Captain America: Cartoon Star of the Small Screen

BACK WHEN I was a kid, very few television or movie producers would have dreamed of looking to comic books for source material. Certainly, the old poverty row studios, poor in ideas and budgets, might have occasionally turned to comic book and comic strip characters, but that was about it.

For obvious reasons, comic strip characters made it onto the screen first. Original comic book characters didn't really kick off in a big way until Superman showed just how viable heroes created specifically for comic books could be.

The earliest live-action comic strip movie I have is Tarzan the Ape Man (1932). I know Tarzan wasn't originally a comic strip character, but I'd argue that the success of the Hal Foster daily comic strip running in hundreds of newspapers in the USA from January 1929 was almost certainly what caught the attention of the the great MGM Studios.

Tarzan the Ape Man (1932) was a major movie from a Hollywood's biggest and most successful studio MGM. Olympic swimmer Johnny Weissmuller was cast in the lead and the production revelled in presenting the star's perfect physique. Hal Foster's art on the newspaper strip was every bit as beautiful as the production values of the movie version.

Other strip characters would soon follow, notably Palooka (1934), an adaptation of Ham Fisher's boxing strip Joe Palooka, and Blondie (1938) based on the Chic Young comedy strip. But it was in the weekly movie serials where comic characters would really come into their own.

In rapid succession, comic strip characters paraded across the screen in low-budget serial chapterplays: Flash Gordon (1936), Dick Tracy (1937), Jungle Jim (1937), Secret Agent X-9 (1937), Buck Rogers (1939), Mandrake the Magician (1939), Terry and the Pirates (1940) and The Phantom (1943).

DC Comics were a bit prima donna-ish about allowing Hollywood to film their star character Superman, so many other companies' superheroes appeared on screen first, like Fawcett Comics' Captain Midnight (1942).

Pretty soon, they were joined by bona-fide comic book characters: Adventures of Captain Marvel (1941), Captain Midnight (1942), Spy Smasher (1942), Batman (1943), Vigilante (1947), Superman (1948), Congo Bill (1948), Blackhawk (1952) and Captain America (1944).

Even back in the 1940s, movie studios seemed to have nothing but contempt for the characters they licensed from the comic book companies. How many errors can you spot here in the appearance of the serial Captain America compared to the comic book version?

Sadly, Republic's serial version of Captain America bore very little resemblance to the dynamic artwork of Joe Simon and Jack Kirby that appeared in Timely's Captain America Comics. I think once the character was licensed to the movie studio, then the producers would just do whatever they wanted. Much as I enjoyed seeing the Captain America serial at Saturday morning pictures all those decades ago it was evident, even to my ten year old sensibilities, that the character on the screen didn't have much to do with the Lee and Kirby Marvel Comics I was reading.

For a start, this Captain America didn't have a shield. That's right, serial producer William O'Sullivan decided to ignore the character's unique selling point. Then he changed Cap's civilian identity from Steve Rogers to Grant Gardner, District Attorney. Finally, to pile insult on top of injury, he gave Cap a gun with which to shoot the bad guys. I hardly even noticed the missing wings on the sides of Cap's mask ...

That said, I still think this is still one of the great serials. The action is non-stop and the stunt players put everything they have into the many, many fight scenes. I won't dwell on it further here, but I wrote a review of this serial a while back for IMDB. So follow the link if you want see what I said.

After that, Captain America wouldn't appear on screen for another 22 years, and when he did, it wasn't a great deal better.

"MARVEL SUPERHEROES ON TV!"

Towards the end of 1966, Stan Lee started running teasers at the foot of random pages in the various Marvel titles promising that Marvel Heroes were going to be on television.

These little banners started showing up in assorted Marvel titles towards the end of 1966.

Then the following month, full-page ads started appearing. It seemed that Marvel had licensed some of their top characters for tv cartoons. Even as an ever-optimistic twelve year old, I had no illusions that we'd ever see these shows on UK television. I was still reeling from the outrage that was 20th Century-Fox's abominable Batman tv show.

Pretty quickly, full page ads started showing up revealing the line-up of the Marvel Super-Heroes cartoon show. Front and centre was Captain America.

It didn't occur to me at the time, but it was apparent that Marvel had sold the rights to the heroes appearing in their anthology titles to tv. Thor was the star of Journey into Mystery. The Sub-Mariner and The Hulk were sharing Tales to Astonish and Captain America and Iron Man were appearing in Tales of Suspense. For whatever reason, the television people didn't seem interested in S.H.I.E.L.D. and Dr Strange from Strange Tales. And my guess is that Marvel publisher Marty Goodman was holding back his big guns - Spider-Man and Fantastic Four - until he saw how the cartoon folks handled the B-team characters.

As it turns out, I wouldn't see any of these cartoons until many years later. Fifty years later to be precise - when I finally got round to buying DVDs of the Marvel Super-Heroes cartoon shows last year. 

The title card of the very first Captain America cartoon, a fairly literal transcription of the origin story from Tales of Suspense 63.

