Marvel 1968 Week--Captain America #103

It's time to bring our time travelling trek to Marvel 1968 to an end, as we take a patriotically infused swim into the waters of Captain America #103!!

We start of with a quiet dinner in a local restaurant for Steve Rogers and fascist S.H.I.E.L.D. agent Sharon Rogers:

Brought to us by, of course:

Steve shows why he's a man for all eras:

But, after a face full of knockout gas, a bunch of thugs kidnap the future murderer of Captain America:


Of course, Exile Island is the home of Red Skull and his troupe of exiled Nazi misfits:


What a fun looking bunch. What do they do for fun??


Please don't press the rod!! Uhh...anyway, Cap is swimming to Exile Island, using an oxygen re breather he claims Tony Stark invented, but that we know damn well came from Q in Thunderball:

And like S.P.E.C.T.R.E., the Skull has surrounded his island with uniquely cool but amazingly insane traps.

Cap (after blowing up part of the installation with a kamikaze speedboat attack) makes it to land, and starts to dispatch Nazi goons!


After Cap gets taken down by a sucker punch, the Skull begins to implement his master plan:

Oh, so that's the deal with the rod!

Skull and the hideously ugly exiles quarrel over exactly how to split up the world:

Cap and Sharon, his baby momma to be, escape, but convenient thought balloons let us know that the Skull is allowing them to escape, to better implement phase two of his evil scheme. He and Cap battle whilst discussing political philosophy, as only Stan and Jack can portray:



...he and Sharon blast off, as the Skull claims triumph:

You know, there is something so totally timeless about this issue...1848, 1968, 2008...it's Cap, dammit.

Given that there's been some talk on the blogs lately about whether or not comics would better be served by more stand-alone stories, I thought I'd present this 40 year-old letter from Bill Hayes:
There we go--case closed, 4 decades ago!!

MEANWHILE, ELSEWHERE IN THE MARVEL UNIVERSE:

Feeling flush with the success of their empire, Marvel was going to try to push the boundaries a bit. From the Bullpen Bulletins:

Not a comic book?? A glossy magazine?!? Not shelved with the comic books, but with regular magazines?!?

Marvel put a ton of promotion into this, with Bullpen Bulletin items for months, a Stan's Soapbox ("an entirely new concept in superhero presentation!"), full page house ads...and yes, it did appear:

A collector's item? Well, sort of...the concept lasted a whole 2 issues. Sorry, Marvel, you can't win them all. (PRO-TIP: maybe you shouldn't have made that debut issue black & white, a fact that wasn't even mentioned in all the promotion...)

And so endeth Marvel 1968 week. What hath 40 years wrought? Some things have changed (the X-Men popular?!?), some remain the same (Cap Vs. Red Skull!!), and some are "startling" plot twists that just crop up every few decades (Jarvis betrays the Avengers?!). Some of this big issues we like to debate today--retcons, too much product published, stand alone vs. continued stories--were around back then; we just like to pretend they're new issues today.

Hope you've enjoyed the tour.