[Stan Lee, Gene Colan, Steve Englehart, Rick Remender, Joe Simon, Jack Kirby, Ed Brubaker, Steve Epting, Mark Gruenwald, Tom Morgan, Roy Thomas, Tony Isabella, J.M. DeMatteis, Chris Claremont, Christopher J. Priest, Axel Alonso,] Kari Skogland, and Malcolm Spellman, 2021
This is one of those Marvel Cinematic Universe series that cobbles together a story from so many sources that the credits just say “Based on the Marvel comics” rather than mentioning any specific comics or their creators. And while there are a couple of MCU offerings that I think are great even apart from their nostalgia value (Iron Man, WandaVision), it is this sort of bricolage that primarily interests me when I watch most of these things. So let’s take a look at which toys got taken out of the toybox this time.
The Falcon. In 1966, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby surveyed the superhero comics scene and realized that, in Kirby’s words, “nobody was doing blacks”. To remedy this, they created the Black Panther, and Marvel cautiously trotted out other characters of African ancestry to follow him up. But as the calendar clicked over to 1969, some were starting to grumble that, sure, “representation matters” is a laudable sentiment, but Marvel’s project was equivalent to representing sixteenth-century Englishwomen by publishing stories about Queen Elizabeth I. The Black Panther was the king of one of the wealthiest countries on (Marvel’s version of) the planet, with technological acumen on par with that of Reed Richards or Tony Stark. Marvel’s first African-American supervillain, Centurius, a.k.a. Dr. Noah Black, was a Nobel Prize winner. Bill Foster was a Caltech-educated biochemist who had made enough of a name for himself at Stark International to be selected as Hank Pym’s right-hand man. Even the most down-to-earth African-American character introduced up to this point, Joe “Robbie” Robertson, was accomplished enough to have landed a position as a top editor at a major New York newspaper. Stan and company were so intent on steering clear of negative stereotypes, critics charged, that they had offered up nothing but a parade of perfect paragons to whom their potential readers in Harlem and Watts could never relate. Stan’s usual reply—such as at a talk he gave at Duke University in early ’69—was that nearly all Marvel’s characters were larger than life: Asgardian gods, pioneering astronauts, billionaire CEOs, groundbreaking scientists… even Peter Parker was a teenage genius on top of his spider-powers. Why should characters of African ancestry be any different? Besides, Stan continued, if you want an African-American hero who’s just an ordinary guy, you have the Falcon! Which raised the question: who on earth is the Falcon?
The Falcon hadn’t yet appeared when Stan name-dropped him, but he was in the pipeline. Incoming Captain America artist Gene Colan had picked up on Stan’s interest in diversifying Marvel’s roster of characters, and as Colan relates, “I enjoyed drawing people of every kind. I drew as many different types of people as I could into the scenes I illustrated, and I loved drawing black people. […] I approached Stan, as I remember, with the idea of introducing an African-American hero and he took to it right away.” Part of the inspiration for this new character came from a sports star who, despite being an African-American from the projects, had come to be hailed as a hero by the country club set after winning the Heisman on behalf of the rich, almost entirely white University of Southern California: O. J. Simpson. In a story arc that ran through the summer of ’69, an out-of-costume Captain America meets Sam Wilson, who describes himself as “a big city brother from way back”, on a tropical island ruled by a band of wannabe world conquerers. At this point Sam has no powers or weapons, and his only special ability is that he’s really good at training birds, starting with pigeons and working his way up to falcons. It is actually Sam’s falcon Redwing, not Sam himself, who bails Cap out at a crucial moment in his first fight with the villains. Cap trains Sam to be an acrobatic fighter like himself, and together they free the oppressed people of the island. Then they part ways—I guess the higher-ups at Marvel needed a few months to gauge audience reaction and figure out what to do with the character. Give him his own series? Shuffle him off to the Avengers? As it turned out, he returned to Captain America in issue #126, which wouldn’t be of particular note except for the fact that one plot point involves Sam putting on Cap’s costume, meaning that Marvel published this panel in 1970. Another pause for evaluation and reflection—and then, before the year was out, the Falcon returned once more, this time to stay. Cap officially took him on as his sidekick, and starting with issue #134, the logo on the front of the book read Captain America and the Falcon.
This was all before my time. I’ve only read a handful of these issues, but I have gathered that Captain America and the Falcon followed in the footsteps of DC’s Green Lantern and Green Arrow with its emphasis on “relevance”, i.e., superheroes grappling with the social issues of the 1970s rather than just bopping bad guys. I do know of a few landmarks. In #169, Sam reaches his breaking point about his unequal partnership with Cap: “If I’m gonna stay your partner, I have to be something more than a ‘costumed athlete!’ Otherwise, I am to you what Redwing is to me: a PET!!” So Cap calls up the Black Panther and has him whip up a pair of mechanical wings for the Falcon, justifying Sam’s code name five years after his debut. Then, in #186 came a notorious turn of events: writer Steve Englehart upended the origin story Stan Lee had cooked up for the Falcon. Stan, pressured to create a character who was just a regular guy but still wanting to make him admirable, had established that Sam Wilson was a straight arrow from a tough neighborhood who had become a social worker. Englehart’s story declared that this was a false identity created by the Red Skull’s Cosmic Cube—before the Skull had started tampering with reality, Sam had gone by the moniker “Snap Wilson”, a hoodlum complete with 1970s pimp outfit. The Skull had turned him into “an upright, cheerful Negro” so that Cap would be inclined to take him on as a partner, and at just the right moment, the Skull would revert the Falcon to his real persona and give Cap the ol’ stab in the back. After this revelation, Englehart immediately left—like, so immediately that another writer took over the issue halfway through—and the ultimate result of his parting shot was that virtually every writer who wrote the Falcon for any real length of time after that wound up doing a “Sam has to reconcile his two personas” arc, as it seemed that no writer was satisfied with any previous writer’s resolution of this baggage. More immediately, it left the Falcon as damaged goods—zombified, institutionalized, put on trial, etc. Redwing was written out in #191, Sam and Cap went their separate ways in #217, and as of #223 (1978), the Falcon was removed from the book’s logo.