The first cartoon in the Captain America series was a panel-by-panel adaptation of the WWII-set Lee/Kirby story from Tales of Suspense 63, "The Origin of Captain America". 

Produced using very limited animation by Grantray-Lawrence the cartoons relied very heavily on artworks from the actual Marvel comics. In fact, so similar are the cartoon frames to the comic book art that I'd say that it's perfectly possible that the animators worked with stats of the original art.

Here's a comparison of the art from the key transformation scene, showing how close to the original artwork the cartoon is. There's some degradation in the detail, suggesting that the animators worked from stats or tracings of the original art.

But still, despite the tale being pretty dramatic, the animators seemed incapable of treating it that way, and dubbed in a glut of comedy sound effects that might be more appropriate in a Three Stooges short. Even stranger, the producers also thought it'd be a great idea to have on-screen lettered sound effects as well, probably believing that that was reason for the success of the Batman tv show. Add in the over-the-top delivery by the show's voice actors and it makes for an odd mixture. Judge for yourself ... you can see some of the cartoons here.

The storyline from Tales of Suspense 64 forms the mid-section of Episode One.

Episode One marches briskly through the remainder of the origin story, including the foiling of the Nazi saboteurs and the destruction of the German submarine, though the producers change the enemy from Nazis to some unnamed military foe. 

This is an inexplicable decision on the part of the show's producers. Why would anyone think that it would be a problem to depict Nazis as the bad guys in a kids' cartoon? Especially given that Cap was created solely for the purpose of fighting the Nazi ideology. Did the producers think that somehow it was a bad idea to show Nazism in a bad light to 1960s children? I guess we'll never know what the agenda was here, but it's a decision I find more than a little weird.

The second half then takes in the Sando and Omar plotline from Tales of Suspense 64, where they too were originally Nazis, then segues into the Red Skull story from ToS65.

Episode Two reveals the origin of The Red Skull from ToS 66, along with the stories from ToS 67 and 68.

Episode Two mixes up the next few Captain America stories from the comics. It kicks off with "The Sentinel and the Spy" (ToS68), then into "The Fantastic Origin of the Red Skull" (ToS66) and "Lest Tyranny Triumph" (ToS67), though in the last part, the Skull's sponsor and benefactor Adolph Hitler is replaced with an unnamed high-ranking military commander.

Episode Three adapts the three-part story from ToS 69 to 71.

Episode Three adapts the "Greymore Castle" three-parter from Tales of Suspense 69-71, which as I explained in an earlier blog entry, was never one of my favourite Captain America stories. Again the Nazis of the original comic book story have been replaced by some generic brutal military types, simply referred to as "The Enemy", though we're given no sense of who they are.

Episode Four takes the Captain America scenes from Avengers 7 and 16 and melds them into a single story that reveals that Bucky's dead, then has Zemo die by his own hand.

Episode Four of the Captain America cartoon then flashes forward in time to the comic stories set in the present day and recounts the Captain America scenes from Avengers 7, with Cap's workout with the wrestlers, then into the plotline where Cap trails Zemo to his South American jungle hideout. Then weirdly, the story jumps forward to resolution of the Zemo storyline from Avengers 15 and finishes with Zemo buried beneath a rockfall because of his own villainy.

The fifth episode of the Captain America cartoon adapts the story from Avengers 4, telling of the revival of the WWII hero and the introduction of the Teen Brigade.

Confusingly, Episode Five then jumps back in the Marvel timeline to Avengers 4 and tells the story of how the Avengers find the frozen form of Captain America floating in the ocean off Newfoundland. Then the episode segues into the Captain America story from Tales of Suspense 59, where Cap, relaxing at the Avengers mansion, thwarts an attack by a bunch of gangsters.

Guest villains The Melter, The Black Knight and the Radioactive Man ally themselves with the mysteriously revived Zemo to tackle The Avengers and Captain America.

The confusion continues when Episode Six has Zemo and his Masters of Evil battling Captain America and the Avengers (from the story in Avengers 6) ... even though Zemo dies in Episode Four. That said, it would have been quite cool if I'd seen this cartoon back in 1966, with the two super-teams fighting in the streets of New York. And the producers also manage to fix a plot glitch from Avengers 6, where Zemo's ship is downed, he is supposedly arrested by the police only to turn up back in his South America jungle lair in Avengers 7. Here, his fleeing ship is sent who-knows-where by Thor's hammer-generated space warp. Not a massive improvement, but at least not a plot hole.

Just like in the comics, The Adaptoid absorbs the abilities of the Avengers - Giant Man, The Wasp, and Hawkeye - to defeat Captain America.

The seventh episode of the cartoon features the Adaptoid, a super-android created by AIM, in a re-telling of the story from Tales of Suspense 82, and features a different lineup of the Avengers, again with no explanation of who the new Giant Man and Hawkeye are. Halfway through the cartoon, the Adaptoid morphs into the Super-Adaptoid, and the story then begins to recount the events of Tales of Suspense 84.

This episode of the Captain America cartoon is a straightforward re-telling of the origin of Hawkeye and how his mentor Swordsman cheats his way into The Avengers.

