Captain America issues 302-312

My latest reading project has been to read the entire Mark Gruenwald Captain America run … or at least the large chunk of it currently available in Epic Collections.

Some thoughts:

The first Epic Collection starts with issue 302, which begins a new storyline after a big epic battle with the Red Skull by J.M. DeMatteis that saw print in issues 291-300 of the series. (I presume 301 was a “breather” issue.)

So we have issues 302-306, five issues written by Gruenwald’s predecessor, Mike Carlin. These issues are fairly forgettable, but they establish the status quo, which was nice for me as it sets the stage for Gruenwald, who immediately starts dismantling it. The major things: The Red Skull just (seemingly) died. Cap is engaged to Bernadette “Bernie” Rosenthal, with whom he shares an apartment in a hipster part of NYC. Cap’s sidekick is Jack Monroe, named “Nomad” (an identity that Cap originally used himself during one of his “quit being Cap” phases, another of which will occur early on under Gruenwald). And Steve Rogers’ civilian job is as the artist for an ad agency.

With that setup, we come to Gruenwald’s first issue, 307, which happen to coincide with Secret Wars II #1, featuring Cap teamed up with the X-Men and the New Mutants against the Beyonder (classic stuff, am I right?). Gruenwald decides to use his first issue to focus instead on Nomad, who’s patrolling the streets solo while Cap is off fighting ol’ Ben de Roy. Nomad’s opponent is the first of many original Mark G. creations for this series, a chaos-embracing guy called “Madcap” (a bit of wordplay on Grueny’s part, plucking the middle syllables out of the combo of “NoMAD/CAPtain America”). Madcap has the power to make people act nutty. In one of several Talking Heads tributes, Gruenwald titles his first issue “Stop Making Sense,” with a footnote that says “With apologies to David Byrne.”

Nomad bombs totally in his solo outing, leading to a crisis of confidence that will become a small arc for the character over the next few issues. Two or three months down the line, Nomad will fight Madcap one-on-one in a rematch, and win, and upon doing so decide that he is done with being in the shadow of Captain America, so he quits the sidekick gig and moves on. Thus is Jack Monroe written out of the supporting cast, for at least a couple years.

This isn’t the only bit of disassembling Gruenwald does. He also has Bernie Rosenthal decide to go to UW Madison lawschool (Gruenwald giving a shout-out to his home state of Wisconsin, there’s a good lad), which means she and Cap break off the engagement and put the whole relationship on hiatus. Cap also decides to quit advertising, and applies for a job as an artist at Marvel Comics, where he’s given a regular assignment as the artist on Captain America. Meta!

One thing I like about reading long runs by a single writer is that there comes a point where it seems like the stories start writing themselves, because the author has found such a regular groove, having put so much of his self into the series. Some of these early Cap stories by Gruenwald don’t seem particularly noteworthy at first, but a lot of the elements he introduces early on eventually recur, and become woven into the fabric of Grueny’s own mythology. Gruenwald would end up writing the series from 308 all the way up to 443, which comes very close to beating PAD’s run on Hulk (331-467) in terms of issue count, and as with runs like PAD on Hulk and Claremont on X-Men, Gruenwald ends up creating his own little universe on the series, populated by several of his original creations as well as cherry-picked pre-existing Cap/MU supporting characters (in addition to Steve Rogers himself, natch).

The first example shows up in issue 308, the story that introduces Dr. Karl Malus, a scientist able to give power-upgrades to folks. In this issue, the dude who got the powers is a tragicomic behemoth called the Armadillo, an example of Gruenwald’s sense of humor on the series. No one really laughs at the Armadillo; he takes himself very seriously, and Cap takes him seriously as well, and someone unfamiliar with Gruenwald’s personality might actually wonder if the writer realizes how ridiculous the character is. But Gruenwald delights in playing ridiculous things totally straight; definitely a trademark aspect of his style.

Another case in point: The Serpent Society. Gruenwald also loved tracking and cataloguing Marvel continuity; his phenomenal ability to do so was eventually monetized in the form of the OHOTMU. (Gruenwald purportedly chose the title of the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe so that the acronym would deliberately sound funny when spoken phonetically, more of his deadpan humor at work.) I don’t know for a fact that his cataloguing is what lead to the Serpent Society, but my head canon is that Mark G. noticed the somewhat disproportionately large number of snake-related villains in the Marvel Universe, most (or all?) of whom were unaffiliated with each other, and decided it would be fun to affiliate them. Thus was born the Serpent Society, which in-story is the idea of Sidewinder, a teleporter who is shown in cutaway scenes of Gruenwald’s early issues, teleporting to various locations and recruiting pre-existing snake-themed villains. At least one of them, Diamondback, is an original creation of Gruenwald’s for the series. The Serpent Society ends up having a lot of members. I never counted them all, but it seemed like there were at least twenty; I’m not sure how many of them were original creations and how many were extant Marvel villains. Apart from a few obvious ones like Cobra, most of them are unfamiliar to me. (The other biggie, Viper, is name-checked during the recruitment montage but we’re told she ignored the invitation from Sidewinder, a tacit refusal.)