Meanwhile, over in Avengers, writer Jim Shooter had launched a story arc based on the observation that, c’mon, the U.S. government wasn’t going to let a squad of superpowered vigilantes operate on American soil without any kind of regulation or oversight. Going forward, the team had to answer to a government liaison named Henry Peter Gyrich, a martinet who threatened to yank the Avengers’ security clearance if they didn’t abide by his directives. When David Michelinie took over as writer at the end of 1978, he had Gyrich demand that the team roster be cut to seven—and Gyrich would dictate the membership. He chooses Captain America, Iron Man, the Wasp, the Vision, the Scarlet Witch, the Beast… and the Falcon. “That bozo’s only powers are flying and rapping with birds!” Hawkeye protests. “He’s not even an Avenger!” But Gyrich says that since the Black Panther isn’t available, this isn’t a matter for debate. “If the Avengers are to be sanctioned by the government, they’ll have to adhere to government policies—and that includes equal opportunities for minorities!” It’s kind of clever, because while Iron Man and Hawkeye are outraged that the feds are deciding who’s in and who’s out, Captain America naturally thinks that the Falcon is a fine choice. Of course, no one actually asked the Falcon! When Cap goes to Sam’s place to let him know he’s been drafted, Sam is none too pleased: “Maybe I oughta change my name to ‘The Token’, huh? Blast it, Steve, I’ve proven myself as a superhero! And I don’t like being chosen to fill a quota!” But Cap asks him to join up as a personal favor to him, so that the Avengers can keep their clearance, and the Falcon reluctantly accepts, though he only sticks around for a few issues. So, yeah—Gene Colan and Stan Lee created the Falcon in an effort to champion liberal ideals about the brotherhood of all races, and a decade later, here were a bunch of white comic book nerds in their twenties deciding, in the aftermath of the Bakke decision, to use that character to grumble about affirmative action. (And that wasn’t even the worst treatment an Avengers character got around this time.)
But this is still all before my time. I didn’t start reading Captain America until 1987, and while the Falcon was regularly featured for most of ’88, he didn’t do much. He’d pop up here and there in a series I followed—e.g., in Black Panther circa Y2K—but, again, he didn’t make much of an impression. In 2004, though, a new Captain America and the Falcon series was launched, penned by my favorite comics writer at the time, Christopher J. Priest, and I made sure to collect that book—except it was undermined by Brian Bendis’s “Avengers Disassembled” event and soon got canceled. When Sam Wilson finally came to the fore again, in the mid-2010s, that was after my time. My understanding is that Steve Rogers had to give up his identity as Captain America for the eleventy-twelfth time, and Sam took over. This was the era when Marvel was billing itself as “All‑New, All‑Different”, with women taking over as Thor and Iron Man and Wolverine and Captain Marvel, Inhumans playing the prominent role previously played by mutants, the Miles Morales Spider‑Man from the Ultimate Universe joining the MU, etc., etc. This was also the second term of the Obama administration. Sam Wilson as the new Captain America seemed to fit the tenor of the times. Continuity also got a reset that allowed All‑New Captain America writer Rick Remender to retcon “Snap” into nonexistence. But I didn’t read that book, so my knowledge of the Falcon has now scraped bottom.
The Winter Soldier. One of the things that has made writing this article difficult is that the MCU versions of both the Falcon and the Winter Soldier were rolled out in Captain America: The Winter Soldier, which I did not write an article about but instead talked about with Stacey Tappan as the subject of my first Calen-deliria podcast. So I can’t just copy and paste over what I’ve already said. But I don’t think we really got into the history of the MU version of the character, so maybe that wouldn’t have saved any time anyway. So—1939 saw the debut of Batman in Detective Comics #27, but writer Bill Finger quickly grew tired of having most of the actual detective work take place in thought bubbles. Batman didn’t have anyone to talk to. So he proposed giving this modern-day Holmes a Watson. Penciler Bob Kane decided that this partner should be a young boy, and inker Jerry Robinson suggested a Robin Hood motif. Robin the Boy Wonder was introduced in Detective Comics #38, and sales doubled. Other creators in the emerging superhero genre took note, and kid sidekick became a sine qua non of the period. Thus, when Captain America Comics #1 hit the newsstands at the end of 1940, the cover promised that the adventures therein would also feature “Captain America’s young ally, BUCKY”. But even though Cap plays the lead role on the covers, with Bucky often tied up, in the actual comics Bucky gets just as much attention as Cap and is often the one who takes the initiative. He fought alongside Cap right up through Cap’s brief tenure as “Captain America…Commie Smasher!” in 1954… but by 1955, Marvel (or, as it was then, Atlas) was out of the superhero business, instead offering up such titles as Journey Into Mystery, Two-Gun Kid, and Patsy Walker. Cut to 1964, though, and Marvel had a new superhero universe up and running—or maybe not so new, because almost immediately the creators of this Silver Age started incorporating characters from the Golden Age comics of the 1930s and ’40s. For instance, they brought back Namor the Sub-Mariner as early as Fantastic Four #4. For that matter, one member of the Fantastic Four itself shared a name and power set with the Human Torch from Marvel Comics #1. And so in Avengers #4, Captain America returned—with a story that turned all of his postwar comics into dead letters. We learn that, shortly before the end of World War II, Cap and Bucky were trying to stop an aerial drone when it exploded, killing Bucky and sending Cap flying into the freezing waters of the North Atlantic, where he survived in a state of suspended animation until the Avengers found him and thawed him out. Meaning that every appearance of Captain America and Bucky from issue #49 of their book up to #78 was retroactively declared to have actually told stories of those who replaced Steve Rogers and James Buchanan Barnes in those roles.
