This is a review of Marvel Masterworks: Captain America Volume Two. Back in the 1960’s, Captain America and Iron Man shared the same magazine – Tales of Suspense – for awhile. The difference being, Captain America had Jack Kirby and Iron Man didn’t. The characters might have been in the same magazine, but the stories are in different stratospheres.
I am sure you will all be fascinated to know that I rate all the graphic novels I read. The only thing preventing this from being a four-star book was the absence of Kirby in two storylines. The fill-in artists (one of whom was Gil Kane) did a fine job with the art, but the stories read as sloppy, unfocused, and rushed. Kirby was a craftsman. More than that, he cared. When you read his product you can tell he cared about what he was putting on the page.
Most of the storylines in this volume follow a template: a villain returns with an apocalypse device. When Cap teams with Agent Thirteen and The Black Panther (Kirby story), it’s a satellite that focuses solar energy into death rays. Okay, that’s scary. In Kirby’s absence, it’s a device that can enclose anything in indestructible bubbles. Which is stupid, especially when the villain ditches his bubble machine for a nuclear submarine. Anyway: Cap kicks the shit out of the villain so that he can go back to being depressed. What, you say Captain America’s depressed? If you were frozen in an iceberg for twenty years and then thawed out, you’d be depressed too!
There are two storylines I’d like to mention. The first involves the Super Adaptoid, a creation of A.I.M. (Advanced Idea Mechanics). The Adaptoid gets the jump on Cap and duplicates him exactly, and then proceeds to get his head handed to him by a Z-grade villain called The Tumbler. Although the Adaptoid has all of Cap’s physical prowess and skills, he doesn’t know how to fight. The Adaptoid goes down, and the real Cap recovers in time to beat the tar out of the confused Tumbler. This is a story built around an idea.
The second storyline is when Cap proposes to Agent Thirteen, the SHIELD agent he’s in love with (even though he doesn’t know her name). Agent Thirteen turns down his proposal to be Mrs. Captain America because she has a sense of duty – and she doesn’t want to quit her job, although she doesn’t say that. Unfortunately for them, it’s the mid-60’s so they can’t just shack up. Cap, depressed, publicly unmasks and quits so that he can have a life. This has real repercussions, in that a number of Captain America impersonators run amok in the city and the Syndicate starts trying to kill them all.
Recommended!
Abandoned Places 