This issue continues Captain America's battle with Machinesmith from the last issue, with the addition of a Fantastic Four character, the robotic Dragon Man (seen both on the cover to your right and earlier, behind the scenes in Avengers #42). We also touch base with Steve Rogers's personal life, watching him as he looks for... Continue Reading →
This issue is a big deal for several reasons. In general, it launches the short run (nine issues) by Roger Stern and John Byrne, which not only remains one of the premiere runs on Captain America to this day, but also leads to a tremendously rich extended period on the book featuring writers such as... Continue Reading →
These three issues of Avengers are great action-packed superhero comics, but not ones with a lot of ethically interesting Captain America content, except for demonstrating his strong leadership. (These issues are perhaps better known for setting up the extremely controversial issue #200, as we'll see near the end of the post.) As an added bonus,... Continue Reading →
In this issue—a fill-in before the legendary run by Roger Stern and John Byrne begins in the next issue—Captain America once again encounters a villain with more to his story than he initially appreciates, emphasizing the theme of mercy made at the end of the last issue. The issue opens with a NYC school board... Continue Reading →
As you can guess from the cover, this issue elaborates on the backstory of Steve Rogers's neighbor Anna Kapplebaum, who survived the Holocaust (with the help of a young Captain America, as recounted in issue #237). However, much of what we'll cover in this post deals with Cap's interactions with his community, as drawn by... Continue Reading →
These two issues bring us back to Captain America's main storyline (after the last issue), in that it references Steve Rogers's burgeoning artistic career, while still having the feel of a fill-in story, this one about a fella named Adonis who definitely isn't. (No judgment... neither am I!) Issue #243 opens with Cap fighting unknown... Continue Reading →
These six issues—only one of which even has Cap on the cover—have very little ethically interesting Captain America content, but they do include the Falcon leaving the Avengers, the new Ant-Man meeting the team for the first time, the introduction of the Taskmaster, a badly beaten Man without Fear, and Cap confronting a new and... Continue Reading →
This issue sees our hero manipulated by a fiend known as—wait, "the Manipulator," really?—who puts him through a series of set-ups and illusions to try to break him mentally. Although the Manipulator pushes all the right buttons, some of them enabled by Cap's innocent gullibility, it is no surprise that at the end Cap emerges... Continue Reading →
In this issue, Captain America meets Frank Castle, aka the Punisher, in one of Frank's earliest appearances outside of Amazing Spider-Man, two years before he appeared in Daredevil and six years before he got his first title. Accordingly, we get our first look at the differences between the two men, which we will see from... Continue Reading →
These two issues contain a battle against the Grey Gargoyle, primarily a foe of Thor who also faced Captain America and the Falcon in Captain America #139-142, which is bookended by a more interesting story—at least for the purposes of this blog—featuring a Senate hearing on the issues of the Avengers' security clearance, which anticipates... Continue Reading →
THE VIRTUES OF CAPTAIN AMERICA 