Issue 310 is Cap’s first encounter with the Society, who are different from other villain teams in that they are organized by Sidewinder as a union. Again, Grueny is totally straight-faced as he describes them having insurance, health benefits, etc. Also, a clever twist is that Sidewinder’s teleportation means he can always easily bust a member of the Society out of jail, so one of the Union guarantees is that none of the serpents ever stays incarcerated for more than a day. Also part and parcel of the absurdity is that Sidewinder refuses membership into this union to any villain who isn’t snake-themed.

Issue 311 showcases another aspect of Gruenwald’s continuity-obsession: He is as fascinated by “archaeology” as John Byrne at his finest. He loves a good continuity clean-up. A few years after starting on Cap, Gruenwald would write Quasar, the hero from Oshkosh, Wisconsin (there’s a good lad), whose entire series seemed devoted to cleaning up loose continuity from other stories. Gruenwald’s efforts have far more charm than Byrne’s however. Cap’s fight with the Awesome Android in issue 311 is a great example. I had zero familiarity with the story that was being followed up on (and I no longer remember what it was), but Mark G’s recap is quick, and snappy, obviating any need to have to hunt a back-issue bin to figure out what’s going on. This issue takes place in the American Midwest, and makes Cap realize that there are other areas of America besides New York that could use superhero-ing. It gets him thinking about how he can better live up to his title, protecting all parts of this great country of ours, rather than just those commie liberals on the East Coast. This will be followed up on in short order.

Issue 312 is the first and maybe best example of Gruenwald creating original villains that work thematically and specifically with Captain America. (Madcap didn’t really have any thematic relevance beyond the pun in his name, as the villain who tested NoMAD, who considered himself a poor man’s CAP.) For issue 312 sees the coming of … THE FLAG-SMASHER. Another silly name played straight, but his agenda is rather ingenious. He loves humanity, all humanity equally, but hates the idea that we are divided into nations. These arbitrary divisions create prejudice; and concepts like national pride creates the false notion that one type of person is superior to another. So the Flag-Smasher commits acts of terrorism, usually against national monuments as they are symbols of what he hates. With Cap being a living, breathing American monument, what better dude for Flag-Smasher to form an arbitrary arch-villain relationship with? So, let it be done, and Flag-Smasher is added to the rogue’s gallery. (There’s a funny moment in this issue when bystanders call Flag-Smasher a “commie” for hating America, and he tries to patiently explain that he’s not a communist; he hates Russia just as much as he hates America.)

Another of Grueny’s innovations (he really does a lot of changes to the status quo, and he’s only six months in!) is the “Captain America Hotline.” The premise: Cap wants to reach out and protect all of America, not just New York, where he lives. So he moves out of his apartment and moves into his van, and starts driving through America. Eat your heart out, J Michael Strasyinski, with your “Superman walks across America” lameness. Grueny did it first, and did it best! He also gets a million-dollar tax refund from the IRS, backpay for the last fifty years he’s been active. (Even though he wasn’t active for a bunch of it, he was frozen, which Cap tries to explain to the IRS. But the tax people, in their benevolent generosity, are having none of it!) Cap uses the money to set up an elaborate “hotline,” allowing people to call in with requests for help. He also recruits some teenage hackers to collate and prioritize the calls that come in. (A footnote helpfully explains that “hackers” is slang for people who are really good with computers.) This new teen brigade is dubbed … The Stars and Stripes!

Cap keeps his job as artist on the Captain America series, despite the fact that he will now be roving. Marvel Comics, fortunately, is happy to accommodate the fact that Steve Rogers now has no permanent address, as long as he still gets his pages in on time. No growing roses, Steve!

So, after six issues, we’re off and running! No more Bernie Rosenthal, no more Nomad, no more job at an ad agency, no more hip apartment in NYC. Instead, Cap is single, roaming the country in a van, and he’s got some young people working for him who are good with a modem. And he’s already had several new additions to his rogues’ gallery: Karl Malus, Armadillo, Madcap and Flag-Smasher, PLUS an entire supervillain union known as … the Serpent Society. Yee-haw! And the best is still yet to come.

Issues 313-320

Issue 313 sees Cap once again in conflict with the Serpent Society, this time as several members have been hired to assassinate MODOK, a task at which they succeed! I know MODOK didn’t stay dead, but I also have no idea when he was resurrected after this story. Certainly Gruenwald won’t have MODOK show up again after this for at least the next eighty-something issues.

Some of the Serpent Society clashes kind of blend together in my eyes (they are very frequent antagonists in the Gruenwald run), but I THINK this is the first one in which we learn of Diamondback’s attraction to Cap. Given how early this is, I assume that this was Mark G’s plan for the character from the start, introducing a new female villain who would eventually become a new romantic entanglement for the newly-single Steve. It’s a fairly slow and steady development. There’s not much here in this issue actually, except for Diamondback just thinking to herself that Cap has a nice A.

