade later, but THIS Captain America/Bucky team were rank McCarthyite thugs -- when Marvel reprinted a couple of these stories during their heyday, the fans let them know how displeased they were at the coarse, intolerant, and frankly stupid attitudes expressed in them.
The irony was how Marvel was still persecuted by those same rabid right-wingers they had cringed before in these pages. We 60's fans all knew how Lee and his cousin/publisher Martin Goodman were investigated by Congress soon after printing this crap, and submitted to a so-called Comics Code Authority, rather than be censored from outside their industry.