“Bucky—Bucky! Look out!” are Steve’s first words upon waking: it may have been nearly twenty years since Bucky’s death, but to Steve, it hasn’t even been twenty seconds. This becomes a key to who Cap will be, now that World War II is long over: a man whose life has been shattered and who must now pick up the pieces. The fact that he finds himself in the future doesn’t even matter all that much—he’s bemused by television and beehive hairdos, but eighteen years requires much less of an adjustment than the MCU’s sixty-six. In the MCU, everyone Cap has ever known is either dead or over ninety; in 1964, they’re maybe getting a little paunchy, maybe a little gray around the temples, but otherwise fine. All except for Bucky. “What happens next??” Cap thinks to himself in Avengers #4. “Can’t return to my career as Captain America—it would be meaningless without Bucky! I don’t belong in this age—in this year—no place for me—if only Bucky were here—if only—” By issue #6, the other Avengers have already grown weary of Cap’s grief. When Iron Man shows off some new gadgets, Cap remarks, “If only Bucky could be here now, to marvel at these scientific wonders!”, and that’s about all Thor can take. “It is not good to dwell upon the past, my valiant friend!” he advises. “You must not allow yourself to continually mourn your youthful lost partner!” But Cap won’t hear it, saying “I can never forget” and “Bucky will always live in my memory!” He also declares that “I shall devote my life, if need be, to finding the one who caused Bucky’s death! Only then will I be able to find peace!” His devastation over Bucky’s death is almost as central to Cap’s character as Peter Parker’s guilt over his uncle’s death is as central to Spider-Man’s. Thus, while readers soon learned that death in superhero comics was nearly always a temporary state of affairs, these two exceptions were so noteworthy that they became part of an aphorism in Marvel fandom: “No one stays dead except for Uncle Ben and Bucky.”
Then in 2005 they brought back Bucky. A new volume of Cap’s comic had just launched, and writer Ed Brubaker retconned Stan’s retcon: we learn that the Soviets had taken hold of the half-dead Bucky, turned him into a cyborg, and put him into suspended animation, to be woken up every decade or so to perform whatever black ops wetwork needed to be done. I guess the idea was that, now that Cap had been back for forty years (i.e., a decade in Marvel time) and actually had reached the acceptance stage when it came to Bucky’s death, Bucky didn’t actually have to remain dead for the Captain America character to keep an identity, so why not go for the big sales that would accompany such a shocking event? Not long after, Steve Rogers was killed— temporarily, for he is not Uncle Ben—and a now (semi-)rehabilitated Bucky took over as Captain America, until he himself was killed off in 2011. Don’t worry, he was resurrected a few months later, and returned to his identity as the Winter Soldier.
But when the MCU started killing off major characters, it seemed unlikely that these deaths would be temporary: the producers would have to work out deals with the actors and, y’know, keep them from aging. So there’s a bit more weight to the question of who will be next Captain America—too much weight, decides Steve’s choice, Sam Wilson, who donates the shield Cap gave him to a museum. This annoys Bucky, who tries to harangue him into taking on the role—only for both of them to be blindsided when the government unveils a new Captain America:
John Walker. So the Falcon’s heyday was before my time, and the Winter Soldier’s was after—but John Walker’s was smack-dab in the middle. While my main interest in the Captain America title very quickly became the relationship between Cap and Diamondback, I started collecting the book with issue #332 to follow the “John Walker takes over as Captain America” story.
In his introduction to the first Astro City trade paperback, Kurt Busiek wrote, “Captain America is the American ideal and self-image circa 1941 rolled into one—the biggest kid in the global playground, who’s going to make the other kids play nice, even if he has to get a little rough to do it. […] And if a superhero can exemplify America’s self-image at the dawn of World War II, could a superhero exemplify America’s self-image during a less-confident 1970s?” The question was rhetorical; Busiek knew full well that, during the Watergate era, Captain America scribe Steve Englehart had in fact spun out a long storyline in which Cap discovers that the head of the sinister “Secret Empire” is Richard Nixon, a psychological blow that led a disillusioned Cap to give up his identity as Captain America and become “Nomad, the Man Without a Country”. The point was that “the greatest strength of the superhero genre” was “the ease with which superheroes can be used as metaphor, as symbol”, in this case for “the self-image of a nation”.
