Captain America

Captain America, the alter ego of Steve Rogers (in some accounts Steven Rogers), is a fictional superhero in the Marvel Comics Universe. Created by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, he first appeared in Timely Comics' Captain America Comics #1. more...

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Publication history

Captain America was one of the most popular characters of Marvel Comics (then known as Timely) during the Golden Age of Comic Books. Though preceded by MLJ's The Shield, Captain America immediately became the most prominent and enduring of a wave of patriotically themed superheroes introduced in American comic books prior to and during World War II. With his sidekick Bucky, Captain America faced Nazis, Japanese and other threats to wartime America and the Allies.

In the post-war era, with the popularity of superheroes fading, Captain America led Timely/Marvel's first superhero team, the All-Winners Squad, in its two published adventures. In his own series he turned his attention to criminals and Cold War Communists. After Bucky was shot and wounded in a 1948 story, he was succeeded by Captain America's girlfriend Betsy Ross, who became the superheroine Golden Girl. Captain America Comics ended with issue #75, by which time the series had been titled Captain America's Weird Tales for two issues, with the finale a horror/suspense anthology issue with no superheroes.

Captain America was briefly revived, along with the original Human Torch and the Sub-Mariner, in Young Men, published by Marvel's 1950s iteration Atlas Comics. Billed as "Captain America, Commie Smasher!", he appeared several times during the next year in Young Men and Men's Adventures, as well as in three issues of an eponymous title. Sales were poor, however, and the character again disappeared after Captain America #78. In the 1970s, the post-war versions of Captain America were retconned into separate, successive characters who briefly took up the mantle of Captain America after Steve Rogers went into suspended animation near the end of World War II.

He returned in Marvel's The Avengers #4. The story explains that in the final days of WWII, Captain America fell from an experimental drone plane into the North Atlantic Ocean and spent decades frozen in a state of suspended animation. (Retellings sometimes place the event over the English Channel.) The hero found a new generation of readers as leader of the all-star superhero team the Avengers, and shortly afterward in a new solo feature beginning in issue #59 of the "split book" Tales of Suspense, shared with the feature "Iron Man". The feature was written by Stan Lee and generally penciled or laid out by Captain America's golden age co-creator, Jack Kirby. Gil Kane, in some of his earliest Marvel work, also drew some stories. The feature went to full-length and took over the numbering of TOS with #100. (Iron Man received his own, separate series.) The new Captain America continued to feature artwork by Kirby, as well as a short run by Jim Steranko, and work by many of the industry's top artists and writers. This solo title has lasted decades longer (albeit in multiple incarnations) than the original run.

Read more at Wikipedia.org