Captain's Call

 

‘O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells;

Rise up—for you the flag is flung—for you the bugle trills,

For you bouquets and ribbon’d wreaths—for you the shores a-crowding,

For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning;…’¹

A major anniversary looms, a President survives an assassination attempt, economic turmoil threatens livelihoods and mind-waves of hate spread across the nation, turning friend against friend. Into a world like this, steps Jack Kirby, contract done at DC and turning in his first work for Marvel in five years on new terms, I get proper credit and edit my own stuff, thanks Stan, Captain America # 193 (January, 1976), published 50 years ago today, 14 October, 1975.

Captain America has always been a ‘political’ comic, not party political (thank God!) but given its titular character it has attempted to say something primarily about America the country, America the people, not simply focus on the party-political State. Jack Kirby closely followed Steve Englehart’s famed run on Cap, a run which expressed Englehart’s and many readers’ disillusionment with our elected leaders at the time of Watergate, culminating in the unmasking and suicide of chief conspiracist, Number One, a thinly disguised Richard Nixon, in Captain America # 176 (August, 1974).

Cap threw away his identity as he felt that ‘…there was no way I could keep calling myself Captain America because the others who acted in America's name were every bit as bad as the Red Skull...’² He became Nomad, a man without a country until he realised that he must return to being America’s champion, ‘"....my naivete is my problem, not America's. The country didn't let me down, I let her down by not being all I could be...there has to be somebody who'll fight for the dream...."³

Like the Walt Whitman poem, written about losing Lincoln to an assassin’s bullet, Kirby’s Cap picks up Englehart’s theme and delivers the best of America right at us as we face the conspiracy crisis of the Madbomb. We, the ‘swaying mass’, want a Captain, someone who will lead us away from the shouting, away from the judgement, away from voices that promise light but deliver hate, we want ‘…somebody who’ll fight for the dream.’

When hate comes, it seems to come suddenly, as Cap and Falcon sit at table about to drink soup and then the ‘mindwave’ strikes! Cap: ‘I’ll break you Falcon!’ Falcon: ‘Try it whitey!...’ The wave comes from the outside, yet this hate clearly sits just beneath the surface, it comes from within.

A recovered Cap and Falc run into the streets and find…chaos, ‘….the madbomb at work. Unseen and undiscovered, its invisible waves are screaming in a sea of minds…creating a force against which even super-heroes are helpless.’ Violence and conflict, there were two attempts on the life of President Ford in 1975, were still a big part of American life.⁴

Cap recalls his World War II past, when he fought right wing fascist dictators, intent on dividing nations, spreading racial hate, all to seize and maintain power. After destroying a small version of the madbomb, he laments ‘I feel as though I’ve been sitting though reruns of old nightmares….’ He stands over strewn streets as a man crouches down next to him and seems to speak for the reader: ‘Where am I? How did I get here?’

Cap and Falc get closer to the mystery of the madbomb as they make contact with government agents, ‘…the news media will report your incident as a riot. But we know that we’re faced with a fearful conspiracy.’ Then deep in the government agency fighting the madbomb, they meet its leader, Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger (!) who confirms they are facing a ‘national emergency.’

The scale of that emergency is soon upon them, not just a challenge to the individual, a community, the biggest madbomb of them all, ‘Big Daddy’, a giant size disembodied brain bomb, is set to go off and release hate that will destroy America in its bicentennial year.

Kirby’s best work has always been multi-levelled. In Cap # 193, he is not simply asking who Captain America is but as the country remembers its past in the present, who is America, what is America, what are its values, what does it stand for? The Captain America comic has always been about individual and collective, national, identity. As big moments are marked, 200, 250, 300, who is the best of us, what can we aspire to, who are we together?

Jack Kirby’s America, his Captain, was about decency, honour, ingenuity, creativity, racial equality, friendship, kindness, welcome, community, democracy, strength. He fought for those things, he lived those things, for him, those qualities weren’t things that other people had long ago, they were values, ways of living that would last. Kirby drew from his past but as the last words on Cap # 193’s letter page note, ‘….Marvelous Marv Wolfman assures us that Jack is thinking not of the past but of the future.’  There’s no time to lose in responding to the Captain’s call.

‘Time is truly wastin'
There's no guarantee
Smile's in the makin'
You gotta fight the powers that be’

….

I got knocked on the ground
By all this bullshit going down
Time is truly wastin'
There's no guarantee’

Fight the Power, Isley Brothers. The song hit # 4 on the Billboard top 100 in the week of 30 August 1975 and went to number # 1 on the Rhythm and Blues chart in 1975.

Footnotes

¹ O Captain! O Captain! Poem by Walt Whitman, published in the collection, Sequel to Drum Taps, 1865.

² Captain America # 183 (March, 1975).

³ Ibid.

⁴ The first attempt was by Manson Family member, Squeaky Fromme on September 5, 1975, in Sacremento. The second was by Sara Jane Moore on 22 September, 1975. Ford subsequently wore a bulletproof trench coat, beginning in October, 1975.

Research this issue -

Comics:

-According to Jack Kirby (Michael Hill, Lulu, 2021)

-Comics Journal # 134, February 1990 (Jack Kirby interview by Gary Groth)

-Mike’s Amazing World of Comics website

- Kirby & Lee: Stuf’ Said! (Jack Kirby Collector # 75: TwoMorrows)

Popular culture:

-Chronicle of the 20^th Century, Editor in Chief John Ross, Viking, 1999.

-Helter Skelter, the True Story of the Manson Murders (Vincent Bugliosi with Curt Gentry, W.W. Norton, 1994)

-The Games People Play (Eric Berne, Penguin, 1964)

-There’s A Riot Going On (Peter Doggett, Canongate, 2007)

-The Vietnam War: The Definitive Illustrated History (Penguin Random House, 2017)

-Uncovering the Sixties (Abe Peck, Pantheon, 1985) 

-Vietnam: An Epic History of a Tragic War (Max Hastings, William Collins, 2019)

Michael Mead is a 59-year-old New Zealand comic book collector, who likes to think he can do "contextual" commentary reviews of old comics, asking: "where does this story come from?", looking at the social, political, cultural times it came from, the state of the comics industry, the personal and creative journey of the writer or artist, the personal journey of the reader as a child and as an adult. 

As part of this, he is vain enough to think he can bring new insights into Jack Kirby’s comics, primarily Kirby's Fourth World comics and so, on the 50^th (or 40^th) anniversary of publication of each issue of Superman's Pal Jimmy Olsen, Forever People, New Gods and Mister Miracle, he published a contextual commentary. Check out his earlier entries on this blog and tell him to stop talking so pretentiously in the third person for God's sake!