Mark Gruenwald, who took over the writing chores on Captain America in 1985, seemed to agree. Though he definitely was not above a bit of silliness (“What if Cap took on a gang of evil jugglers called the Death Throws?”), for the most part his storylines did grow out of the fundamental themes Busiek discusses. And in the 1980s, the U.S. had set aside its crisis of confidence by embracing a triumphalist, pugnacious jingoism. Reagan was in the White House, Rambo was a top draw at the multiplexes, and the Hulk idolized by Marvel’s target demographic was not the green monster from the comic books but a balding, roided-up wrestler. In his role as one of Marvel’s ten editors, Gruenwald had responded to the skyrocketing popularity of pro wrestling by commissioning a story arc from his former assistant Mike Carlin in which the Thing becomes a charter member of the “Unlimited Class Wrestling Federation”, in which super strength is allowed. This might seem to make for a limited participant pool, even in the Marvel Universe, but it doesn’t, leading the Thing to ask, “Where are all you super-strong people who are joining the U.C.W.F. comin’ from anyway? You guys are crawlin’ out of the woodwork!” The answer turns out to be that a mysterious “Power Broker” has been offering an “augmentation” process to promising candidates—basically, steroids—and if you guessed that the dark secret is that half of the volunteers end up as deformed freaks, then congrats, you know your timeworn tropes. One character in the wrestling story arc is a shady impresario named Ethan Thurm who returns in Captain America #323 with a new scheme: why not promote one of these “augmented” strongmen as something more than a wrestler? And so Steve Rogers happens across a rally for “the hero with his finger on the pulse of the Eighties… the one, the only—Super-Patriot!”
In Secret Wars II #1, when the villainous Thundersword has the drop on Captain America, he declares, “You’re a Republican, aren’t you? Well, now there’ll be one fewer!” In 1985, when that issue came out, it stood to reason that Thundersword would jump to that conclusion about Cap’s party affiliation; Cap wore a flag-themed costume, and wrapping themselves in the flag was what Republicans had been doing for decades. But Cap had been created in 1940 as a rebuke to Republican isolationists; his book was squarely in the camp of unapologetic liberal Franklin Roosevelt. When he was revived in the 1960s, he was written by equally unapologetic liberal Stan Lee, then handed off to a series of young Baby Boomers who’d at least dipped toes in the counterculture. (Steve Englehart, for instance, had been discharged from the military as a conscientious objector.) So while the Super-Patriot doesn’t come out and say why it is he and not Captain America who has his finger on the pulse of the 1980s, he doesn’t really have to, because years earlier, the Red Skull already had, cackling that Cap’s Achilles heel is his “sniveling liberalism”. And in Captain America #332 and #333, the Reagan administration agrees, stripping Steve Rogers of his role as Captain America and handing it over to the Super-Patriot.
The Super-Patriot turns out to be John Walker of Custer’s Grove, Georgia, and while Ethan Thurm is just a grifter, Walker isn’t—he genuinely believes that Steve Rogers’s “concept of American and her ideals is as dated and obsolete as” Rogers himself is. He takes his new role as Captain America seriously, cutting ties with Thurm at the government’s request and dedicating himself to a grueling training regimen along with his partner, Lemar Hoskins, selected as the new Bucky. (This was later changed to “Battle Star” after readers wrote in to note that Hoskins is African-American and “buck” is a racial slur.) Not only does Walker learn Rogers’s moves—the acrobatics, the shield-slinging—but he also finds himself using Rogers as an ethical model as well: what would Cap do? Nevertheless, Rogers is a liberal and Walker is a conservative, and while a big part of why Rogers is fired is his refusal to be sent to Nicaragua to fight alongside the Contras, Walker is eager to do so. But the government wants to be sure that Walker, unlike Rogers, is willing to follow orders he doesn’t like, so for his first assignment as the new Cap, Walker is sent to his old hometown in the southern foothills of Appalachia to infiltrate and take down a KKK-style outfit called the Watchdogs. “They’re against pornography, sex education, abortion, the teaching of evolution—anything they believe to be immoral!” Walker is told during his briefing, and he thinks, “Hmmm… I’m against those things too!” Nevertheless, Walker does as he’s told, which comes back to bite him a few months later when the Watchdogs kidnap his parents. During his rescue attempt, the elder Walkers are caught in the crossfire and killed. Walker snaps, going on a killing spree—not just of the Watchdogs, but of anyone he deems to have played any role in his parents’ deaths. Two of his murders are so gruesome that I was astonished that they were permitted in a Marvel book—and they weren’t even shown. They are described in dialogue, but the descriptions had me triple-checking whether the issue in question had been granted the Comics Code seal. Very rough going if you’re squeamish. Anyway, having a rogue Captain America running around convinces the government to get out of the superhero business, turning the rights to the Captain America brand back over to Steve Rogers. At least, that’s the cover story. Oh, Rogers gets to be Cap again, all right. But the government doesn’t get out of the superhero business. Instead, it fakes Walker’s death, secretly gives him some rehab (i.e., a partial mind wipe), and launches him on a new career as the U.S. Agent. I won’t go into the last thirty-odd years of the U.S. Agent’s history here, but he’s been portrayed as a villain, as a true hero—just a red state version of Cap—and as everything in between.