IMWAN stalwarts know of John Byrne’s charming habit of bringing up the fact that Mark Gruenwald was a “dear, dear friend” before going on to talk about how he was a jerk who forced Byrne to put Quasar on the West Coast Avengers, or how Mark’s kid couldn’t keep her grubby fingers off of his Arthur Curry, or what-have-you. One of his refrains is that Gruenwald was more a DC fan than a Marvel fan, and really “should have been working for DC.” Real nice.

But if true, Captain America was probably a good fit for Mark G., with Cap having a very DC quality to him: fighting for truth, justice and the American way; being almost Adam West-ishly straight-laced; having a secret identity who is a fully self-actualized adult with no real hang-ups, capable of functioning in the real world with no particular personal or professional problems.

Still, Cap is not NEARLY as DC as the Squadron Supreme, the “Justice League” analogues that Roy Thomas invented in the 1970s. Gruenwald took a huge shine to them, and wrote the twelve-issue “Before Watchmen: Squadron Supreme” mini in the mid-eighties which some people speak highly of and was apparently Gruenwald’s favorite of his own works. I always assumed that the series was fairly self-contained, and maybe it is, but that doesn’t prevent Gruenwald writing a crossover issue of Cap that spins directly out of and into the S.S. narrative. That’s what we get in issue 314, whose cover shows Cap fighting a bunch of DC-ish villains on a giant typewriter. The story is all right, a team-up with Nighthawk, the Squadron’s Batman analogue. Also noteworthy (to me), the second Talking Heads reference: Nighthawk goes into a dance club at one point and the band is playing the song “Slippery People,” from the Speaking in Tongues album.

After that, some more Serpent Society shenanigans, Diamondback makes her crush on Cap known to him (he does not reciprocate), and the tragicomic Armadillo returns, seeming more tragic than ever. While in the background, Grueny develops the “Scourge” saga.

Gruenwald’s collating of Marvel continuity for the purposes of OHOTMU not only showed a preponderance of snake-themed guys, but also a bunch of villains who struck him as lame and obsolete. Thus was born the “Scourge” idea: a serial-killer who goes after costumed supervillains. The story was a way of “cleaning house,” getting rid of bad-guys whom Gruenwald dubbed redundant and unnecessary in the modern Marvel Universe. (He later said that John Byrne of all people talked him out of his stance, and that he kind of regretted killing off all those villains, any one of which might have eventually been rehabilitated by a genius, in the way that one-trick-pony Daredevil antagonist Bullseye was so brilliantly turned around by McKenzie and Miller.)

The second Gruenwald Cap Epic Collection is kind enough to reprint pages from other comics, by other writers who were willing to play along with this whole gimmick of Grueny’s. Writers like Byrne, Mike Carlin, Walt Simonson, even Jim Shooter himself in an issue of Secret Wars II, were willing to devote a couple subplot pages to an obscure villain showing up and getting gunned down by a mysterious assailant, who always uttered the same triumphant catchpharase, “Justice is served!” This was all kind of news to me, I have to admit; I wasn’t reading Marvel comics yet at this point, so I missed all of these, and my back-issue obsessions up to now have been for X-Men, Hulk and Daredevil … three series that didn’t contribute to the whole “Scourge” thing. (Actually John Byrne did write a Scourge story into what would have been Hulk 320, but then he quit after Hulk 319, and so the story was drawered for a while, finally showing up in Marvel Fanfare, years after the Scourge thing was passe. Go figure.)

Anyway … after all this build-up, we come to Captain America 319, which features the amazing sequence depicting an entire score of canonical Marvel villains all gunned down in a bar. Dang, dawg! Alas, after a sequence like that, the Cap vs. Scourge “final battle” in issue 320 is anti-climactic. Basically after Scourge is defeated, the villain himself is killed by a shadowed villain bellowing “Justice is served!” OMG! Actually not a bad twist, but the mystery as to who the original Scourge was and who the new one is and how it all fits together ends up kind getting a tad tangled, and either Grueny or the readers or both lost interest before he finally resolved it in 1993, a full seven years later. As a Claremont fan, I have no problems with plotlines stretching out seven years or longer, but my sense is that the readership didn’t find this particular mystery engaging enough to be stretched out that long. (I actually quite liked the resolution when I finally read it. I think it’s one of Gruenwald’s coolest stories. But we’ll get to that.)

Issues 321-332

With the Scourge storyline resolved (for now), as of issue 320, Gruenwald begins planting the seeds for his most ambitious Cap epic EVAH in the very next issue. In 321, the Flag-Smasher returns, now backed by an entire organization of nation-hating zealots collectively called ULTIMATUM. It’s an anagram, though I can’t recall what it stands for. It is suitably absurd, and like usual with Grueny, played totally straight. But the big deal here is that when ULTIMATUM takes innocent people hostages, Cap is forced to kill one of them to defend the hostages. He kills a bad guy … WITH A GUN. Cap is devastated that he wasn’t able to save the day in this instance without resorting to lethal force, and it begins a crisis of confidence for him, which will lead to him, a year down the line, GIVING UP THE IDENTITY OF CAPTAIN AMERICA. What a concept!

