Captain America: From Timely to Timeless

Unfrozen Super-Soldier Avenger

Captain America was created as a product of his time—in a good way.

Timely Comics (Marvel’s predecessor) published the first issue of Captain America Comics in 1941, and creators Joe Simon and Jack Kirby depicted Cap socking Hitler on the jaw on the front cover. That’s how the world met Captain America, and it was precisely the image the world needed to see at that moment in time.

One hopes that actual Adolf Hitlers were harmed during the making of this comic.

Superheroes typically didn’t debut in their own series during this era. Captain America needed to make a splash fast, and he did. There was real-world evil to defeat, after all.

1940s Cap was basically a propaganda symbol. The cause was righteous, and the message was correct (except for the racist depictions of Japanese soldiers, which occurred all too frequently in comics at the time). Cap was fighting fascism and was fully justified in doing so. But he was propaganda nevertheless, and his character had no substance beyond that—he was just a stalwart good guy sticking it to those rotten Nazis.

He lost his purpose after the war ended. Timely’s successor, Atlas Comics, attempted to revive him in 1953. We had entered the Cold War, so this time, Cap was a stalwart good guy sticking it to those rotten Commies.

The revival didn’t last long. Perhaps the attempt came slightly too early, as the superhero boom didn’t kick off until DC introduced a new Flash in 1956.

But after Marvel achieved some success with the likes of the Fantastic Four and Spider-Man, it was time to attempt another resuscitation in 1964. This one worked, and it continues to work.

In Avengers #4, by Stan Lee and original co-creator Jack Kirby, the Avengers discover the long-lost World War II hero on ice and thaw him out, allowing a man from the 1940s to step directly into the 1960s. He was Rip Van Winkle in red, white, and blue.

Captain America … On Ice!

This was an ingenious device for reviving the character and keeping him relevant, especially since Lee and Kirby couldn’t possibly have known that we’d still care about Captain America all these decades later. Perfect accidental cryogenic preservation may not be realistic, but there’s elegance in its simplicity.

Lee and Kirby could have had the Avengers meet a retired Steve Rogers, his aging slowed down by the super-soldier serum, and convince the old soldier to return to action. Then future writers would have needed to explain his expanded longevity or decide to tweak his origin, perhaps choosing a later war to give rise to Captain America.

This is the problem that now faces Magneto in X-Men comics—he needs to be a victim of the Holocaust for his character to work, so his pre-Xavier life just gradually gets longer and longer. We can only assume that a secondary mutation is keeping him relatively young (at this point, this is still a cleaner approach than introducing any convoluted explanation, so I’m not complaining).

Cap is spared Magneto’s problem. Now, in keeping with the original intent, World War II can always be the historical event that created Captain America. He can emerge from ice in any year and react to that era from his 1940s perspective. His length of time on ice can gradually increase, and we can measure his suspended animation in units of Rip Van Winkle. The Marvel Cinematic Universe’s Cap slept for somewhere between 3.25 and 3.5 Rip Van Winkles, for example.

The man-out-of-time status allows Captain America to graduate from a propaganda symbol to a character. Right in Avengers #4, we learn that teen sidekick Bucky died right before Cap froze. The failure haunts him in the present, leaving him with survivor’s guilt, and this already gives him more depth than he ever had during the original run of Captain America Comics. (Bucky would eventually come back, of course, but he stayed dead for an impressively long time by comic book standards.)

Additionally, the time jump allows us to explore the gulf between ideals and reality, and we can examine why those ideals remain worth holding onto even if we keep falling short of them.

A great example of this came after Watergate. Wisely, the 1970s comics didn’t tackle Watergate in any literal fashion. No Cap vs. Nixon showdown. But the inspiration and allegory were clear. “Secret Empire” (Captain America and the Falcon #169-176, by Steve Englehart and Sal Buscema) involved Cap discovering corruption that went all the way to the Oval Office. This led to Cap’s disillusionment and his decision to give up the Captain America role. After a brief stint as Nomad, Steve Rogers realized that Captain America doesn’t represent the government—he represents the country’s ideals. Two very different things. The story, in focusing on Cap’s internal dilemma, demonstrates how to draw inspiration from real-world events without creating straight-up propaganda.

Captain America or Captain Obvious?

Compare that to this panel from Captain America Comics #15, published in 1942:

Captain America has spoken!

1942 Cap isn’t wrong, but he’s more a mouthpiece than his own man. Hard to imagine that Cap having any internal conflict whatsoever.

The 2014 movie Captain America: The Winter Soldier also made great use of a recently revived Cap reacting to a changed world and trying to hold onto his bedrock values despite the moral ambiguity and uncertainty all around him. It remains the strongest movie of the entire MCU, one that’s more of a spy thriller than a superhero film.

Though designed specifically to punch out Nazis, Captain America has become a viable character in any era. Specific storylines may be products of their time, but the foundations of the character can speak to anyone of any decade.

Adapting to a changing world. Struggling with failure. Measuring your ideals against reality. Holding onto those ideals anyway. You don’t have to be a World War II super-soldier to relate. You don’t even need to have been a child of that era.

Cap is a mostly static character, and that works for him. He’s still basically that same idealistic young man who submitted to experimentation for the good of his country and its allies during World War II. But situations, circumstances, and characters around him are dynamic, and we can measure them against him. He’s the moral barometer of the Marvel Universe.

Like the ideals of the country itself, Captain America is timeless.

Just as his shield always returns to him, Cap keeps returning to issue #1. And he’s still Cap.