By Jack Kirby, Don Glut, Roy Thomas, Steve Gerber, Scott Edelman, David Anthony Kraft, Sal Buscema, John Buscema, George Tuska, Steve Leialoha, Dave Cockrum, Frank Giacoia, Mike Royer, John Tartaglione, John Verpoorten, Pablo Marcos, Mike Esposito, Dan Green, Joe Sinnott, Al Gordon & various (MARVEL)
ISBN: 978-1-3029-6052-0 (TPB/Digital edition)
This book includes Discriminatory Content produced in less enlightened times.
These days, Captain America is more a global symbol of the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave than Uncle Sam or Apple Pie ever were. Thus, I’m again exploiting a lazy obvious way to celebrate the prelude to Independence Day (for them and whichever of so many prospects TangoTacoPotUS is shopping as the next candidate for the nation’s 51st State) by recommending this blockbuster book highlighting material first seen in 1976 and beyond as said States commenced a third century of existence and still felt relatively United and travelling in generally the same direction…
Created by Joe Simon & Jack Kirby in an era of frantic patriotic fervour, Captain America was a dynamic, highly visible response to the horrors of Nazism and the threat of Liberty’s loss. However, he quickly lost focus and popularity after hostilities ceased: fading away during post-war reconstruction. He briefly reappeared after the Korean War: a harder, darker sentinel ferreting out monsters, subversives and the “commies” who lurked under every American bed. Then he vanished once more until the burgeoning Marvel Age resurrected him just in time to experience the Land of the Free’s most turbulent and culturally divisive era.
“Cap” quickly became a mainstay of the Marvel Revolution across the Swinging Sixties, but lost his own way somewhat after that, except for a glittering period under scripter Steve Englehart. Eventually, however, he too moved on and out in the middle of the 1970s.
Meanwhile, elsewhere, after nearly a decade drafting almost all of Marvel’s successes, Jack Kirby had jumped ship to arch-rival DC in 1970, creating a whole new mythology and dynamically inspiring pantheon for the opposition. Eventually, The King accepted that even he could never win against any publishing company’s excessive pressure to produce whilst enduring micro-managing editorial interference.
Seeing which way the winds were blowing, Kirby exploded back into the Marvel Universe in 1976 with a signed promise of free rein, concocting another stunning wave of iconic creations – 2001: a Space Odyssey, Machine Man, The Eternals, Devil Dinosaur (plus – so nearly – seminal TV paranoia-fest The Prisoner) – as well as drafting a wealth of bombastic covers for almost every title in the company. He was also granted control of two of his previous co-creations – firmly established characters Black Panther and Captain America – to do with as he wished. The return was much hyped at the time but swiftly became controversial since Jack’s intensely personal visions paid little lip service to company continuity. Jack always went his own bombastic way and whilst those new works quickly found many friends, his tenure on those earlier inventions drastically divided the fan base.
Kirby was never slavishly wedded to tight continuity and preferred, in many ways, to treat his stints on Cap and the Panther as creative “Day Ones”. This was never more apparent than in the pages of the Star-Spangled Sentinel of Liberty…
This sterling collection reprints Captain America and the Falcon #201-221 and Captain America Annuals #3 & 4 cumulatively spanning September 1976 – May 1978, as the King eventually moved on and a horde of lesser lights sought to shepherd the hero back to Marvel mainstream continuity…
At the end of the previous volume Kirby’s original Fighting American had saved the nation from a conclave of aristocratic oligarchs attempting to undo two hundred years of freedom and progress with their “Madbomb” (and don’t forget to check out Washington DC for the effects still extant today…). After saving the nation, the Star-Spangled Avenger reunited with his partner Sam Wilson for CA&TF #201, set in the aftermath of their struggle…
Inked by Frank Giacoia, the tone shifts to malevolent moodiness and uncanny mystery with the introduction of ‘The Night People!’: a street-full of maladjusted maniacs who periodically phase into and out of “normal” New York City, creating terror and chaos with every sunset. When Falcon and girlfriend Leila are abducted by the eerie encroachers, they are quickly converted to their crazed cause by exposure to the ‘Mad, Mad Dimension!’ the vile visitors inhabit during daylight hours. This leaves Cap and folksy new not-evil millionaire colleague Texas Jack Muldoon hopelessly outgunned when their last-ditch rescue attempt results in them all battling an invasion of brutally berserk other-dimensional beasts in ‘Alamo II!’
