His power came from his long-unfashionable hat.
Teeny weeny magic beanie, / Pointing towards the sky; / Give me muscle, power, vigor, / Form a super guy!
And with that Green Lantern-like chant, Forsythe Pendleton Jones III became the caped, blue-clad (or sometimes purple-clad, or yellow-clad) Captain Hero in a Captain Marvel-like flash.
Whereas his pal Archie Andrews became super with a self-help book and a considerable effort of concentration, Jughead needed only to invoke the beneficence of the hat he’d been wearing for 25 years.
A similar fashion fetish — a twist of her ponytail — turned Betty Cooper into a Super-Teen.
“What’s interesting about the Archie superhero transformations is that it predated the advent of the Batman television show by a full five months,” observed Carl Thiel. “The first Pureheart the Powerful story appeared in Life with Archie 42 (Oct. 1965).”
Captain Hero debuted as a dream figure in Jughead 126 (Nov. 1965). With access to an undefined array of powers and gadgets, Jughead’s alter ego put paid to supervillains such as the Fink, the Hot Foot, the Whammy, the Collector, the Spoiler, the Silencer, and the Duke of Decay in seven issues of his comic book as well as in several other titles.
Captain Hero’s super-scientific equipment included a jet belt, suction shoes for climbing walls, an inner-ear shortwave transmitter, and a super-mental teleray operating through a grid in his beanie to project his thoughts over vast distances. His superpowers included a super-sensitive nose and the rather formidable “fury of a thousand hurricanes.”
His chest insignia was, of course, a hamburger. I have to presume the “Hero” in his colorful code name referred as much to the sandwich as anything else.
“I think it helped that no one seemed to have any real grasp on what his powers were,” observed comics historian Mitchell Brown. “He was strong, sure, but he also appeared to be whatever the story required him to be, and he would pull gadgets like a radio headset out of thin air. Not that I’m complaining — a hero whose strength is fueled by burgers is probably not meant to be taken too seriously.”
“For all the arguments you can make for ‘realism’ in comics and the current decompression of story elements, this issue is fun in ways that modern comics just can’t match,” Matthew Peterson wrote of Jughead as Captain Hero 1 (Oct. 1966).
“(I)t doesn’t take itself too seriously, something I wish more comics could pull off. The art is clear, bright, and brilliant, mixing super-hero tropes and the teenybopper quasi-romance style of the Archie line with ease.”
A surprisingly effective superhero, Captain Hero proved a good fit for Jughead. Jughead’s penchant for daydream heroics goes back at least to 1960 when he starred in the three issues of Jughead’s Fantasy as a knight in armor, the Son of Hercules, and a private eye named “Peter Goon.”
I admit to a slight lingering resentment against Captain Hero, though. If defying fashion gives you superpowers, then where are mine?
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