Episode Eight moves back in the Marvel timeline and adapts Avengers 19 and 20, telling the story of how The Swordsman tries to join the Avengers and how the character was responsible for teaching Hawkeye his archery skills. It's interesting to see how the cartoon style changes from being drawn in the style of Jack Kirby to looking like Don Heck artwork. Hardly surprising given that Heck had taken over the art on The Avengers starting with issue 17.

Next time I'll cover the remaining episodes of the Marvel Super-Heroes Captain America show and look at the three Captain America tv movies in the 1970s and 1990s.

Next: Captain America goes live-action

Captain America: A Man Out of Time

CAPTAIN AMERICA was one of the first Marvel Comics heroes I discovered back in the hazy days of 1965. I'm not sure what it was that fascinated me about the character - his star-spangled costume, his embodiment of the American Dream, the fact that he was not Super but just an ordinary man.

Even in the mid-Sixties, we were exposed to a great deal of American culture here in the UK, through movies, television and our reading matter. My feeling was that home-grown comic papers like Beano and Beezer were for small children, but the brash and colourful US imports were for older kids like myself. And of course, they were more expensive which, like designer goods today, made them more aspirational.

These early Marvels would have first been on sale in the UK in mid-1965, around the time of my eleventh birthday. Compared to the straight-arrow Justice League of America the Marvel characters seemed wilder and just a little more dangerous.

I've covered my earliest encounters with the fledgling Marvel comics in earlier blog entries, but it's worth mentioning again that the character that first caught my eye in those formative years was Captain America. And in the summer of 1965, I resolved that I was going to save (we didn't call it "collecting" back then) all the Captain America comics I could get my hands on. But as it was quite a while back now, I can't really remember now what order I found these issues in, so as with my recent Spider-Man coverage, I'll just examine each issue of Tales of Suspense in order.

HOW MUCH SUSPENSE CAN YOU MANAGE?

After the Battle issue of Tales of Suspense 58 (Oct 1964), the first issue of Suspense to feature Captain America in his own strip was issue 59 (Nov 1964). This was one of the Marvels caught up in the great Thorpe & Porter import snafu of late-1964 that I reported on in an earlier blog. So the issue didn't make it into UK newsagents, at least not so as you'd notice. So I wouldn't get my hands on a copy of this comic until sometime in the 1970s.

Marvel used the idea of a Battle Issue to introduce the incoming superhero strip in the anthology titles - so Iron Man battled Captain America in Tales of Suspense 58, though Don Heck's Cap was only adequate. A couple of months earlier, Giant Man had battled The Incredible Hulk in preparation for ol' Greenskin's solo series which would begin in Astonish 60.

Looking back on ToS59 now, the Captain America story feels very much like it was was plotted and drawn by Jack Kirby, then handed to Stan for dialoguing. The reason I think this is that there's no characterisation going on and next to no motivation for the bad guys to invade the Avengers Mansion. The closest we get to seeing Cap depicted as a real person is when he has a flick through an old scrapbook of his wartime exploits with Bucky - though trying to imagine Captain America sitting down with a pot of paste and a stack of newspaper clippings is pretty difficult. When did he make the scrapbook? Was it frozen in the ice-block with him? Or did he put in a safe-deposit box against the time he was thawed out? This kind of detail wouldn't have been neglected if Stan had been plotting the story, so that's why I'm blaming this on Kirby's storytelling carelessness.

When the Captain America solo strip kicked off in Tales of Suspense 59, the artwork by Kirby was outstanding, but the story felt very thin on the ground. Some gangsters invade the Avengers mansion and have a big fight with Cap. That's it.

The following issue wasn't a massive improvement. The Captain America story, again pencilled by Kirby with great inks by Chic Stone, featured essentially the same plot. This time the antagonists are a group of assassins despatched to kill Cap while he's giving a demonstration of his fighting skill to an invited audience, but once again - in a great Kirby action sequence - the "weakest" Avenger mops them up with ease. Rick Jones also gets a little ass-whupping action, as a sort of substitute Bucky, but without the wisecracks. It's worth mentioning here that Cap is still using the magnetically-powered shield given to him by Iron Man in Avengers 6 (July 1964).

In Tales of Suspense 60, the Captain America strip was more of an incident than a story. A group of thugs sent by Baron Zemo takes the place of Cap's sparring partners during a public demonstration and get their asses kicked. That's it.

Tales of Suspense 61 was a bit of a change of pace. Captain America shows up in Vietnam to rescue a POW, Jim Baker, the younger brother of a soldier who'd once saved Cap's life in Europe during WW2. The Viet-Cong are led by The General, a huge sumo wrestler. Aside from the fact that sumos are Japanese, it's a better story for Cap than what we've seen so far in this title. But it still lacks a bit of substance.

Even though the Captain America section of Suspense 61 featured a change of locale - Vietnam, in this case - it was still just an incident, where Cap shows up, kicks some commie butt and departs.