On bludgeoning, battle-hardened top-form, the Star-Spangled Avenger saves the day once more, but no sooner are the erstwhile inhabitants of Zero Street safely re-integrated on Earth than ‘The Unburied One!’ finds our indefatigable champions clashing with a corpse who won’t play dead. The concluding chapter reveals the cadaver has become home to an energy-being from the far future as (inked by John Verpoorten) ‘Agron Walks the Earth!’ Thankfully, not even his/its pulsating power and rage can long baulk the indomitable spirit and ability of America’s Ultimate Fighting Man…
Non-stop nightmares resume in #206 as ‘Face to Face with the Swine!’ (Giacoia inks) sees the Star-Spangled Sensation illegally renditioned by secret police to deepest Central America. Here he subsequently topples the private kingdom and personal torture ground of psychotic sadist Comandante Hector Santiago, unchallenged monarch of the prison of Rio del Muerte. Never one to go anywhere meekly, Cap escapes and begins engineering the brute’s downfall in ‘The Tiger and the Swine!!’ but soon finds the jungles conceal actual monsters. When they exact primal justice on the tormentors, Cap’s escape with the Swine’s cousin Donna Maria down ‘The River of Death!’ is interrupted by the advent of another astounding “Kirby Kreation”:‘Arnim Zola… the Bio-Fanatic!!’
Abducting Cap and Donna Maria to his living castle, the former Nazi geneticist and absolute master of radical biology inflicts upon them a horde of diabolical homunculi at the behest of a mysterious sponsor, even as elsewhere, Falcon closes in on his long-missing pal. Indomitable against every kind of shapeshifting horror, Cap strives on, enduring a terrible ‘Showdown Day!’ (with Mike W. Royer taking over inking), whilst back home Steve Rogers’ girlfriend Sharon Carter uses her resources as SHIELD’s Agent 13 to investigate wealthy Cyrus Fenton and exposes ‘Nazi “X”!’ as Zola’s sponsor and the Sentinel of Liberty’s greatest nemesis.
With his time on the title counting down, Kirby ramped up the tension in #212 as ‘The Face of a Hero! Yours!!’ sees Zola preparing to surgically insert the Red Skull into Cap’s form, triggering a cataclysmic clash which leaves America’s hero bloodied, blind, but ultimately victorious…
With the hero recuperating in a US hospital, Dan Green inked #213 as ultimate assassin ‘The Night Flyer!’ targets the recuperating Cap at the behest of unfettered capitalist villain Kligger – of the insidious Corporation – inadvertently restoring his victim’s vision in time for spectacular if abrupt, Royer-inked conclusion ‘The Power’…
Narratively and chronologically adrift – and thus reading slightly out of sequence here – Captain America Annual #3 and 4 follow: wrapping up Kirby’s contributions to the career of the Star-Spangled Avenger beginning with his abruptly diverting back to business basics in a feature-length science fiction shocker which eschewed convoluted backstory and cultural soul-searching to simply pit the valiant hero against a cosmic vampire.
‘The Thing From the Black Hole Star!’ is a complication-free riot of rampaging action and end-of-the-world wonderment featuring a fallible but fiercely determined fighting man free of doubt and determined to defend humanity at all costs. It begins when farmer Jim Hendricks finds a UFO on his land and calls in a specialist he knows he can trust…
A year passes like magic in comics and one year later but immediately following here, Kirby recruits one of his earliest villain creations for ‘The Great Mutant Massacre!’: a feature- length super-shocker which again rejects accumulated history and the career confusion which typified Cap before and after Jack’s tenure for instant gratification. Here America’s Super Soldier strives against humanity’s nemesis Magneto and his latest mutant recruits Burner, Smasher, Lifter, Shocker, Slither and Peeper. This riot of rampaging action and end-of-the-world bombastic bravado pits the Sentinel of Liberty against a Homo Superior hit-squad aiming to take possession of a superpowered being whose origins are far stranger than anybody could conceive…
When Kirby moved on it left a desperate gap in the schedules. Captain America #215 saw Roy Thomas, George Tuska & Pablo Marcos respond by revisiting the hallowed origin story for the current generation with ‘The Way it Really Was!’: reiterating simultaneously the history of the heroes who had inherited the red, white & blue uniform whilst Steve Rogers was entombed in ice, and ending with our hero desperately wondering who the man beneath his mask might truly be.
