Tuesday, December 8, 2009

Marvel 1974 Week--Captain America #180!!

Hey, 1974 was just like 2009--Steve Rogers wasn't Captain America!!!

Gil Kane drew EVERY Marvel cover during the early 1970sAs you may recall our discussion from back in July, in 1974 Cap uncovered Richard Nixon's dastardly scheme to overthrow the U.S. government, thwarted it, and caused Nixon to commit suicide. Really.

Well, Steve became so disillusioned with America, he decided that he no longer shared the value of our leaders and nation, and so he dumped his identity as Captain America!!

(Such disillusionment was clearly contagious at Marvel, because as we saw last Sunday, it was revealed that Gerald Ford was really the villainous Black Lama. Sheesh.)

So, what will Steve do with the rest of his life? Let's follow along, as he struts down the boardwalk in his Haggar slacks:

If you're dyslexic, the coming of Damon!!Who created this one?

our creatorsSal Buscema we know...it couldn't be a Marvel 1970s week without at least one Sal Buscema joint. And Steve Englehart was in the midst of looong runs on both Captain America and the Avengers. We'll take a little more about Englehart tomorrow...

Anyway, via a tiny one-panel flashback, we learn that Hawkeye convinced Steve that even if he weren't going to be Captain America, he could still be a hero:

Hawkeye should have kept that costume...So as Steve ponders his future, we hop over to the villainous plot for the issue. Jordan Stryke, the original Viper, is being transported by federal marshals, when:

He's in costume why??
The government should have sprung for dart-proof glass
Dead cops...the Code really was dying here, wasn't it?Who's busting him loose?

She was sexier as Madame Hydra...
There's a struggle for Serpent Supremacy?This turns out not to be a good thing, however:

Why have the big conversation if you're just going to kill him??And why is Madame Hydra/the new Viper being such a rhymes with witch? Simple:

Man, Madame Hydra was that radical girl who always ruined your college philosophy courses, huh?Man, that's what comics need: more villains fighting for nihilism!!

Meanwhile again, Princess Python is helping to free the rest of the Serpent Squad...

Dear Marvel prisons--stop letting your villains wear costumes in their cells(That's Cobra and the Eel, by the way...)

Back to Steve Rogers. Sadly, we learn that the Sharon Carter of 1974 was pretty much a big party pooper, as she is not at ALL supportive of Steve's decision to take up heroing again.

No, Sharon, he should remain unemployed...
Saving the world be damned...our dinner dates are more important than stopping Hydra!!Man...did anybody before Brubaker write a good Sharon Carter?

So, all on his lonesome, Steve works to come up with a new costume and new identity:

Our tax dollars at work
OK, fine, screw itYeah, stick it to DC, Steve.

I would totally buy HOBOI don't know...I would have loved a hero called "The Bum."

It works for Thor...NOOO..not a cape!!

SexyTa-dah!!

Amazingly enough, on his first patrol, Captain Amer err Nomad stumbles upon the Serpent Squad on their first caper:

They're not that old...And the Viper just can't keep politics out of it:

I could have killed you...instead I just disemboweled you!The action moves inside the theater, where they're debuting a new documentary on Captain America...because the Marvel universe without crazy coincidences would be a fairly boring place. Besides, this gives us a little bit of unintentional commentary on the real action:

Better than the TV movie, that's for sureWell played, Mr. Englehart.

Nomad, no longer constrained by having to be the white-bread Cap, can make risque jokes:

Comment redacted by the editorSadly, however, as he pursues the fleeing villains, we get graphic proof that Edna was right in The Incredibles:

D'oh!!
Admit it--you all have wanted to see that, too.Well, that was embarrassing...and now Steve is royally ticked off!!

Steve--you've got to pay for the costume out of your own pocket!! Stop!!
Does he wax his chest??You know what's interesting? During his first Nomad outing, Steve never once mentioned missing his shield...

So...it turns out that the dude the Snakes kidnapped was the president of Roxxon (a frequent Englehart bugaboo). And then the final member of the Squad reveals himself, with another Englehart mainstay:

Krang? Then Namor must be guest-starring next month...Ahh, the Serpent Crown...what good times.

The change to Nomad wouldn't last long--only 4 issues. But it part of the longer Secret Empire arc, as Steve Rogers learned the difference between being disgusted with America's leadership and dismissing the American Dream. Sure, it was a little unsubtle and naive and high-handed at points--it was still a comic book, after all, and still under the Code--but it was much more sophisticated attempt at a political lesson than was going on anywhere else in comics at the time.

Englehart was also somewhat ahead of his time in the long game he was playing with Captain America and Avengers--storylines and plot points would takes years to resolve themselves, although it was very quietly done, and the reader didn't realize it until it reared it's head months later. The whole Serpent Squad story started 27 issues earlier; he'd been teasing the Madame Hydra story for almost 2 years, starting in the Avengers; Roxxon and the Serpent Crown would go on to be major factors in the Avengers 2 years later. Continued stories were nothing new for Marvel, but the way Englehart could keep them on slow boil (without becoming monotonous) and keep them popping up and intertwining in unexpected ways was a tad more sophisticated than the average Marvel book.

Of course, many readers weren't happy with Steve dumping the Cap identity. Neal Meyer of Bickleton WA wrote in:

0 for 3, NealOption 3 was the one they took during the Gruenwald run, and the Brubaker run...

ELSEWHERE IN THE MARVEL UNIVERSE:

Speaking of Steve Englehart:

Hey, Strange died, not his girlfriend!! What up with that?This was the final issue of the 5-part arc kicking off the new Doctor Stange comic, and Englehart and Frank Brunner were putting out some of the trippiest damn comics that you can imagine without the aid of illicit drugs. The Silver Dagger was a former Catholic Cardinal who went mad, and in his zealotry decided that all magic was evil and he must kill all magicians (not at all like to DC's use of the Spectre during Infinite Crisis...). Silver Dagger actually killed Strange in issue #1 (he got better)...and he ended up communing with a giant hookah-smoking caterpillar. Really. I told you it was trippy...


4 comments:

  1. Damn. And I thought I wrote a lot. But how can you not explain why the hell Hawkeye was "disguised as the Golden Archer"? This is the weirdest damn Captain America stuff I've ever seen. I'm glad I missed it. Ha! I really would appreciate it if you'd just tell my Hawkeye was dressed so stupidly. Cause I don't want to go back and read these comics.

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  2. Hawkeye decided that Cap needed a kick in the butt after Steve Rogers abandoned the Cap identity. So Clint posed as the "new villain" the Golden Archer (picture of full costume here) to convince Steve that he could and should still be a hero, even if it wasn't as Captain America.

    Cause I don't want to go back and read these comics.

    Shame on you.

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  3. To quote one of the great films of the 1990s:\
    "Nihilists! Fuck me. I mean, say what you like about the tenets of National Socialism, Dude, at least it's an ethos."

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  4. The serpent society has a guy named Eel ? The hell? aren't eels fish or am I wrong ? If they ran out of english snake names why not use the latin translations...

    Still Steve looks pretty cool in his Nomad duds, but the greatest is Jack Monroe !

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