The same month that ToS61 came out, Captain America guest-starred in Sgt Fury and his Howling Commandos 13 (Dec 1964), one of my favourite comics of the Silver Age. Looking back on it now, it's not hard to see why. Behind a great Kirby/Stone cover, there's a neat little scene at the beginning of the story where Nick Fury and Pamela Hawley are enjoying tea in a pub (yes, it seems unlikely, and even less likely that a pub would have uniformed waitresses, but Stan's still an American, despite professing to being an Anglo-phile and actually being married to a Brit). One of Fury's fellow tea-sippers is Pvt Steve Rogers. When platoon bully Sgt Bull McGiveney shows up, he picks on Rogers and pushes him around a little, before Fury intervenes.

As soon as I saw this comic advertised in the Marvel house ads, I just knew I had to track it down. Captain America. Bucky. Fighting alongside Sgt Fury. In World War II. How could it not be brilliant?

Later on in the story, Fury and Rogers meet again on a Nazi train transporting slave workers to help dig a tunnel to Britain (so, probably in France, then). When Fury and the Howlers start to bust up the Nazis' project, Captain America and Bucky show up and pitch in. There's a couple of great pages of Kirby/Ayers action (the first Kirby Fury since issue 7) before the heroes make their escape and we're treated to a fun epilogue with Fury recuperating in one hospital room while unknown to him Steve Rogers/Captain America recovers in the very next room.

Sgt Fury 13 certainly felt a lot more substantial than the 10-pagers that were running in Suspense at the same time. With a whopping 23 pages to play with here Lee and Kirby were able to craft a much more satisfying tale, despite Cap having to share the stage with Fury and his Howling Wotsits.

Kirby's art is superb here. The big frame with Captain America being held by the convicts at the top of a page 4 perfectly captures the controlled power of Cap ... only Kirby could have pulled this off so effectively.

But after the widescreen spectacle of Sgt Fury 13, the return to 10-page incidents in Tales of Suspense 62 felt like a bit of a let-down. In this episode, Cap is giving (yet) another demonstration of his fighting prowess, this time inside a prison. What he doesn't realise is that the "warden" is actually the leader of a bunch of escaped convicts that have taken over the penitentiary - and they want to use the electronics in Cap's shield to open the complex outer doors. Of course, a big fight breaks out and Cap gives the convict horde a severe slapping. By the time reinforcements show up, Captain America has the situation safely in hand. The epilogue has Cap revealing that he's taken the electronics out of the shield because they upset its delicate balance, and the real warden telling Cap that the outer doors can be opened by simply speaking the words, "Captain America".

Looking back on it now, this seems about the lamest tale of the bunch so far. It's like neither Stan nor Jack actually knew what to do with the character. But then Stan must have realised that too, because at the very tail end of the letters page, we're told that Captain America strip is taking a new direction ... "It's gonna be a new type of tale, the first of a new series". It was, as well.

The origin of Captain America has been retrofitted a few times in the years since 1965, but this version is the most straightforward telling of the tale, if a little wordy, and as a bonus, we get the origin of Bucky, as well.

I remember seeing Tales of Suspense 63 for the first time - a fairly tatty copy in a second-hand shop - sometime in early 1966, I think. My first thought was that I would finally find out how Captain America could be a young man both in the 1940s and in the 1960s. (Remember, I'd seen ToS64 a year or more earlier and I was already aware of Cap's adventures as an Avenger). Part of me was a little disappointed when all I got was a ten-page origin story set in the forties with art by Jack Kirby and quite a lot of scripting from Stan. No explanation of how Cap had weathered the twenty years from 1944-1964 without ageing. That was annoying.

As far as the plot points are concerned, the origin of Captain America in Tales of Suspense 63 is identical to the original origin, way back in Captain America Comics 1.

That said, it's a rattling good read and actually two-and-a-half pages longer than the original story from Captain America Comics 1 (Mar 1941), though that's mostly because it tacks on an incident at the end showing Cap and Bucky busting up a bunch of Nazi saboteurs landing from a submarine, then destroying the sub (and presumably the crew inside it) with the saboteurs' own explosives. The final caption pledges that "each following issue of Suspense will feature a new adventures of Cap and Bucky based on their World War Two exploits." But that wouldn't be quite true ...

I mentioned Tales of Suspense 64 in the very first entry of this blog ... it was one of the first Marvel Comics I ever saw. It's hard to describe how I looked upon Iron Man versus Hawkeye and the Black Widow and the rather eerie tale of Captain America and Bucky battling clairvoyant Nazis at the time. I'd been used to the clean-cut adventures of the DC super-heroes up till that point and this new approach was an entirely different experience. As Nick Caputo pointed out in one of his first blog posts, the Marvel tales felt altogether grimier, and closer to real life than the artificial and squeaky-clean landscapes that Flash and Green Lantern inhabited. For me this made the Marvel landscape seem all the more familiar to me, despite New York being three thousand miles away from the south-east London district I was living in at the time. DC's suburban backdrops, all manicured and neat, seemed a long way away from where I lived.

The Captain America story from Tales of Suspense 64 was a straight re-telling of a story from the very first issue of the 1941 Captain America comic ... Stan added the explanation of Sando's crystal ball which was missing from the original version.