After Flag-Smasher’s defeat in the following issue, we come to issue 323, the debut of John Walker: THE SUPER-PATRIOT. I love, love, love this character, and he will play a huge part – second only to Cap himself, really – in the “Cap quits” epic that is Gruenwald’s masterwork for this series.

As he appears here, John Walker is a guy who’s decided he wants to be the #1 patriotic hero in America, and resents the fact that the title is currently held by an old fuddy-duddy like Captain America. With some logistical and marketing assistance from a sleazy show-bizzy agent called Ethan Thurme, Walker has created a red white and blue costumed identity, the Super-Patriot, armed with a kind of light-saber-ish weapon. His backup are three dudes called the “Bold Urban Commandoes,” which anagrams to BUC and thus are called the “Buckies” for short. His initial forays into superhero-dom are actually fake setups by Thurm, with the criminals actually being Walker’s confederates.

The Super-Patriot himself is an arrogant jerk, seemingly without any redeeming qualities, more a caricature than a character, and easily write-off-able.. In one of Gruenwald’s best writing tricks on Cap, he’ll eventually develop John Walker into a much more dimensional creation, and someone who I love reading about.

In the subplot department, someone in the U.S. government records department has noticed that some nobody called Steve Rogers got a million-dollar tax refund recently. Assuming it’s a mistake needing rectifying, he starts researching it … Dun dun DUN. Meanwhile, Jack Monroe, a.k.a. Nomad, is undercover working as a bodyguard on a yacht for a crimelord called “The Slug.” Talking Heads reference: At one point, one of the songs playing on the yacht is “Life During Wartime” from the FEAR OF MUSIC album.

The Nomad plotline sees fruition in 325, in which Gruenwald catches us up on what he’s done since quitting the partnership back in one of Grueny’s first issues. He’s hooked up with a chick named Priscilla Lyons, whose brother is into drug-related crime, working for The Slug. In order to impress his new ladyfriend, he’s now on the Slug’s Yacht, hoping to bring down the crimelord and also rescue Priscilla’s bro. Captain America ends up showing up to give a hand, and we learn that Nomad has gotten a bit Punisher-y during his time as a solo artist. He ends up setting fire to the entire yacht causing it to sink, and deliberately sabotaging Cap’s attempt to rescue the Slug (who is, as the name implies, a big fat guy who can’t swim).

Cap manages to rescue most hands, and though the Slug sinks, there’s a hint that he may have survived at the end. Nomad hides the fact that he’s the one who sank the yacht. Also, we’re invited to ruminate on the fact that Nomad totally failed to rescue Priscilla’s brother: he didn’t die during the yacht incident, but he also refused to give up his criminally drug-suffused lifestyle. (Not that Nomad tried particularly hard to persuade him.) Cap and Nomad go their separate ways, but the fact that Nomad is developing into a bit of a jerk will be developed a bit further down the line.

In issue 327, Cap has his first brawl with the Super-Patriot, which ends in a draw. It becomes clear to Cap that the Patriot has undergone power-augmentation, a more successful version of what was done by Karl Malus to the Armadillo back in Gruenwald’s second issue. Cap wants to investigate the Patriot’s origins, which sets the stage for a four-part epic that runs through issues 328-331, wherein Cap hunts down “the Power Broker.”

The Power Broker is a mystery figure from, I believe, the Thing solo series. I think it’s from the era that Mike Carlin was writing it, but I dunno. For a while, the milieu of the Thing solo series was the “Unlimited Class Wrestling Federation” scene, in which super-strong folks like the Thing fight in cage matches to entertain the masses. Gruenwald and Carlin were pals, I gather, and Gruenwald actually eventually had his creation the Armadillo become an Unlimited Class wrestler, around issue 316. As I understand it, there was a story in the Thing series whereby this Power Broker character would take weaklings and turn them into super-strong dudes and dudettes, then funnel them directly into the UCW Federation, in which he presumably owned a stake.

So in 328, Cap shows up at the UCWF headquarters to learn more about the Power Broker, whom he believes is responsible for augmenting the Super-Patriot. (He’ll turn out to be right; not only John Walker but his three confederates in the BUCkeys will eventually be revealed as augments.) Cap makes fast friends with another Thing supporting character, Dennis Dunphy, the Demolition Man (D-Man, for short). Big, bald and Power-Broker-augmented, Dennis is a down-to-earth, humble guy who thinks it would be totes awesome to work as Cap’s sidekick on this case. Cap agrees, and D-Man debuts his new superhero costume, which as Cap points out is a ripoff of Daredevil’s original yellow suit but with the addition of a ripoff Wolverine cowl. Kind of funny, but the joke does wear old after a couple issues, I gotta say.

So over the course of the four-parter, Cap and D-Man infiltrate the Power Broker’s headquarters. In a consolidation of Grueny threads, we learn that Dr. Karl Malus is the head scientist for the Broker. Meanwhile, the Broker himself is revealed as Curtiss Jackson, who is apparently a villain from Machine Man, who later turned up in a Cap/Hulk/Machine Man crossover. He was, in fact, the villain in six issues of Stern’s Hulk, all of which I’ve read more than once but I don’t remember at all.

