But for a quirk of fate, comic books’ Silver Age might have arrived a couple of years earlier.
Why? Because Joe Simon and Jack Kirby did precisely what DC Comics would do to kickstart the Silver Age — revive, revise, and revamp a popular 1940s superhero.
But they did it in 1954, not 1956, and their template was Captain America, not the Flash.
The story beats were familiar in both cases.
— Instead of honest and courageous weakling Steve Rogers, the S&K team gave us honest and courageous weakling Nelson Flagg.
— Instead of the noble scientist Prof. Reinstein being murdered by Nazi agents, the noble newscaster Johnny Flagg was assassinated by communist agents.
— Instead of a secret WWII experiment turning Rogers into a super-soldier, we got Nelson’s consciousness transferred into his brother’s rebuilt body to create a super-agent.
— Instead of Captain America’s masked partner Bucky, we got Fighting American’s masked partner Speedboy.
“The 1950s comics scene was dominated by horror and crime comics, witch hunts and scare stories,” noted comics historian David A. Roach. “Into this unpromising environment, Joe Simon and Jack Kirby launched The Fighting American in 1954 (published by Prize Comics), which the creative duo hailed as the first superhero satire in comics history. Interestingly, Marvel Comics had revived Captain America just eight months earlier, and it is intriguing to ponder if Simon and Kirby created the Fighting American as a riposte to their earlier superhero creation. Indeed, the pair’s avowed aim was to make the public forget Captain America entirely; clearly, this did not happen.”
In terms of style — with villains like Hotsy Trotsky, Poison Ivan, Count Yuscha Liffso, Scarlet O’Haircut, and Charity Bizarre — the Fighting American feature anticipated the Batman TV show of a dozen years later.
Fighting American is also interesting to comics fans as an example of the evolution of Jack Kirby’s art. It’s the midpoint between his 1940s and 1960s approaches to Captain America.
“The comic-book company that first published Fighting American (in 1954) was a minor outfit called Prize Comics, where Simon and Kirby had recently had several notable successes — including Young Romance, the first comic devoted to what we now think of as Harlequin-style love stories, and Black Magic, a horror comic that long outlasted that genre’s comic-book fad years,” noted comics historian Don Markstein.
“Fighting American, did not, however, prove as commercially viable as those other titles, lasting a mere seven bimonthly issues. An eighth was written, drawn, and ready to go to press when the title was canceled. It’s impossible to know for sure, but the reason it failed to find public acceptance may also be why it is so highly regarded today — it didn’t take itself or, apparently, the Cold War, seriously.”
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