But about those promised all-new stories of Captain America set during WWII ... they may have been new to me at the time, but as The Kid reminded me in response to an earlier post, the Sando and Omar story was a re-telling of the second tale, by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, in the now legendary Captain America Comics 1. So similar are the two that Stan probably shouldn't have taken a "writer" credit on the re-telling.

The plot has a couple of variety performers, Sando and his mute "psychic" assistant Omar, predicting disasters from a theatre stage to bewildered audiences. Each of their predictions comes true ... hardly surprising as they are simply part of a nest of Nazi saboteurs. Presumably, the theatrical performances are intended to demoralise the American public. Captain America and Bucky investigate, discover the secret behind the plot and break up the gang with the help of government operative, identified as Betty Ross in the 1941 version, but Agent Thirteen in the 1964 story. Confusingly, there would be an Agent Thirteen in Cap's 1960s life, but that's a story for another time.

The original version of the tale, which appeared in Captain America Comics 1, was scripted and drawn by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, one of their first jobs as the in-house creative team of Timely comics, as Marty Goodman tried to wean himself off depending on Funnies Inc for his supply on new comics material.

The Special Announcements Section at the end of the Tales of Suspense 64 letter page told us next issue we could expect "the most famous villain Captain America ever fought - a villain whom the older readers will remember, and who is just a legendary name to our younger fans." Not to me, he wasn't. I'd never heard of The Red Skull.

When I did eventually find a copy of Tales of Suspense 65, I was more excited about the prospect of the old golden-armoured Iron Man fighting the newer red-and-yellow version ... but once I got to the Red Skull story, it turned out to be a lot better than I expected. It all begins when a high-ranking army officer is murdered by a weird Nazi agent in a red skull mask. Police are baffled about the cause of death and Steve Rogers and Bucky Barnes decide to take a hand as Captain America and Bucky. Cap rescues Bucky and demolishes the Skull's henchmen, but the Skull himself escapes. Next day, Rogers and Barnes are on guard detail during a demonstration of a new plane designed by the head of the Maxon Aircraft Corp. Right under the noses of the military, the plane is sabotaged. That evening the General Curtis is murdered by the Red Skull. But the fracas attracts the attention of Captain America and he manages to defeat the Skull. Pulling the mask from the Nazi agent he's shocked to see the face of aircraft designer Maxon. Taking advantage of Cap's surprise, Maxon makes his escape.

The re-introduction of The Red Skull in ToS65 was a pretty big deal, thought I didn't know it at the time. The character would go on to eclipse Baron Zemo, who'd started out as Cap's main nemesis during the 1960s.

The storytelling here is a bit confused. Is the fake "Maxon" actually The Red Skull? Doesn't seem likely, because Cap says that "Maxon was eliminated by the Nazis and replaced with a lookalike, which indicates that this was the Maxon lookalike, disguised as The Skull. Yet, as he escapes, "Maxon" shouts, "The Red Skull is never without a waiting escape route.

The likeliest explanation is that Kirby plotted and drew the tale, using the original comic as a reference, then handed it over to Stan for scripting, who in turn, struggled to make sense of Jack's ramshackle plot. Not even Chic Stone's smooth inking helped. And when we look at the Red Skull story from Captain America Comics 1, it turns out that The Red Skull - who dies at the end of the tale - actually is Maxon, a man turned traitor for the promise of the post of Minister of Industry when Hitler conquers the USA. Yet, Simon and Kirby would revive the character in issue 7, indicating that Maxon was only an impersonator, though that plot point really isn't made clear in Suspense 65.

The earlier telling of the story seemed to work a bit better, probably because Simon & Kirby hadn't originally intended using the character again and were happy to have him revealed as Maxon, then killed off at the end of the tale. The popularity of the character must have caught them by surprise.

Tales of Suspense 66 strayed from the re-telling of old stories from Captain America Comics 1. Stan and Jack gave us the all-new Origin of the Red Skull. I might be wrong, but I'm fairly sure that the character's beginnings were never portrayed in the original 1940s Captain America comics. It's not a bad tale, either. The story begins with Captain America bound and at the mercy of The Red Skull. As the Skull gloats over his helpless foe, we learn how an un-named nebbish chances to be in the same room with Adolph Hitler one day at the beginning of WWII. Hitler capriciously decides that he can make the perfect Nazi out of this nobody and gives him the mask and costume. The Red Skull quickly takes to his new role as Hitler's Head of Terror and pretty soon starts getting ambitions of his own. The story ends with Captain America, in a drug-induced trance, under the full control of his arch-enemy.

With Cap captured and Bucky missing, The Red Skull reveals the secret of how he rose to prominence in Hitler's Nazi Party. The story ended with a brainwashed Captain America prepared to assassinate, the leader of the Allied Forces in Europe.

