Captain America spent twenty-four years without a comic book of his own.
He had been one of the biggest characters in American publishing in 1941 — selling close to a million copies a month, punching Hitler on a cover that reached newsstands a full year before Pearl Harbor — and then the war ended and he became, by slow degrees, a memory. A Timely relic. A revival in the mid-fifties that lasted three issues. A body in an ice floe, until Avengers #4 pulled him out of it in 1964 and gave him back.
Even then he had to share. From 1964 to 1968 he ran in the back half of Tales of Suspense, twelve pages a month behind Iron Man, while the letters page filled with readers asking when he would get his own book again.
This is the answer. The numbering carries over from Tales of Suspense #99, which is why the first issue of Captain America is issue one hundred — a paradox that is very Marvel and entirely deliberate. New logo. Kirby’s fist coming off the cover. CAP, IN HIS OWN MAGAZINE AT LAST! across the top in yellow, the exclamation point doing real work.
Now look at the cover date: April 1968, which put this book on the spinner rack in the winter of the Tet Offensive. It is across exactly this stretch of issues that the modern Captain America gets written — the man out of time, no longer certain the country he woke into is the one he went under for. Everything Marvel has done with the character in the sixty years since traces back through here.
Kirby draws the whole roster behind him: Black Panther in silhouette at the left, Iron Man, Thor, the Wasp, the Sub-Mariner. Stan Lee retells the origin one more time for whoever has just arrived. Syd Shores and Joe Sinnott ink it.
This copy is CBCS 6.0 with off-white to white pages — an honest mid-grade example of a book that is hard to find at any level, and one that reads exactly as it was meant to.
Captain America spent twenty-four years without a comic book of his own.
He had been one of the biggest characters in American publishing in 1941 — selling close to a million copies a month, punching Hitler on a cover that reached newsstands a full year before Pearl Harbor — and then the war ended and he became, by slow degrees, a memory. A Timely relic. A revival in the mid-fifties that lasted three issues. A body in an ice floe, until Avengers #4 pulled him out of it in 1964 and gave him back.
Even then he had to share. From 1964 to 1968 he ran in the back half of Tales of Suspense, twelve pages a month behind Iron Man, while the letters page filled with readers asking when he would get his own book again.
This is the answer. The numbering carries over from Tales of Suspense #99, which is why the first issue of Captain America is issue one hundred — a paradox that is very Marvel and entirely deliberate. New logo. Kirby’s fist coming off the cover. CAP, IN HIS OWN MAGAZINE AT LAST! across the top in yellow, the exclamation point doing real work.
Now look at the cover date: April 1968, which put this book on the spinner rack in the winter of the Tet Offensive. It is across exactly this stretch of issues that the modern Captain America gets written — the man out of time, no longer certain the country he woke into is the one he went under for. Everything Marvel has done with the character in the sixty years since traces back through here.
Kirby draws the whole roster behind him: Black Panther in silhouette at the left, Iron Man, Thor, the Wasp, the Sub-Mariner. Stan Lee retells the origin one more time for whoever has just arrived. Syd Shores and Joe Sinnott ink it.
This copy is CBCS 6.0 with off-white to white pages — an honest mid-grade example of a book that is hard to find at any level, and one that reads exactly as it was meant to.
