| Posted: 03 Mar 2010 17:23 |
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I need to know what happened with Cap America after WW2, and when and why he fought the Communists, thank you!!
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| Posted: 03 Mar 2010 21:21 |
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After WW2, GIs came home, women left baseball, and the appeal of superhero comics waned. It was like a great evil was defeated, everyone should love life and celebrate. Without the threat of Nazi domination, Heroes had no one to fight and protect innocent people. To attract readers, Cap, Torch and Sub were teamed up with Mrs America and Whizzer for the All-Winners squad, Sun Girl and Golden Girl replaced the side kicks, Toro and Bucky, and Namor the Sub Mariner began hanging around with his cousin, Namora. Comic trends leaned toward the eerie or scary tales, and pin-up pics of girls with long legs, hence the Wierd tales title in the last 2 Cap books, but it wasn't enough to save Timely's superhero books from cancellation in 1949 (From what I read, comics stopped being distributed through newstands, going to the Mom+Pop's convenience stores, and print runs exceeded cost). National Periodics kept Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman going past the 49 implosion.
around 1952-54, with news of Russia testing their own Atomic bomb, the alleged accusations of the Rosembaum for selling Atomic secrets, spread of Communism taking over the world, spies in your neighborhood thinking, Senator McCarthy anti-communist senate hearings, ...Timely, now Atlas, thought it was a great time to bring back Cap, Torch and Namor, and have them battle this commie scare or threat, liken it to the time when Nazi was growing in power. Alas, it didn't work and their books came to another end after something like 2 to 4 books.
It wasn't until Lee, Kirby, Ditko and others found a new trend in the 60s, ...Radioactive contamination scare, soap opera, angst, continuation, science, space ships, aliens and evil tyranical dictators of small foreign countries, ...that provided the universe for Cap, Torch and Namor to prosper and find readers and fans (Namor had a long run of books, Torch lived on in the FF but the original pops up here and there).
Think: Superheroes need bad guys to put them through trials and battles and express their positions and ethics. Or, something bad is going on in the world and superheroes here to protect us or provide security like a teddy bear.
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| Posted: 03 Mar 2010 23:23 |
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Thank you very much!
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| Posted: 04 Mar 2010 01:00 |
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I think Cap was frozen from there. That was the winter soldier era.
Although there are many comics in the Nam area, that's because in the 60-70s they thought that was the present. It's complicated, depends on what year your in...
Captain America stands for freedom and liberty, Communism is complicate... Other Cap fans, this is more your TOPIC.
Cap is a made up superhero, you can believe what you want...
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| Posted: 04 Mar 2010 13:14 |
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Vincent explains what happened to Cap post-WWII in the real world (good summary there).
As for the stories, Post War Cap became a teacher in civilian life (Again. Apparently he had been one before the war). He began to teach at Lee School as an instructor, later a Professor, in a variety of subjects and began to wear glasses while in his civilian attire as Steve Rogers (to make him more scholarly, no doubt). Bucky became one of his students.
Sales were still down with comics during post-WWII (maybe all those G.I.s didn't need to read them when they returned home?) so another shake up was made with Timely (who were flirting with the Marvel Comics name by the late 1940s) and their big three heroes in Cap, Sub-Mariner, and the Human Torch all took on female sidekicks. The comic audience was growing up and noticing girls, I suppose. So the Torch paired up with Sun Girl, Namor with Namora, and Cap's new female sidekick was Golden Girl, who replaced Bucky when he was shot (but not killed) by the female villain Lavender. Cap reasoned "who better to capture a woman than another woman?" so he asked Betty Ross (sometimes called Betsy, no relationship to the Hulk's Betty Ross) to help him capture Lavender. She agreed and, after some training and a costume, they defeated the female villain and she stuck around for a few more issues. She had a different-colored costume during her adventures with Cap in Marvel Mystery Comics. She actually debuted in the first Cap comic from March 1941 as special agent to the government Betty Ross too. Cap always has a thing for blonde agents.
But sales were still down so by the last two issues of the Golden Age run in 1949 and 1950, the title was changed to CAPTAIN AMERICA'S WEIRD TALES and it took on a horror theme. Cap wasn't even in the last issue. Horror was becoming the new thing in comics as a post-war audience, including adults with film noir, were now a little less innocent and naive about the world and the industry was trying to shock to sell books. This lasted in comics until the Wertham crackdown and the beginning of the Comics Code Authority.
The irony was, though, that Cap comics in the Golden Age always had a horror element to them. Especially those early Simon and Kirby books, which were very much influenced by horror and suspense movies like THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME, THE UNHOLY TRIO, THE HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES, Boris Karloff, and more. Joe Simon even told producer Michael Uslan that he wrote those early stories like a horror comic.