Also, I could be wrong about the Power Broker being a presence in issues of the Thing. This story implies that, but maybe Grueny is doing some retconning here.

At any rate, the four-parter is a bit chaotic, loaded with guest-stars including an oddball group of villains called the Night Shift, who don’t realize their leader, the Shroud, is actually a reformed villain who is pointing his team in directions that actually bring down other criminals. Kind of an interesting concept, but to my knowledge Gruenwald never returned to it.

Meanwhile, Cap’s attempt to take down the Jackson the Broker is interrupted by the U.S. Government, who want Jackson free, as he sometimes makes augments for THEM, including G.I. Max, who fights Cap in issue 331. Max himself is sort of a poor man’s Nuke, the villain in Miller’s seminal Daredevil epic that guest-starred Daredevil, and which was published roughly concurrent to this story. (As interesting as Gruenwald’s work is, its winky, continuity-laden homages to the tone of Silver Age DC here in Cap seem rather quaint when you consider that at the same time, Miller was doing “Born Again” in Daredevil.)

At any rate, Cap becomes somewhat disillusioned with the American government at the end of this story, leading into the next issue, the payoff to the IRS plot-thread, whereby the government decides that if they’re giving Steve Rogers a million bucks in backpay, they want some value for their money. Cap is called before the Commission on Superhuman Affairs, who tell him that THEY (the U.S. Government) technically own Captain America’s name, costume and shield, and if Steve Rogers wants to keep using it, he’ll have to become officially a government agent, rather than the free-roaming superhero he is now. Rogers declines. He QUITS THE JOB OF CAPTAIN AMERICA. What a concept!

Meanwhile, in some fortuitous timing, just as the U.S. has realized they need a new Captain America, a Washington D.C.-based lone terrorist is apprehended by John Walker, the Super-Patriot. Where could this be headed???

Issues 333-341

One of the slickest Captain America collections out there is the one called “The Captain,” which collects issues 332-350. I don’t think it’s part of the Epic Collection line, officially, but it is nonetheless FREAKING EPIC.

After Cap quitting in issue 332, the next three issues have Steve Rogers being totally absent from the series. Issues 333-335 are all about the Commission’s recruiting John Walker (the erstwhile Super-Patriot) to be the new Cap. The three Bold Urban Commandoes, as well as sleazy agent Ethan Thurm, all want in on this gig as well, but the Commission decides that with the exception of LeMar Hoskins (one of the three BUCkies), they all have backgrounds far too dubious to be associated with the U.S. government’s “Captain America” franchise.

LeMar is brought on as the new Bucky to John Walker’s new Cap, although Hoskins – a black man – is later convinced that the codename is racist, and is rechristened Battlestar. Both John and LeMar were originally painted as somewhat unsavory characters when first introduced, but Gruenwald does a nice job in having them both sort of inspired by the patriotism that is part and parcel of the new gig … over the course of their training, they both take on somewhat heroic casts. Gruenwald will slowly flesh out the backstory for both men, revealing that they both have always been patriots – they were, in fact, both soldiers in the army who met on their first day of basic when they were assigned to be bunkmates. After their tours ended, they found themselves at somewhat loose ends, wanting to still serve but not knowing how, and eventually that desire was exploited by Ethan Thurm, who talked them both into the somewhat tainted patriotism of the “Super Patriot” scam.

Now free of Ethan, and unfortunately also having to cut loose their pals -- the two erstwhile Bold Urban Commandos -- out of necessity, John and LeMar take to their new roles rather quickly and with much enthusiasm. Walker, though, has a definite psychological aberration, an angry violent streak that occasionally manifests in the field with lethal force. In a nice twist that goes against the grain of 1987 – when killer heroes like Punisher and Wolverine were riding high in popularity – John is ashamed of this aspect of his psychological makeup and wants to repair it, believing it to be unworthy of any man who calls himself Captain America.

Every chapter in this epic is great. This particular collection reads almost like a novel, as each issue (while being somewhat standalone) interlocks with the overarching narrative in significant ways. Issue 335 is a key one, as it features John Walker vs. another Gruenwald creation, the Watchdogs – militants in helmets who commit acts of terrorism in the name of “decency.” Like the Flag-Smasher, the Watchdogs have an ideology that makes them great Cap villains, taking a POV that is not only perfectly respectable (a desire for decency and an aversion to things profane) but also extremely prevalent in America, and pushing it to a villainous extreme.

Anyhoo, the John Walker Cap makes an enemy of the Watchdogs in this issue (even though, being a political conservative, Walker isn’t entirely unsympathetic to their views), which will have major consequences down the line.