The ten-page story seems to hang together better than the adaptations from Captain America Comics 1 in Suspense 63-65 do. Perhaps that's because it's not an adaptation. Further, perhaps it's because with ToS66, Stan was actually plotting the stories instead of (I'm guessing) leaving Jack to revise the plots from the older stories by himself, then just adding the dialogue afterwards. The next issue would continue in this direction.

Tales of Suspense 67 has The Red Skull gloatingly deliver the mind-controlled Captain America to the Fuehrer. Hitler orders The Red Skull to have Cap carry out his "mission" then kill him. So, leading a squad of Nazi commandos, Cap parachutes into London and breaks into the home of the highest ranking US general in the European Theatre of Operations ... and apparently pulls the trigger.

The Red Skull introduces Adolph Hitler to his new BFF - Captain America. The Nazis then have Cap assassinate the highest ranking US Commander in Europe. We can only watch, horrified, as Cap pulls the trigger of his borrowed Luger.

As with the previous episode, the storytelling here is a lot smoother that the Golden Age adaptation had been. Lee's script and Kirby's art seem to mesh more fully, and the inking of Frank Giacoia (under the fake name "Frankie Ray" - he was still working for DC at the time) is almost as perfect as Chic Stone's.

Just like the old cliffhanger serials, Tales of Suspense 68 began with a resolution to the dreadful situation at the end of the previous episode. It was a bit of a cop-out, to be honest. A kind of, "with one bound, Cap was free." Stan and Jack ask us to believe that the brainwashing of Captain America was complete - but not complete enough. At the crucial final reckoning, Cap is unable to pull the trigger on the general. Then the story veers off in a different direction, with Cap chasing down a Nazi agent who manages to get his hands on an allied secret weapon, "Project Vanish", and the plotline becomes a little conventional again in the process.

Oh, wait a minute ... seems like Captain America had second thoughts about shooting the general at the behest of his Nazi controllers and switches back to the side of the good guys at the last moment. Not Stan and Jack's finest moment in their long partnership.

The final WWII era story, that began in Tales of Suspense 69, was never one of my favourites. A drawn-out three parter, the first episode was drawn by Kirby/Ayers and the final two by George Tuska over Jack Kirby layouts. I know Tuska is highly regarded in some quarters and certainly his long track record is worthy of respect, but then, as now, his artwork never really rose above the "slightly cartoony" and for that reason, never appealed to me. So this is the point that I lost a bit of my enthusiasm, at least for Cap's solo stories.

George Tuska continued on the Captain America strip until Tales of Suspense 74, and as a result my interest in the title waned in direct proportion. The Iron Man stories benefited from the introduction of a new penciller, "Adam Austin", who brought a modern, metallic sheen to the character. There were a couple of fill-in stories in ToS 77-78, drawn by John Romita just before he picked up the reins on The Amazing Spider-Man, then Kirby was back and kicking some serious butt in Tales of Suspense 79, and Captain America began his long association with Nick Fury and SHIELD ... but that's a story for another time.

Next: Leading the Avengers

From Regular Reader to Committed Collector

GROWING UP ON A SOUTH-EAST LONDON council estate might seem like a bit of an urban nightmare to some readers of this blog. But it really wasn't. The Milne Estate in Woolwich was quite genteel in comparison to the kind of sink-hole estates depicted in today's television shows and movies. For example, vandalism just didn't happen. We kids were all all too afraid that our families might be evicted if we committed such a senseless and selfish act. Besides, if any of us had been spotted daubing graffiti and our parents (or parent) got to hear of it, we'd be battered to within an inch of our lives.

Growing up on a council estate, we had no sense of hardship - quite the 
opposite. It was a community. We lived in the top left flat, 30b.

The up side was that we all had loads of mates to play with. The area itself was a wonderland for any child because Woolwich had suffered major damage during the war as the Nazis tried to bomb the Arsenal to rubble and, of course, there was a lot of collateral damage. Entire streets of houses were reduced to ruins or worse and less than twenty years after the end of the conflict, hardly any clearance or rebuilding work had started. But we had all these highly dangerous - and hugely adventurous - playgrounds.

The local kids would turn bombed-out house into dens,
where we'd hang out with our mates and read and swap comics.
(Hue and Cry, © 1947,  Ealing Studios)

Against this background, some kids collected Monkees bubblegum cards, some kids built go-karts out of old prams, some kids climbed trees and hung rope swings. And some did all of that. Me, I loved comics. In particular Marvel Comics. Back then, in 1965, the readiest supply of Marvel Comics was the corner newsagent, and I used to range far and wide throughout the SE18 postcode, looking for new sources for my favourite comics. My nearest supplier was in Kingsland Parade, the newsagent right next to Woolwich Church Street.

I had already decided that Captain America was my favourite character and set about tracking down as many books starring my hero as I could. The next item I was able to find was the second part of the story I began reading in my first Avengers comic, with good old CA right there, almost as large as life, on the cover.

Avengers 16 (May 1965) would have been on sale in the UK during the summer of 1965, just as I was turning 11 years old. I wasn't sure why there were so many supervillains on the cover, but I'd find out soon enough ...