So as I was saying, in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, Sam and Bucky are blindsided by the announcement that, with Sam having turned down the chance to be Captain America, the role has been handed to someone else—and, yes, it’s John Walker. I knew it was John Walker the moment I saw him: artist Tom Morgan gave him a very distinctive face, which his successor Kieron Dwyer stuck with, so I know what John Walker looks like, and the casting agents here found a shockingly good match. (It’s Wyatt Russell, son of Kurt Russell and Goldie Hawn.) There are a few key differences between page and screen. In the comics, John Walker joins the army to try to live up to the memory of the older brother he idolized, who’d been killed in Vietnam—only to find that in the ’80s, soldiers didn’t do much more than peel potatoes. “I served my hitch, and still hadn’t made anything of myself,” he explains, which is why he signs up for the Power Broker’s augmentation process. Things are different in the twenty-first century, and in the MCU, Walker is an decorated soldier with a record that makes him the most elite of the elite. But he hasn’t undergone augmentation and feels outclassed as a baseline human going up against opponents with superpowers. Otherwise, the story arc is similar: Walker tries his best, but the villains kill someone he’s close to (here it’s Lemar rather than his parents), and he flips out and starts turning bad guys into red splotches on his shield. He loses his role as Cap (to Sam Wilson rather than Steve Rogers this time), but gets a second chance as the U.S. Agent.
One thing that has long bothered me, not just about comics but about pretty much all serial narrative of this type, is the blithe face turn. “Oh, yeah, I killed hundreds of people in season two, when I was the big bad, but now it’s season five, and I’ve had a change of heart! Cheer me on as I now fight alongside the heroes!” Would the government continue to employ John Walker after his killing spree? Sure, I can absolutely believe that. Would Captain America accept him as an Avenger? Would the Wasp? That seems less likely. And the thing is, Walker is fairly small potatoes on this count. Almost every Marvel supervillain has had a chance to be recast as a hero in one way or another. In some cases this seems to be permanent: Magneto and the White Queen are elder statesmen among the X‑Men, for instance, and Loki has been turned into some sort of metafictional “god of storytelling” who fights alongside Thor more often than against him. I think the Green Goblin is currently supposed to be reformed. But even many of those who have returned to villainy have had stretches when they’ve been played as heroes, or at least as taking steps on the road to redemption. Doctor Doom had his own book in which he played hero. So did Doctor Octopus. And so did the character who in this series joins the Falcon, the Winter Soldier, and John Walker as a roguish ally:
Baron Zemo. Joe Simon said on several occasions that his starting point in developing Captain America was not the hero at all, but rather the villain. Who would make a good villain? Simon thought that no fictional villain he could come up with would be worse than Adolf Hitler, so why not make Hitler the villain? Okay, so then what kind of hero would he want to see socking Hitler in the jaw? And that was the basis on which Captain America was designed. But the thing is, Hitler couldn’t always be the villain. If the story was about Nazi saboteurs trying to take out a munitions factory in Milwaukee, it wasn’t going to be Adolf Hitler himself standing in the parking lot with a detonator. So right from Captain American Comics #1, Simon and Kirby put forth the Red Skull as the Nazi agent Cap and Bucky would most often take on face to face. In the 1960s, using Hitler as a villain was even more difficult. And while Stan and Jack brought back the Red Skull, complete with new origin, almost immediately upon reviving Cap, he couldn’t be Cap’s only villain. Thus, in Avengers #6, they introduced a new arch-enemy for Cap: Baron Heinrich Zemo, a Nazi scientist who was said to have fought Cap several times during the war, though this was a retcon—he had never actually appeared in any WWII-era comics. To build up Zemo’s stature, they established that it was he, not Hitler and not the Red Skull, who had launched the drone that killed Bucky. Zemo, who now led a team of supervillains called the Masters of Evil, was the Avengers’ primary nemesis for a lot of those early issues—until he was abruptly killed off in #15. And though no one in comics stays dead, Zemo actually did. Maybe under that hood he was secretly Uncle Ben!