Issues 336 and 337 return us to Steve Rogers. After a random act of heroism in 336 committed in his street clothes, Steve decides he doesn’t want to give up being a hero. He ends up linking up with three former sidekicks: The Falcon, Nomad, and Dennis “Demolition Man” Dunphy, as well as Nomad’s gal-pal Priscilla Lyons, now ALSO wearing a patriotically themed supersuit and calling herself Vagabond, albeit without any super powers or fighting prowess. The five of them (or six of them if you count the Falcon’s pet bird, I guess) continue Steve’s mission of roaming the countryside. Dunphy gives Rogers a supersuit he designed: black, white and red and reminiscent of the Cap suit while not breaking any copyright laws. Now calling himself “The Captain,” Steve Rogers is back in the superhero game. Gruenwald has also partially dismantled some of his own status quo developments: Steve’s job as an artist for the Captain America comic-book from Marvel is now a thing of the past. However, the Stars and Stripes hotline is still going.

The next few issues of the series see a kind of cross-cutting back and forth between the John Walker Captain America/Battlestar team sponsored by the Commission on Superhuman Affairs, and the free-roaming “Captain” team. Gruenwald’s scope and ambition for the series have greatly increased by this point; he’s essentially writing two series in one, with some issues actually split up (in old Silver Age style) into two stories, one about Walker and one about Rogers.

Issues 341-345

Okay, maybe not every chapter in this epic is great. Well, they’re all pretty great, but maybe not every one is PERFECT. Some of them feature some lame villains, admittedly. There’s an appearance by one of the many lame mutants that Louise Simonson created for X-Factor that is a real low point, for example.

That said, I just love the character dynamics. Over on the Rogers side of this now divided series, there ends up being a rather amusing (albeit played straight, like always) love triangle bit with Nomad, Priscilla and D-Man. Priscilla asks D-Man to teach her some fight moves after her boyfriend Jack proves unwilling. When Jack sees Dennis and Pris getting chummy, he reacts in truly jerkish fashion, which leaves Dennis – totally naïve as to Priscilla’s attraction – flummoxed. The Falcon, appropriately enough, is the only character who flies above all of the petty squabbles. He’s basically just hanging with this group temporarily while they get themselves into their heroism groove, the he has his own stories to attend to. (Was Falcon an Avenger at this time, or perhaps in a solo series?)

Gruenwald’s developing Nomad into a complete jerk is a delightful arc during this period. I don’t know what the motivation was … I get the impression that the character was meant to be liked by readers when first conceived, and certainly Gruenwald wrote him sympathetically in those early “Madcap” issues … maybe Mark G. just thought it would be funny. And it is.

Meanwhile, over on the Walker side, things go sour at a press conference to announce that there is a new Captain America, though his identity will be kept anonymous just like the original’s. At the conference, Walker and Battlestar are attacked by two augments in costumes, the Left-Winger and the Right-Winger. They’re the two castoff Bold Urban Commandoes, angered at not having been imported into the Cap gig at the same time John and LeMar were. Their new identities were constructed by sleazeball Ethan Thurm, presumably as a way of mocking the whole concept of a patriotic hero rather than as any expression of the two characters’ actual respective political leanings.

During the fight, one of the Wingers announces to the crowd that Captain America is actually John Walker of Custer’s Grove, Georgia, blowing his secret identity. This will have tragic consequences, but before we get to that … Serpents! All this time, the Serpent Society have been operating pretty successfully, their organized “union” structure proving to be quite durable. A testament to Sidewinder’s skill and foresight as the guy who set it all up … but those qualities are taken for granted when several of the Society organize a coup to overthrow Sidewinder and replace him with a new leader, the Viper. (Viper is a perennial Cap villain but this marks her first appearance in a Grueny Cap story.)

Amidst the chaos, the beautiful pink-clad Diamondback is definitely on Team Sidewinder, so she contacts her crush -- Steve Rogers -- to save the Society from Viper’s takeover. This leads to a big melee amongst the different factions, including a somewhat silly plotline in which Ronald Reagan is transformed into an evil snake-man by a serum put into the Washington D.C. water supply by Viper. Cap having to fight Snake-Reagan is possibly a smirking parody of the old Englehart plot that had Cap become disillusioned and quitting back in the 70s, after he found out Richard Nixon was a supervillain.

Engelhart played that whole thing for drama, but Gruenwald makes it a joke. Once Reagan is cured, he ends up telling Rogers that in light of all he’s done for the country, he needn’t fear any reprisals from the government for this whole “The Captain” thing he’s doing, despite the fact that it is really testing copyright law.

The whole Serpent Society Takeover story makes some changes to the status quo, as Nomad, Vagabond and Dennis all end up captured by the government. Meanwhile, though Viper is ousted, Sidewinder decides to give up on the Society after their betrayal of him, leaving them temporarily leader-less. As for Diamondback, she’s more smitten with Cap than ever, and the two part as friends if nothing else, Cap even leaving her with a signaling-device so that she can “Jimmy Olsen” him in the future if there is ever a need. And oh yes, there WILL be a need. But that’s later.