This issue was an experience of highs and lows for me. At the end of the story, after the comprehensive defeat of the Masters of Evil, some of the Avengers decided they needed a rest. Iron Man and Giant-Man elected to take leaves of absence and, with Thor exiting (off-camera) to take part in The Trial of the Gods (Journey into Mystery 116, Jul 1965, covered in my last post) the hunt was on for replacement members. By happy coincidence, former Iron Man foe Hawkeye was looking for a new gig after his love Black Widow was wounded in battle and taken into custody by the Soviets. No sooner did he turn up at Avengers Mansion than he was sworn in. Then in far-off Europe, Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch, who had previously battled the X-Men under the dark influence of Magneto (more on that next post), read of the Avengers membership drive in a local Swiss newspaper and decided to write an application letter. No email in those days, you see.

So Captain America returned from his fateful battle with his arch-enemy, Zemo, to find that not only were there three new Avengers on the team, but also that he was in charge of them. And it doesn't take him long to discover that he doesn't especially enjoy his new management position. Then Iron Man and Giant-Man (prodded by The Wasp) take off and leave Cap to it. Thanks, guys ...

Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver remark on how different
the atmosphere here is compared to their last team gig.

I'm pretty sure the real reason Stan Lee wanted to do this was because, although he was sole writer on the books by this time, even he was having trouble keeping track of where his characters were in any given month. The letters pages were peppered with comments from readers like, "If Thor is battling The Executioner in New York in Avengers, how come he's also doing the Trial of the Gods in Asgard?" So Lee moved his big stars out of the team and confined them to their own strips. The only flaw in this theory is that just two months later, Giant-Man and Wasp lost their spot in Tales to Astonish, so there wouldn't have been these types of conflicts if Hank and Janet had carried on as Avengers.

With Captain America, it was less complicated. The Tales of Suspense stories had Cap in a WWII setting while he led the Avengers in the present. I still wasn't sure how Cap could be in his twenties in 1944 and the same age in 1964 - but that conundrum would be answered in due course. Issue 65 of Suspense came out the same month as Avengers 16. And there was Captain America taking the lead slot on the cover battling The Red Skull and his nasty Nazi henchpersons. And it's a great story - what's not to love about The Red Skull?

The split-cover design of these former mystery tales 
anthologies must have been murder for the artists.

But it was the Iron Man tale that grabbed my attention in this instance. The new red-and-yellow Iron Man battles his clunky old Golden Avenger persona. How can this be? It's not that mysterious. Just three-time loser Weasel Wills finding Tony Stark's attache case containing his Iron Man armour during a burglary and stealing it. Stark has to use his original armour to take on the impostor. But it was quite a thrill to see the two Iron Men slug it out in a knock-down, drag-out brawl. Aside from that, I liked the fact that Stark had his own life, marred though it was by his heart issues. Worried that he might not live very long, he avoided getting romantically involved with his secretary Pepper Potts and stepped aside to see if she might make a go of it with Happy Hogan, the Stark chauffeur. In the following issues, all sorts of complications ensued and I'd find myself skipping over the fight scenes to see how Stark was going to resolve his latest emotional crisis.

A classic split-cover drawn by Jack Kirby
and inked by Frank Giacoia.

In Tales of Suspense 66 (Jun 1965), Stark has to risk Happy quitting when he assigns Iron Man to test a prototype miniature sub, to avoid risking Happy's life. This leads to all kinds of problems, the least of which is a pitch-battle with the Sub-Mariner's enemy, Attuma. After defeating the blue-skinned megalomaniac, Iron Man returns to the surface, only to find that Happy has left and that the Senator in charge of the sub's government appropriations committee is pretty ticked off with Stark. It's pure Stan Lee storytelling and mirrors the sort of private life complications that Peter Parker was having to deal with over in Amazing Spider-Man.

The Captain America story reveals to us the origin of the Red Skull. It's the story of how a nobody - we never see his real face - is chosen at random by Der Fuehrer to be the living symbol of Naziism, an Axis counterpart to our red-white-and-blue hero. The tale ends with the evil Skull brainwashing Cap to be ... a Nazi. Too horrible to contemplate. 

As Ben Grimm would say, Wotta revolting development
this is. Cap under the control of The Red Skull.

The letters page in this issue mentions that Tales of Suspense 63 featured the origin of Captain America, so I made a mental note to track that one down as soon as possible. But I also noticed a strange anomaly in this issue. The Marvel house ads that I looked forward to so much for the miniature cover repros were not in colour.

Now what was this all about? Did Stan think that
leaving the colour out might save a few bucks?
More likely, it was a deadline issue ...

The May cover-dated Avengers 16 also had house ads without colour, albeit with a slightly different arrangement of covers, so it could well have been down to some kind of time restraint in the production department. Needless to say, I didn't enjoy the mono ads half as much as I loved the colour ones. Later on, as I came to understand how this kind of four colour printing worked, I did wonder if those house ads were individually coloured using the hand separation method or whether there was some photographic way of reducing the original full size separations down to the smaller size.