It is astonishing that Zemo stayed dead from 1965 to 1973, but after that, it became less of a surprise—because in ’73, Roy Thomas and Tony Isabella used a fill-in issue of Captain America to introduce Heinrich Zemo’s son, and inheritor of his title: Baron Helmut Zemo. Though at the time he called himself “the Phoenix”, when J.M. DeMatteis brought him back in 1982, he had dropped that sobriquet. He went on to become a major character, leading the Masters of Evil in a celebrated Avengers storyline of the mid‑’80s, then founding the Thunderbolts, with whom he would make something on the order of a hundred appearances. He even got his own redemption arc in the mid‑’00s. So I was surprised when I watched Captain America: Civil War and found that Zemo’s name had been given to what seemed to be a throwaway character, suggesting that the MCU creators had no more ambitious plans for such a big player in the Marvel Universe. But it turns out that his appearance was setup for a sort of Hannibal Lecter riff here, as the heroes turn to a villain they had previously locked up so that he can help them catch the villain they’re after now, namely:
The Flag-Smasher. Another Gruenwald creation, the Flag-Smasher was very clearly a villain based on a schema (“we need an antagonist with this set of characteristics”) rather than on a more organic process (“I keep hearing these lines of dialogue while I’m making breakfast”). Remember, Captain America was originally imagined as a superhero specifically designed to punch Hitler in the face. After his revival, this remained the case. In the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s, even as Nazi Germany receded into the past, Cap’s cast of enemies was still dominated by Nazis and Nazi-adjacent villains: the Red Skull, Baron Zemo, Arnim Zola, Wolfgang von Strucker, the Hate-Monger, Sinthea Shmidt, etc., etc. Oddly, Cap didn’t fight a lot of communists during this period, even with the Cold War on—communist villains were more likely to square up against Iron Man and the Hulk. Instead, when he wasn’t fighting Nazis, Captain America was usually taking on subversive organizations attempting to take over the country and, from there, the world: HYDRA, AIM, the Secret Empire, the Imperial Forces, and their ilk. So what if there were a guy who claimed that America, Nazi Germany, the USSR, the Secret Empire, and all the rest were just spokes on a wheel, and wanted to defeat Captain America not because he coveted America’s spot on the top of the wheel, but because he wanted to break the wheel? This is the question Gruenwald poses in Captain America #312, which introduces Karl Morgenthau, the Flag-Smasher. Morgenthau’s goal, he claims, is to spread “the message of peace through world unity”. And given that goal—spreading a message—it probably comes as no surprise that his issues are heavy on the speech balloons. Example: “I am not against America in particular! I am against all countries… I am against the very concept of countries! I believe all men are brothers, sprung from the same primal parent. Tribalism, ethnicism, nationalism—these are all latter-day concepts that in our nuclear-powered world have become outmoded and dangerous! They make people think they are different… special… better than other people. This is wrong! All men are equal. No better or different than anyone else! When you say ‘I’m an American,’ what you’re saying is that you are separate from anyone who cannot make a similar statement. Every nation fosters the idea that it is better than all the others! This is what has brought us to warfare with our fellow beings—what has brought us to the brink of nuclear destruction!” That’s all one panel. And he’s not done. “If we were to erase national boundaries and accept the essential unity of all mankind, the world would be a better place! Earth should not be divided into nations! We are the world—not a bunch of different species!”
I always thought the Flag-Smasher had tremendous potential, in that he demonstrated how the standard liberal attempt to rescue the concept of Captain America fails. “I’m not a knee-jerk patriot,” Gruenwald has Cap say in issue #322. “I don’t believe in my country right or wrong. I support America in its concept, its essence, its ideal. Its political system, its foreign and domestic policies, its vast book of laws—I am not America’s official advocate of any of that. What I represent are the principles that America’s politics, laws, and policies are based upon… freedom, justice, equality, opportunity…” Flag-Smasher interrupts: “Then why alienate the rest of the world with ‘America’ in your name? Why don’t you call yourself Captain Freedom, Captain Justice, or—” And the best response Cap can come up with is that he thinks he hears a helicopter.
Sadly, the Flag-Smasher’s potential went unrealized. Gruenwald was determined to make him a villain in deed if not in word, so Morgenthau is a 1970s-style terrorist: his standard tactic is to hijack a plane or take an auditorium full of people hostage, and demand that the public listen as he recites his manifesto or he’ll kill everyone. He never seems to grasp that for every listener he successfully radicalizes, there are scores more who will reject his ideas because they’re coming from a terrorist. (Actually, one thing I liked was that Gruenwald acknowledged that even this level of rhetoric, about on the level of a high school class on world politics, is over the heads of most of the public. “Go back to Russia, ya commie!” “What? I’m not a communist. Weren’t you people listening? I hate what the Soviet Union stands for as much as I hate what America stands for!”) Morgenthau also isn’t very interesting as a person. He’s actually very similar to Baron Zemo: both of them want to carry on the work of fathers they idolized. It’s just that Zemo’s father was a Nazi scientist while Morgenthau’s was a delegate to the United Nations. So it’s not necessarily a huge loss that The Falcon and the Winter Soldier completely reinvents the Flag-Smasher. Actually, there is no single Flag-Smasher; rather, “the Flag Smashers” are a terrorist group that our heroes are hunting down. Their agenda springs from the specific circumstances of the MCU timeline: when Thanos killed half the world’s population in Avengers: Infinity War, we learn, countries were so desperate for labor that virtually all migration restrictions were dropped. With people free to travel wherever they wished, it felt like national boundaries were a thing of the past, but now the missing four billion have been resurrected, and those barriers are going right back up. The Flag Smashers want to go back to the way things were. Their leader is Karli Morgenthau, a typical MCU application of an established name to a wholly new character. The name Gruenwald chose was already pretty dubious: looking for a name that would mark his character as Swiss, he took the surname of an American political dynasty—an ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, a secretary of the treasury, a State Department consultant, a long-serving Manhattan district attorney—of Ashkenazi Jewish descent. And then the MCU people applied that name to an Irish-Jamaican woman with a grating Birmingham accent. I don’t know how many Morgenthaus fit that description. Maybe the idea is that the MCU Flag Smashers all swapped surnames to show that countries don’t matter. Anyway, the show doesn’t really do anything interesting with the Flag Smashers—the macguffin of the series is that they’ve gotten hold of the super-soldier serum that created Captain America, and that is what Sam and Bucky are after. The macguffin could’ve been in the possession of anybody and the series would have been about the same. So, with Zemo pointing the way, they head to…