First! After introducing the Watchdogs in issue 335, a group of anonymous dudes in matching costumes and helmets performing acts of terrorism, Gruenwald gives us the Resistants in issue 343, a group of anonymous dudes in matching costumes and helmets performing acts of terrorism! The difference? These guys are MUTANTS, and they are protesting the “Mutant Registration Act” that recently passed over in the X-books. Besides referencing the Registration Act and that X-Factor villain, Grueny has other ties to the X-universe around this time. It was Claremont who made Mystique’s Brotherhood of Evil Mutants into the government team Freedom Force working under their human liaison, Val Cooper. Since John Walker’s Cap and LeMar “Battlestar” Hoskins are both government agents as well, they end up training and working with Freedom Force a bit during this era, which I think is cool, being an X-fan. Gruenwald also makes Val Cooper a member of the Commission on Superhuman Affairs, which is cool. I actually thought Val Cooper was a Captain America character when I was a young’un, as I met her in one of these Cap issues as a ten-year-old before I ever saw her in X-Men. Later I was not surprised to realize she was a Claremont creation, as are all the great Marvel characters this side of Captain Britain.

Another thing I didn’t twig to when I was a child because I knew nothing about Marvel history is that Gruenwald was having some fun with longtime Cap fans, vis a vis his mutant terrorist group, the Resistants. Their uniforms are a brand new design, and they have all new code-names, but several of them are former members the short-lived iteration of the “Brotherhood of Evil Mutants” who appeared in only one issue, the Jack Kirby written-and-drawn Cap Annual #4. Once I knew the backstory, I found this all to be incredibly cool.

But then we go from cool to tragic. Issue 345 is another split-issue, half devoted to Rogers and half to Walker. Roger’s side isn’t tragic actually, just a cool development in the narrative, in which he turns himself in to the Commission in exchange for the freedom of Nomad, Vagabaond and D-Man. (Note that at this time, the Commission’s enforcers are team of special operatives collectively called the Guardsmen, who are – wait for it – a group of anonymous dudes in matching costumes and helmets.) Walker, meanwhile, has a much rougher time of things this issue: With his identity now public knowledge, the Watchdogs decide they can take revenge by kidnapping Walker’s parents. When Walker goes to the Watchdog installation where they’re being held, his rescue attempt is unsuccessful, his parents gunned down before his eyes before he can save them. Walker then proceeds to go nuts, ripping into the Watchdogs and killing every single one that’s present. It’s supposed to be horrifying, but … let’s face it’s kind of awesome. But the final moment is tragic and awful, with Walker cradling the bloodied bodies of his parents.

Issue 346

My reasons for wanting to read the Gruenwald Cap run in its entirety are threefold.

1.) When I was doing my issue-by-issue “analysis” of Claremont’s X-Men over at Geoff Klock’s blog, a commentator named David Fiore became an online friend of mine. He’s an excellent critic and writer – much better than I am, by far – and at one point he confided that he was partially inspired by my blog to do an issue-by-issue analysis of Gruenwald’s Cap, which he considers a masterpiece of superhero comix. I say “partially inspired” because he may have already had the idea to do such a blog, and besides, the inspiration seems to have burned out before he ever even got the idea off the ground. I occasionally still pester him to do it, and I may actually alert him to these write-ups here. I’d pay to read his take on these issues.

2.) As I mentioned before, longitudinal runs by a single writer are my jam. I’ve got Claremont’s X-Men, Dave Sim’s Cerebus, and PAD’s Hulk already under my belt, so this seemed like a logical next step. I mean, what else is there, Erik Larsen’s Savage Dragon. Please, don’t make me throw up in my mouth, oops, too late, am I right? HIGH FIVE

3.) My first ever Cap issue was Cap 346. I was already kind of an X-Fan, so this issue attracted me with its cover blurb: “From the pages of the X-Men comes … Freedom Force!” I had no idea what I was getting into until I leaped in, and found myself unknowingly in the final countdown to issue 350, which would be the climax to an arc that Gruenwald had been developing slowly and cannily for years now. And my ten-year-old mind was BLOWN.

Issue 346 isn’t one of the Rogers/Walker split issues; it’s entirely devoted to Walker, who up to now has been getting his violent, angry tendencies under control because he feels anything less is unworthy of the Captain America mantle. But the murder of his parents has shattered all of that. He’s very unstable, and thus the Commission is dubious as to whether they want to involve him in their latest op: Laying a trap for mutant terrorist group The Resistants. Instead the assignment is given to Battlestar and Freedom Force who stage a mock trial for Mystique, disguised as Quicksilver. Again, at the time, I didn’t realize the meta-layers here. Quicksilver was part of the original Brotherhood of Evil Mutants in the sixties; the Resistants were members of a later iteration created by Kirby in the 70s; and Freedom Force are the reformed Brotherhood from the eighties. Clever, Grueny, clever!

Anyway, the expectation is the Resistants will crash the trial to free “Quicksilver.” The Force will put up a fight but throw the match, allowing Mystique to be taken back to Resistant headquarters with a tracker on her, so Freedom Force can later bring the entire operation down. Good plan, and the Resistants do show up, but John Walker also shows up, thinking none too rationally but also wanting to prove he is still a good soldier. What follows is an awesome sequence that sees Walker just tearing through all these mutants. HARDCORE.

