It's easy to see why Captain America was such a hit for Timely Comics in 1941. Many previous action comics had portrayed Hitler and Nazi Germany under safe pseudonyms. Here was a brash, explosive book which socked Hitler on the jaw on the cover of the very first issue! Don't read these stories for characterization; unlike Bill Everett's concurrent Sub-Mariner stories, there was none. Do read it for Jack Kirby's masterful, ballet-like and violent action sequences, in which he literally wrote the book on fight scenes in superhero comic books for decades to come (and on into the future). I was surprised to see the crossover influence of the shudder pulp magazines (like Timely publisher Martin Goodman's Uncanny Tales and Uncanny Stories pulps), with lots of creepy monsters and dungeons featured. Issue No. 4's "Horror Hospital" is a good example, with a Peter Lorre-like mad scientist who keeps a one-eyed, hunchbacked patient on a leash.
My favorite story in the volume was the first appearance of Hurricane. It's all Kirby (script, pencils and inks). Hurricane's an intriguing character and Kirby uses scenes and characters - a masquerade party and Pluto, ruler of the underworld - that he'll revisit decades later in series like Machine Man and Thor. Hurricane is a great character in his own right, but in 1998 was retconned (by Editor-in-Chief Bob Harras?) as an identity of the Eternal Makkari. What a gyp! Marvel, after Kirby's death, merged two of his self-created characters into one out of a misguided attempt to interlock every tiny, dark corner of the Marvel Universe into a cohesive whole.
Captain America co-creator Joe Simon writes an afterward in the paperback edition in which he tells how he, Kirby and Martin Goodman visited the offices of John Goldwater to hash out Cap's visual similarity to MLJ Comic's The Shield. It turns out Goodman and Goldwater had a shared history; they had both worked at one time for magazine publisher Hugo Gernsback!
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