Madripoor. An important locale in the Marvel Universe, it originally appeared in a Chris Claremont New Mutants story but came to be strongly associated with Wolverine. It’s an island near Singapore with an extremely wealthy “Hightown” and an extremely poor “Lowtown”—Dubai bolted onto Port-au-Prince. I don’t know too much about it, but my understanding is that it is governed, at least de facto, by the top crime boss on the island, much like the real-world United States circa 2025. In the comics, I think this is a woman who calls herself Tyger Tiger, though my information may be out of date. In The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, it’s the Power Broker. This threw me for a loop, because I thought the Power Broker had already appeared in the MCU in the second season of Jessica Jones, but I was wrong—that was Karl Malus. Though Malus was the one who actually augmented various characters in the MU, such as John Walker, he wasn’t the Power Broker—he worked for the Power Broker, a businessman named Curtiss Jackson. On this show, however, the Power Broker turns out to be…
Sharon Carter. For most of the 1960s, Marvel’s distributor limited the number of comics the company could release each month—and it was wary of books that weren’t proven sellers, so it was only so often that a new title could be launched with issue #1. That meant that when Stan Lee came up with a character he wanted to feature, he usually had to assign the character to an existing book. For instance, Iron Man was assigned to Tales of Suspense. And when the number of featured characters exceeded the number of books, well, some of them had to share. So Captain America also got assigned to Tales of Suspense, which from #59 to #99 allotted ten to twelve pages to each character. So it is in Tales of Suspense #75, cover date 1966.03, that we first meet Sharon Carter. Steve Rogers is out on his balcony, brooding about the usual: “Can I ever forget Bucky Barnes, the teenager who was like a brother to me? He shared my battles, my dangers, my triumphs! But, though we saved countless lives in the past, his own was sacrificed in the name of freedom!” But then, a new twist: “But, there was one other! Our lives touched for only a short time—but I’ve never forgotten her! I can still remember our final date—when she whispered to me, thru trembling lips, ‘I’ll wait till you return, Steve! No matter how long—no matter what happens—I’ll wait for you, my darling…!’ But that was an eternity ago—in the dead past—the forgotten past—the past which will live with me forever!” He decides he’s got to stop holing up in his apartment: “I’m alone too much! I’ve got to get out—lose myself in the crowd!” It doesn’t help. “There must be more to life than endless combat!” he ruminates as he strolls down a crowded New York sidewalk. “Others have found a home—a family—why can’t I? Or, is Steve Rogers destined to walk alone forever—until the final battle—until he walks no more?” And then, completely randomly, he crosses paths with a young woman who looks like his lost love from the war. Not only that, but she seems to be engaged in some spycraft, surreptitiously exchanging packages with someone she had supposedly bumped into. A few moments later, he finds her squaring off against the supervillain Batroc the Leaper—and she manages to hold him off and escape with the package! Batroc hurriedly explains to Cap that they need to team up to stop her, since the package is a WMD that has accidentally been activated. “It shouldn’t be too difficult to overtake one lone girl,” Cap says, but Batroc disagrees: “Ahh, but this one—she is different! She is no ordinary female—she is an agent of S.H.I.E.L.D.!” And in fact as Cap works alongside S.H.I.E.L.D. himself in future issues, he finds that this young woman is an extraordinarily capable agent, rarely subject to the sort of damseling Stan Lee constantly inflicted upon the Wasp and the Invisible Girl.
But it takes a while to get there. At first it looks like she’s going to die of radiation poisoning from carrying a leaky nuke around, which gives Cap even more to angst about: “Is this my destiny? To have been given a second chance at life—only to lose everything I ever held dear? First it was Bucky, the greatest sidekick a man ever had! Then, those many years ago, I can still remember her—promising to wait—no matter how long it might be—! Now—when I thought I had found her reborn—I’ve lost her again! And perhaps this time it will be—forever!” It is not, though it isn’t until late 1967 that they are reunited. In Tales of Suspense #92, Steve Rogers is walking down the street, consumed by self-pity as always. “Even in the center of a crowd, I’m an outsider—an outcast—a misfit!” he thinks to himself. “Only when I’m costumed as Captain America do I seem to come alive—to have a mission—a purpose! But, as Steve Rogers, I’m merely a name—a hollow shell—with no roots—no real life to call my own!” He glances into a restaurant. “Other men have friends—wives—loved ones!” he muses. “If I wanted to have dinner out—I’d have to dine—alone!” But within a few panels he’s fighting to save Nick Fury from an AIM robot, and Fury tells him that “yer girl friend” has been infiltrating AIM but now needs to be bailed out. Cue two issues of Cap and his love interest working together as smoothly as Cap and Bucky, except with more martyrdom, e.g., when Cap tells her, “Escape—while you can—job is—too big for one girl! Fury—will send—others! Forget about me!” But by #95, with the mission successfully completed, the two of them are off on their first date, at “the most romantic restaurant in town”. “I had almost forgotten there could be nights like this!” remarks the young blonde in her hip mod dress. Steve, wearing the biggest grin that can fit on a human face, replies, “There’ll be many more such nights—a lifetime of them!” To repeat: first date. “Whoops!” Steve says. “I’m getting a little ahead of myself! I wonder what people would say if they knew I’m here with a girl who means so much to me—and yet—I don’t even know her real name! How does a fella propose—to someone he only knows as—Agent Thirteen!” Agent Thirteen’s reply, sensibly enough, is “PROPOSE?!!” Steve seems genuinely shocked that she doesn’t want to marry him three minutes into their first date. “I do love you!” she explains. “There can never be anyone else for me—except you!” But she’s committed to S.H.I.E.L.D., and so begins the pattern of the next several years: they cross paths during a mission, defeat the evildoers together, say things like, “Oh—my darling—we’ve found each other again at last—kiss me—! And yet—we must part—for we each have a duty—yet—we must also never give up hope—that someday—our work will be done—!” A few landmarks along the way:
Captain America #103, 1968.07: Cap finally learns that Agent Thirteen’s real name is Sharon Carter. We already knew, thanks to thought balloons in Tales of Suspense #75, that Cap’s lost love from the war was Sharon’s older sister (much older—the gap is about twenty years). She will eventually be revealed as Peggy Carter. But learning Sharon’s name doesn’t ring any bells, because Cap never knew Peggy’s name either.
