Captain America by Jack Kirby: Part 2- Second Phase Assault

I know I always say this, but I am really behind with this blog at the moment. As much as I enjoy writing about comics, I enjoy reading them a lot more. To be fair, I read way more comics than I blog about because I only like to write about books that are of particular interest to me. But since Christmas I have a lot of good stuff sitting on my book shelf, all killer, no filler.

And this one is a Killer.

But first, a little background. Feel free to skip the next paragraph if you’re already familiar.

So, Marvel reintroduce Captain America into their Universe in Avengers #4 (I should re-read Kirby’s Avengers books when I have time, just for the sake of Cap completism) and of course, one of the original creators of the character, Jack Kirby, is drawing the book. The character is a success, people want to see more of him so they give him half of a split-book with Iron Man starting in Tales of Suspense #59. So far as I understand, the reason for Marvel producing a lot of split books is that, for reasons that I won’t go into, National/DC, Marvels main competitor, were the distributors of Marvels books and they limited the amount of Marvel books that they would put on the news stands, so if Marvel wanted to market more characters in solo stories they had to share books with other characters, hence the Cap/Iron Man split in Tales of Suspense (just to be clear, a split book has half the page count devoted to solo, unconnected stories of the characters, rather than a team up book which would feature the characters together in one story.). This continued from issue 59 to 99, when the comic was renamed Captain America with issue 100, and featured cover to cover Cap. Kirby’s run as artist continued unbroken from Tales of Suspense #59 until Captain America #109 and he returned for one issue, #112 and that is the entirety of Kirby’s involvement in Cap’s Silver Age solo adventures. (The Annuals from this period did have Kirby stories but they were reprints from the main title, nothing new.)

Background done. Read on, one and all.

The comics I’ll be talking about in this post are all collected in the Captain America Omnibus (2011) ISBN 9780785150787. The full compliment is Tales of Suspense 59-99 and Captain America 100-113, which includes a couple of issues not by Kirby.

The copy I have features the variant cover by Ron Garney, which looks like this:

What I wanted, but couldn’t find anywhere, was the one with the original cover of Captain America 100, by Jack Kirby, which looks like this:

I actually like Ron Garney, I have some of his Cap stories, but why would you want to see Ron Garney re-imaging a Jack Kirby cover, when you could just see the Jack Kirby cover?

It really annoyed me. Probably more than it should have, but still, Garney vs. Kirby is a no-contest for me, especially when this collection is, in essence a Jack Kirby Omnibus. Dang you Marvel.

The first thing that struck me when I was reading, bearing in mind that I read Golden Age Cap right before this, was the panel layout. As I mentioned in the last post, the Golden Age Cap layouts are very fluid and unusual in places, but these Silver Age panels are much more rigid and structured, often with a strict six panels per page format. This is purely guess work, but Kirby was producing a lot of pages per month in this period so I imagine this was one way to streamline the process, along with some relatively sparse backgrounds which also serve to speed up the pencilling but with the benefit of focusing the readers attention on the subjects, particularly for the high energy action sequences which Kirby excels at. Another possible reason for the rigid panel layout could have been the page count for the Tales of Suspense stories. Because Cap shared the book with Iron Man, the stories needed to be condensed into roughly ten pages, so the opportunity for flamboyance was perhaps limited by this. I have to say that I don’t think the stories suffered because of this, the one thing that this type of layout provides is an obvious progression from panel to panel, there is little room for ambiguity in regard to the flow of the story.

Scanned from original comic, not this volume.

One of the highlights of this run is the reintroduction of one of my favourite villains back into the Marvel Universe. Tales of Suspense #66 brings the Red Skull back into prominence as a major antagonist for Cap. This guy is just a perfect foil for Cap, he exudes evil. There’s no sympathetic element here at all, we are given an origin, but the truth is that Red Skull isn’t truly a character, Red Skull represents an idea, the most base elements of humanity distilled into an ugly avatar of hate. He doesn’t need a name, he doesn’t even need to operate in a manner that makes sense, all he needs to do is corrupt, subjugate and control and that is what we see. A totally self obsessed and arrogant embodiment of Baddyhood. Steranko says in the afterword that when he took on the book, he wanted to move away from Red Skull as he felt that the character and his ideals were dated. As much as I enjoy Steranko’s work, in this instance I have to disagree absolutely. The Red Skull and his Nazi origins are a perfect shorthand for establishing his threat to everything that Cap holds dear, he’s iconic, he’s an archetype in the Jungian sense and he’s here, in this book. Look out.

A perfect Red Skull quote:

Gruning: Was that not why we lost world war two, because we underestimated the skill and the courage of free men.

Red Skull: No! It was because the Fuehrer did not listen to me!

There is a run of stories early in this volume which are retconned tales of Cap and Bucky in WW2. As they disappeared after a few issues I can only assume that they weren’t particularly favoured by the readers at the time. Personally, I loved them, but I can understand why they may not have been too popular at the time. Readers were buying these books to see solo Cap stories and this was the only place to find them, so they possibly felt a little cheated to find that he was not interacting with the Marvel Universe in the way that pretty much every other book did at the time. As a modern reader, knowing that there are plenty of Cap stories to come that have a contemporary setting, I found these issues an interesting early experiment in retroactive continuity and satisfying stories to boot. The narrative of these stories explores the relationship between Cap and Bucky with the occasional knowing wink in regard to the audience being aware of the fate of Bucky, but, when all is said and done, these are primarily action driven tales, which is exactly what they should be.

What I wasn’t expecting to find in this volume were the original letter pages as printed in the issues. I thought this was a great addition, I’ve always enjoyed reading letter pages of older books, it’s a telling insight into how the books were received by the fans on their initial publication, which isn’t always the same outcome as when they are looked back on years later. I won’t spoil it for you but I was surprised at the number of letter writers in this volume that went on to have notable careers in the comic book industry.

In regard to the presentation of this volume, it’s nothing new in terms of Marvel. A satisfyingly heavy and solid volume, beautifully bound with a high quality printing. It is all done to a high standard (hence the price tag) but, on a purely personal level, I would rather have seen a non-glossy paper stock with a more muted colour palette. (Benday dots anyone?) But having seen some of the feedback on the DC volumes that have done exactly that, it’s obvious that Marvel are damned if they do and damned if they don’t. There’s no accounting for taste.

Mad Thinker Reads................
The Most Base Elements of Humanity Distilled Into an Ugly Avatar of Hate and Other Pretentious Musings.




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