For all that, #216 was a deadline-filling reprint of November 1963’s Strange Tales #114, represented here by Gil Kane’s cover and a single page framing sequence by Thomas, Dave Cockrum & Frank Giacoia. Thomas, Don Glut, John Buscema & Marcos actually began ‘The Search for Steve Rogers!’ in #217 with S.H.I.EL.D.’s record division, where the Falcon is distracted by a surprising job offer. Nick Fury (I), busy with the hunt for capitalist cabal The Corporation, asks Cap’s partner to supervise the agency’s newest project: the S.H.I.E.L.D. Super-Agents. These wonders-in-training consist of Texas Twister, Blue Streak, The Vamp and a rather mature-seeming Marvel Boy, but the squad are already deeply flawed and fatally compromised…
Issue #218 finds Cap targeted by a Corporation agent and fed data which bends his legendarily-fragmented memory back to his first thawing from the ice. Heading north to retrace his original journey, Cap spends ‘One Day in Newfoundland!’ (Glut, Sal Buscema & John Tartaglione), uncovering a secret army, an unremembered old foe and a colossal robotic facsimile of himself. One month later, ‘The Adventures of Captain America’ (Glut, Sal B & Joe Sinnott) reveals how, during WWII, Cap and junior partner Bucky were ordered to investigate skulduggery on the set of a movie serial about them, thereby exposing special effects wizard Lyle Dekker as a highly-placed Nazi spy. Now in modern-day Newfoundland, that warped and unforgiving genius has built a clandestine organisation with one incredible purpose: revealed in ‘The Ameridroid Lives!’ (inked by Tartaglione & Mike Esposito) as the captive crusader is mind-probed and dredges up shocking submerged memories.
In 1945, when he and Bucky chased a swiftly-launched secret weapon, the boy (apparently) died and Rogers fell into the North Atlantic: frozen in a block of ice until found and thawed by The Avengers. At least, he always thought that’s how it happened…
Now as the probe does its devilish work, Captain America finds that he was in fact picked up by Dekker after the spy was punished by the Red Skull and exiled for his failures. Deciding to work only for his own interests, Dekker then attempted to transfer Cap’s power to himself and it was only in escaping the Newfoundland base that Rogers crashed into the sea and fully froze…
In the Now, the vile scheme is finally accomplished: Cap’s energies are replicated in a 15-foot-tall super-android, with aging Dekker’s consciousness permanently embedded in its metal and plastic brain. However only at the peak of triumph does the fanatic realise he’s made himself into a monster at once unique, solitary and utterly apart from humanity…
The deadline problems still hadn’t eased and this episode was chopped in half, with the remainder of the issue affording Falcon a short solo outing as Scott Edelman, Bob Budiansky & Al Gordon’s ‘…On a Wing and a Prayer!’ portrays the Pinioned Paladin hunting a mad archer who has kidnapped his avian ally Redwing. The remainder of the Ameridroid saga came in #221 where Steve Gerber &David Kraft co-scripted ‘Cul-De-Sac!’, wherein the marauding mechanoid is finally foiled – by reason, not force of arms – whilst ‘The Coming of Captain Avenger!’ (Edelman, Steve Leialoha & Gordon) provides one last space-filling vignette with former sidekick Rick Jones given a tantalising glimpse of his most cherished dreams…
To Be Continued…
This tome then concludes with contemporary media moments, including John Romita’s July image from the Mighty Marvel Bicentennial Calendar 1976 and Kirby & Giacoia’s contribution to Marvel Comics Memory Album Calendar 1977 plus a sublime covers and interior pages original art gallery by Kirby, Giacoia, Romita & Verpoorten for fans to drool over.
The King’s commitment to wholesome adventure, breakneck action and breathless wonder, combined with his absolute mastery of the comic page and unceasing quest for the Next Big Thrill, always make for a captivating read and this stuff is as good as anything Jack crafted over his decades of creative brilliance.
Fast-paced, action-packed, totally engrossing Fights ‘n’ Tights masterpieces no fan should ignore and, above all else, fabulously fun tales of a truly American Dream…
© 2025 MARVEL.