With the next issue of Avengers (17, Jun 1965) the team were off on their first proper mission. Locate the Hulk and get him to rejoin. Captain America is putting the newcomers through a training exercise when an over-sized robot walks through the wall of Avengers Mansion to deliver a message about The Hulk. Without waiting to hear the whole message, they quickly disable the automaton, possibly a bit prematurely. Nonetheless, the robot's message tape is still functional and the team learn that The Hulk can be found in the desert. And far away, beneath the desert, The Mole Man gloats about the trap he's leading The Avengers into.

The first real mission for the new Avengers lineup was to track 
down the Hulk and persuade him to return to the team ...

Over the course of the next few pages, The Avengers engage in a battle with one of Mole Man's legion of monsters, The Minotaur, defeat the Mole Man and are shot up to the surface when old Moley doesn't like the way the fight is going - all without realising that The Hulk was just a few hundred yards away fighting his own battle against the Leader - as seen in Tales to Astonish 69 (Jul 1965), Stan's footnote tells us. It's not the best Avengers tale. It certainly looks like Don Heck was just beginning to find his way with the Marvel Method of storytelling. He starts with an uncharacteristic splash page that shows a scene from the main story, something that Kirby would never do and that you'd be more likely to find in a DC comic. Some of the pacing seems rushed, and some of the Hulk scenes look like they were swiped from Kirby art. But the book, and Heck's storytelling, would get better.

By this time, I was becoming more and more curious about earlier issues of Marvel Comics. References to The Hulk being an Avenger were making me wonder what I had already missed, so I set off on a quest to track down older issues, while keeping up to date with the current output by haunting the local newsagents. I knew of some kids in the area who had what I termed "classic" Marvels. Issues with numbers in the single digits. So I determined I would discover what they wanted and make some kind of trade. A friend told me he knew someone with Avengers 3 (Jan 1963), so I knocked on this kid's door and asked him if he was willing to do a swap. I can't remember what he wanted, but I'm pretty sure it was about three or four comics. I don't think I would have parted with Marvels, so it's likely he got a few Supermans or Adventures in the trade.

The first "classic" Marvel Comic I ever owned,
traded from a local kid for several DC comics.

And I had my first real "classic" Marvel. Rushing home to read the comic, I noticed that The Hulk was right there in the cover corner box, as well as featured large on the cover, so he must have been in the team. 

So it was true ... The Hulk was an Avenger.

Inside the book, there was just one tantalising reference, on page 2, to the fact that The Hulk quit The Avengers last issue. Darn. Now I was going to have to find Avengers 2. As with the mission in issue 17, this earlier team also set out the find The Hulk, to prevent him doing too much damage while at large. So Iron Man contacts the FF, Spider-Man and even The X-Men in an effort to get a lead on The Hulk's whereabouts, without success. But it's Rick Jones who is the key to The Hulk's whereabouts.

At this point, The Hulk was still an ill-defined character. There was still no clear logic behind his transformations or his personality as The Hulk. Though I wasn't aware of them at the time, the original run of six issues of The Incredible Hulk offered a different change method and Hulk persona with each issue. Sometimes the Hulk was mute, sometimes he talked like The Thing. Sometimes he changed at nightfall, sometimes Banner bombarded himself with rays from a gamma machine. It was all a bit ... badly thought-out. And if, as Kirby claims, he was responsible for these characters, then he plainly failed with The Hulk, the first of the early Marvels to be cancelled.

The Hulk in Avengers 3, drawn by Kirby, was definitely the Kirby Hulk. He has the same speech patterns as The Thing. He changes both spontaneously and using the Gamma Machine. But is also susceptible to being controlled by Rick Jones. He thinks, he reasons and he's a bit crafty.

Though he speaks about himself in the third person, something later 
versions would also do, this Hulk seems more like Fantastic Four's Thing ...

Finally, he spontaneously changes back to "Bob" Banner, deserts his "partner" Sub-Mariner and dives off the Rock of Gibraltar into the Mediterranean Sea to escape. 

Stan took some stick for mis-naming Bruce Banner "Bob"
in two panels this issue. He explained it away later by claiming
that Banner's name was really Robert Bruce, but he was fooling no one.

The issue was one of the longest Marvel stories of the period - at 25 pages three pages longer than Avengers 2 and two pages longer than Avengers 4. With no ads and no letters page, Lee and Kirby had 25 pages to work with and the result was early "widescreen" Marvel. The story seems more epic than any of the other Marvel tales of the same time period - the extra space allows for more exposition of both Sub-Mariner and the Hulk, as well as scenes with the Teen Brigade and with the main heroes. And the pacing seems more leisurely ...

By the end of the story, the Avengers are down a member, have a new enemy in Prince Namor and a savage Hulk is still at large. A great day's work for your average Marvel super-team. Within a few issues the page-length would drop, until by Avengers 10, the team had the standard 20 pages to work with, and while these stories were fun too, they didn't have the big budget feel of Avengers 3.

Not long after this, I managed to scare up a couple of really early issues of Fantastic Four, but I'll leave that story until next time ...

Next: Two "classic" Fantastic Four Comics and exploring second-hand shops