So the Cap title was cancelled in 1950 with issue #75 until Timely/Marvel, now under the Atlas banner, tried to revive super heroes again about 3 or 4 years later. The female sidekicks were now gone and the big three Timely heroes returned in titles like YOUNG MEN and MEN'S ADVENTURES and their old titles and numbering resumed. But the Nazis had been defeated in the 1940s so a new bad guy was needed. Well, during the era of the Cold War and McCarthyism, whom better than the Communists? So Cap and Bucky returned as "Commie-Smashers". Even the Red Skull got into the act becoming a Communist himself.
But this short revival didn't last as the heroes were soon shelved again until Marvel began to revive the characters again in the 1960s. The Communists were still the bad guys but it seemed Iron Man was the only one fighting those battles on occasion in the 1960s while Cap was mostly kept as a battler of your standard super villains and left over Nazis like the Red Skull whom also was revived.
But there was a problem. AVENGERS #4 shows Cap being revived after he witnesses the "death" of Bucky during Baron Zemo's drone plane explosion at the end of WWII. So how then do you explain all this post-war adventures? The answer came from Roy Thomas.
Roy Thomas recognized the problem and during the early 1970s he suggested the idea that maybe more than one guy wore the uniform. Cap writer Steve Englehart liked the idea and used it. McCarthyism was now out in the 1970s so he had a revived Captain America and Bucky from the 1950s fight the team of Cap and the Falcon. This revived team went mad due to not completing the Super Soldier process properly (the Vita rays, was it?) so they went crazy. After their defeat, they were brought back in 1979 for a White Supremacy story. That Bucky from the 1950s, Jack Monroe, then came back in the 1980s as the real Cap's new partner, Nomad. The 1950s Cap was brought back during the current Brubaker run and is featured in the latest storyline with the Watchdogs in Idaho.
But even the 1950s Cap and Bucky still didn't explain the late 1940s post war adventures so Roy Thomas invented two more people who wore the uniform after the nation's loss of the real Cap and Bucky at the end of the war. Roy used two lesser patriotic heroes in The Spirit of '76 and The Patriot to fill the boots and you can read that story in WHAT IF? #5 from the 1970s, which was less of a What If story and more of a story that became cannon over the years. Even a fill in villain took the guise of the real Red Skull during the 1950s to explain his sudden conversion from Nazi to Communist. This wasn't far-fetched as doppelgänger George Maxon was used in the first couple Red Skull stories from 1941 before the official Johann Schmidt Skull came to be.
As for Communism, even though the Cold War was still going during the 1970s and 1980s, there was a thaw in relations and that was reflected in the comics with most Communist and/or Russian powered-characters being seen as heroes rather than villains (Black Widow, Darkstar, Red Guardian, Colossus, etc.)
Roughly speaking, the real Steve Rogers Cap adventures went to the end of the war. The immediate post-war era with the All Winners Squad adventures featured the Spirit of '76 Cap (William Naslund) and the Lee School/Golden Girl era featured the Patriot, Jeff Mace, in the Cap uniform with Fred Davis as his Bucky. Apparently, after the two retired in the 1950s, Golden Girl and the Mace Cap married but I have yet to find that story.
Also retroactively explained in comics was that the original Bucky never died but merely had his arm blown off as he fell to the English Channel. We was picked up by a Soviet sub, outfitted with a bionic arm, and brainwashed into the assassin known as The Winter Soldier. The Soviets would take him out of cold storage from time to time to perform assassinations in the western world. During his time with the Soviets, he developed a relationship with Natasha Romanova, the Black Widow. After the fall of the Soviet Union, the Winter Soldier remained in cold storage until a Russian General retrieved him. During his battle with Cap, Cap used the cosmic cube to help him regain his memories. And now the former Winter Soldier is now the NEW Captain America.
Okay, anyone who read all that deserves a No Prize!! lol
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| Posted: 04 Mar 2010 16:47 |
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Did you know the Red Skull of the 50s, who turned out to be a communist spy using the 'Red Skull' mask and name, had some secret operation in Africa which Peter Parker's parents were sent in to learn his secrets? The Commie Skull blew up the plane that they were on, made Peter an orphan to be raised by his uncle, ...plus some info got leaked out saying the Parkers were working for the commie spy, traiters to the US, thus, Ben and May Parker chose not to tell Peter that his parents were spies, just died in a plane crash.
It took Parker as Spidey on an adventure to Africa to learn that his parents were actually working for the states trying to bring down the commie Skull. I'll let you guys find or reference those books.
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| Posted: 04 Mar 2010 23:05 |
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That was in an AMAZING SPIDER-MAN ANNUAL, right?
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| Posted: 05 Mar 2010 20:04 |
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Thank you all very much! I really appreciate that!
I need to analyze analyze 4 stories, one connecting with the Nazis one with the Communists and the other 2 just stories, and then i need to compare them, can anyone tell me if there's a website where I can read summery of those stories?
Thanks.
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| Posted: 05 Mar 2010 20:30 |
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The sites I look at don't really have good summaries of the issues. I think your best bet is to get to a comic book store and maybe find a reprint of the very first issue or one of the golden age trades.
If you want to go the bit torrent route, the golden age stories are out there too.
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