As a writer, Stan Lee took pride in attempting to repurpose something that might be regarded as a liability in a plot, turning it into a storytelling advantage.
Marvel had already successfully revived the Human Torch in an updated teenage version. The original Sub-Mariner had been revamped as a villain or anti-hero. But Lee and Captain America’s co-creator Jack Kirby faced a predicament in reviving their third Golden Age great in Avengers 4 (March 1964).
How do you pull a potentially corny red-white-and-blue character out of World War II and plant him in the protest-movement 1960s?
“Over the years we had tried to resurrect him, and he never worked,” Lee recalled. “After World War II ended, he was just a guy in a dumb costume running around. I mean, that’s the way a lot of people perceived him.
“So I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be fun to say he had been frozen in the ice for these two decades or whatever it was, and now he’s back?’ I’m always trying to give them a personality hook or a character trait that would make them unique. And I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be great? Here’s a guy who’s been out of it for 20 years, and suddenly everything is changed.’ He never knew what a hippie was. There are hippies, there are guys smoking marijuana, all those things…”
So against the public’s disintegrating belief in America, Marvel would juxtapose Captain America himself.
“That’s right!” Lee said. “And here’s a guy who’d be considered totally square. He believes in liberty and freedom and the flag. It was the Vietnam War, and nobody was interested in war anymore. People were turned off. So I figured, ‘Let’s give it a shot.’ So that was the reason for the man out of time, out of sync.’”
So Lee and Kirby performed an act of plotting jujutsu, and turned a weakness into a strength.
Comics historian Matthew Jackson noted, “Kirby and Marvel guru Stan ‘The Man’ Lee had already tested the waters on Cap’s return with an odd little Human Torch story in a 1963 Strange Tales issue, letting Johnny Storm tussle with the classic hero for a while before revealing at the end of the book that it was really just villain The Acrobat in disguise. But the idea of having the actual Captain back in action was appealing enough to fans that in The Avengers 4 (March 1964) it was revealed that Cap had never really been gone, just frozen in a big block ice after he went down with a plane during the war. You know the rest. Captain America became the leader of Earth’s Mightiest Heroes and eventually got his own solo series again.”
So seven months after the Avengers fished him out of the ocean, Cap was appearing in his first solo feature since 1954 (Tales of Suspense 59, Nov. 1964).
Kirby ended that adventure with a clever visual joke. Cap is shown resting in the Avengers Mansion surrounded by the dozen or so costumed assassins whom he has just battered into unconsciousness.
“I’m sure glad it’s almost morning. I’m one tired Avenger,” Cap thinks. “I never used to feel tired! I guess when a fella reaches my age, he just starts to get soft!”
The remark proves the ‘man out of time” angle can be played even for laughs.
“One thing I always tried to do was take things that are disadvantages, and try to make a plus out of them,” Lee said.
“You know, every often — in fact, most of the time, after we got started — the artist did most of the plotting. I would just give him a one-liner like, ‘Let’s feature Dr. Doom and he goes back in time’ or something. And whoever the artist was, he’d practically do the whole story, and when I would get the artwork back and I had to put the copy in, very often there were things that I thought didn’t work or were foolish or didn’t make sense or something.
“Instead of having the artist redraw and go to a lot of trouble, the thing that was the most fun for me was to find out how I could take that discordant element in the story and make it seem as if we purposely did that to embellish the story. You know what I mean? And turn it into a good story point.”
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