Past Times
HE wasn’t bitten by a spider, pounded by gamma radiation or born with the power of a Viking god.
Steve Rogers was just a skinny kid from Brooklyn with no super-power whatsoever until he was injected with a secret serum that led to him becoming Captain America.
He made his first appearance in 1941, in Timely Comics, which later became Marvel Comics, and the patriotic super-soldier was the creation of Jack Kirby and Joe Simon.
Joe, who passed away in 2011 at the age of 98, once explained: “I was 24 when I started creating Captain America. It’s been a guardian angel hanging over my whole life.
“Everywhere I went, in the service or wherever, I wasn’t Joe Simon. I was Captain America.”
Co-creator Jack, who also brought to life comic favourites like the Incredible Hulk, Thor, Fantastic Four, Black Panther and the X-Men, was 22 when he introduced Steve Rogers to the public for the first time. He explained the appeal of the character, saying: “I don’t think Captain America would do anything wrong. He wouldn’t... even at the cost of his life.”
Captain America proved a hit with fans from the very start, with the first March issue selling nearly a million copies. The front cover of the launch issue saw him punching Hitler in the face and standing up for all-American virtues. The comic has since become a highly-prized collectors item and a few years ago was fetching £278,142.
Stan Lee began working on the comic from the third issue, with a story called Captain America Foils The Traitor’s Revenge, which saw Captain America throwing his shield and using it as a weapon for the first time.
You can’t keep a good superhero down, and Stan Lee and Jack revived the character once more in 1964. “I found a way to help the war effort by portraying the times in the form of comic characters,” said Jack. “I was saying what was on my mind. I was extremely patriotic.”
It was not long before Captain America made the move to TV and cinema. Dick Purcell played him in the 1944 cinema serial, which changed the comic book story, so that a city district attorney by the name of Grant Gardner put on the star-spangled costume to tackle a villain called the Scarab.
Marvel Comics gave Republic Pictures the rights for free in the hope that it would boost sales of the comic. The cliffhanger movie episodes featured titles like The Purple Death, Scarlet Shroud and The Avenging Corpse before