In a single story in Captain America Comics 3 (May 1941), we get mummies, a looming thug with the strength of 10 men and a masked super-criminal garishly costumed as a butterfly who glides down on victims and runs them through with his long, sword-like red proboscis.
Of course, when the story was reprinted in Fantasy Masterpieces 3 (June 1966), the sword-snout had to go to accommodate the Comics Code.
The verbose title was also changed, from The Queer Case of the Murdering Butterfly and the Ancient Mummies to The Weird Case of the Murdering Butterfly and the Ancient Mummies — an illustration of how language usage can shift in a quarter of a century.
Watch how Cap bends almost into a circle to deliver a blow that must be overwhelming. See him dodge an attack, torso twisting, long legs akimbo. Look at him run, bent forward, bullet-fast. Who needed super powers when you had that much sheer dynamism on the page?
And if Jack Kirby’s art was sublime, the contents were often appealingly profane. The Universal monster movies were popular at the time Cap was introduced — The Wolf Man would be released on Dec. 9, 1941, a year after the first issue of Captain America Comics appeared on the newsstands.
“The third and most iconic member of Timely’s ‘big three’ spent a great deal of time fighting monsters before he turned his attention to the Jap-a-Nazis, an activity to which he returned when World War II ended,” noted Robert Michael Carter in his The Great Monster Magazines: A Critical Study of the Black and White Publications of the 1950, 1960s and 1970s.
“In fact, the book was even re-titled Captain America’s Weird Tales for the last two issues before the original title was cancelled. Indeed, for practically the first ten issues drawn by the legendary Joe Simon and Jack Kirby team, Cap fought practically nothing but the most hideous fiends that the duo could conjure up.”
About Author