Captain America #162, 1973.06: Peggy Carter returns. It is revealed that after reading about Cap’s apparent death in 1945, she went crazy and had to be institutionalized. No one ever told her about Cap’s return for fear that such a shock, even a good shock, would kill her. Cap disagrees and says she seems fine, and in fact she is fine, at least once she sees that Cap is alive after all. Well, as fine as she can get realizing that she’s forty-five and her wartime sweetheart is now dating her twentysomething sister.
Captain America #233, 1979.05: Brainwashed by the villainous Doctor Faustus into joining the Neo-Nazi “National Force”, Sharon commits suicide—by self-immolation! yikes!—when the group is defeated. Her last words: “A white America is a strong America!” And that was the status quo I grew up with: by the time I started reading comics, Sharon Carter had been dead for years, much like Gwen Stacy, and Cap didn’t even think about her much. And so I was pretty annoyed when I read:
Captain America #445, 1995.11: New writer Mark Waid brings back Sharon Carter after sixteen years. She’s been doing black ops in the interim and is now jaded and bitter, and she and Cap spend the rest of the issues I read doing sitcom banter between exes à la Ross and Rachel. Death in comics really is meaningless.
Anyway, in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier she’s set up as a secret big bad for something in the future. Or maybe it’ll turn out to just be spycraft—in the comics Sharon often posed as villains, like Irma Kruhl in Tales of Suspense #97. Or maybe she’s a Skrull. The MCU loves doing Bendis in the ’00s, right? Back then Bendis had a whole thing about people turning out to be Skrulls. But we don’t find out here—here it’s all setup.
As for this series, the chief order of business is to maneuver Sam Wilson into his role as Captain America. In the comics, he owed his original wings to the Black Panther, so to have the Wakandans provide his new Captain America outfit would make for a nice tip of the hat. Fortunately, there is a good excuse for the Wakandans to appear, as MCU Zemo killed King T’Chaka, father of T’Challa, so when the Wakandans discover that Zemo has been freed from his prison cell, they send in:
The Dora Milaje. First appearing in Christopher J. Priest’s Marvel Knights Black Panther series, the Dora Milaje were originally conceived as just a pair of bodyguards for the Black Panther, based on supermodels Tyra Banks and Naomi Campbell. T’Challie’s Angels, if you will. At some point after Priest’s run, they were changed to a small army of buff women with shaved heads, and that’s the version we get here. One last piece of input that helps Sam make up his mind comes from:
Isaiah Bradley. Around the turn of the millennium, with Marvel Comics struggling to emerge from bankruptcy, newly appointed publisher Bill Jemas encouraged creators to take some risks. Let’s do a whole month of issues without any dialogue! Let’s reboot X‑Force from a book about grimacing musclemen doing black ops to one about superheroics in the reality show era, done in a kooky retro style—but with enough gore for Marvel to ditch the Comics Code! And as long as we’re ditching the code, let’s have Power Princess from the Squadron Supreme spend three issues naked and uncensored! A little controversy couldn’t hurt sales, right? As an example of the sort of thing he was looking for, Jemas tossed out the idea of “a black man in red, white, and blue”, and editor Axel Alonso realized, hey, wait—didn’t the Tuskegee Syphilis Study show that if American scientists of the mid-twentieth century were trying to recreate the super-soldier serum, and found that it was wildly risky, leading to mutation and death, they would use African-Americans as their guinea pigs? But what if, for one, it actually worked? This is Isaiah Bradley. In the comics, Bradley has one secret WWII outing, but then is debilitated by the serum—aging very slowly, but with severe brain damage. In the MCU, his brain is fine, but he ages normally. He has also faked his death, certain that if the government knew that the secret African-American Captain America of the Korean War was still alive, he would immediately be killed; after all, for thirty years he’d been locked up and experimented upon. His advice to Sam is that “they will never let a black man be Captain America, and even if they did, no self-respecting black man would ever want to be.” Sam disagrees, takes up the role, and near the end of the series, takes Isaiah to the Smithsonian, which now has an exhibit, complete with statue, detailing Bradley’s career and the horrific experiments done on the unwilling African-American test subjects. “Now they’ll never forget what you did for this country,” Sam says. “Never.” This series is set in 2023. Two years later, of course, Trump would be back in office and order the Smithsonian to remove “divisive narratives” and “improper ideology”—i.e., anything that made white supremacy look bad—so that exhibit would surely be shut down. “Never” ain’t what it used to be!
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