I haven’t talked much about Grueny’s artists; Paul Neary drew the first part of the run, a very solid superhero artist though not particularly striking. I neglected to mention, Mike Zeck draws one of Gruenwald’s scripts for Cap Annual 8, a team-up with Wolverine that had all the ingredients for coolness but is actually incredibly boring, despite Zeck’s contribution. (Possibly because they fight a giant mute robot called Tess-One, which doesn’t make for a very interesting battle. Plus, “Tess-One” is a weirdly effeminate name for a robot, isn’t it?)

Anyway, around the same time that the “Cap No More” epic begins, John Byrne’s son-in-law Keiron Dwyer takes over. It may well be nostalgia talking, but I love Dwyer’s art during the John Walker arc, particularly the way he draws the Cap-vs.-the-Resistants battle in issue 346. Again, nostalgia plays a big part, but the sh*t-eating grin he gives Walker when he really goes nuts during the fight … intense, and awesome.

Issue 346 is also the first appearance of the “mystery villain” who has been orchestrating a lot of events. He’s only shown in shadow, but he’s smoking a cigarette and the “shadowy-ness” that surrounds him is red-tinged, so longtime fans probably knew exactly the intent. As a ten year old, I had no idea, and I also didn’t realize this was the character’s first appearance as the mysterious anonymous head of the Commission. But it is!

Also, Gruenwald has a great sting at the end, when Pyro of Freedom Force berates Walker for totally screwing up the plan to have them get away so they could track them back to their headquarters. Walker replies that he was trying to do his best, and he’s sorry if that wasn’t good enough. Especially since he skipped his parents’ funeral in order to be there.

Intense stuff. Ten-year-old Doot loved it.

Issues 347-350

Only four more issues in this epic, and in the post-decompression era, one might think these would be quick reading as the momentum takes us to the big issue 350. But this is pre-decompression, and in fact each of these issues is a little mini-epic in itself. The Gruenwald/Dwyer team was really in top form by this point.

Issue 347 is the nigh-obligatory “revenge” issue, in which the John Walker Cap really goes off the deep end. We already saw him go nuts and wail on the Resistants, against whom he had no particular grudge (which is why he left them alive, albeit only after beating them violently into submission). But this time he’s after the Right-Winger and Left-Winger, the two augmented former allies of his who revealed his identity on national television, which in turn led directly to the murder of Walker's parents.

Walker (and Gruenwald) is in full-on “Punisher” mode her. It’s just one big slice of “revenge movie” violence, and it’s awesome. Given Gruenwald’s own thoughts about violence, this is no doubt an analogous situation to Alan Moore and Rorschach, where Moore was creating a character he thought readers would find horrifying, but instead they thought he was pretty cool. The John Walker Cap is similar here. Yes, there’s something terrifying about this guy become judge, jury and executioner, and yet it’s still narratively satisfying when he does it. (Spoiler for the ending: He ties them to each other and then burns them alive. Later issues will explicate that Walker’s torture left them alive, but paralyzed with “burns over 90% of their bodies.” Gruesome, Grueny!)

Issue 348 sees the return of the Flag-Smasher, who wants revenge for his defeat at Cap’s hands back in the two-parter from issues 321-322. The Commission sends John Walker to fight him one-on-one, and Flag-Smasher beats him, but not after realizing it’s a different guy. Enraged that the government sent an “imposter,” he demands that the “real” Cap come to face him, or he will murder his hostages. (The Flag-Smasher always takes hostages, don’tcha know.)

In issue 349, the mysterious villain allows Steve Rogers to escape from his holding cell, where he’s been since he surrendered in issue 345. Once he’s free, he’s recruited by Battle Star to head out to Arctic headquarters of the Flag-Smasher, to rescue Johnny Walker. The rescue is a success, though it’s Battlestar who frees Walker while Rogers takes down Flag-Smasher, so Rogers and Walker never meet face to face. (They faced each other back when Walker was the Super-Patriot of course, but they haven’t met since Walker became Cap, and Steve doesn’t actually know at this point that the new Cap is the former Super-Patriot.)

All of which takes us to the big Cap 350 extravaganza, whose cover sees the black-white-and-red Rogers facing off against red-white-and-blue Walker. Awww, man! Unsurprisingly, we learn that the mystery villain is the Red Skull. Perhaps more surprisingly, Grueny reveals that the Skull (resurrected after his seeming “death” in issue 300) is behind a LOT of the stuff that’s been going down. The Skull is not just the anonymous head of the Commission, the one that forced Steve to step down as Cap. Oh, no! The Skull is ALSO the one who tipped off the IRS as to the “million dollar discrepancy” that led directly to Cap’s confrontation with said Commission. The Skull is the one who suggested Walker as the replacement, because he knew Walker was mentally unstable and wanted someone in the role who would do dishonor to the Cap identity.

The Red Skull is ALSO the man who funded ULTIMATUM, the group that Flag-Smasher had working for him. (It was revealed in the previous issue that Flag-Smasher actually disavowed ULTIMATUM and went solo when he learned their financier was a former Nazi.) The Red Skull ALSO founded the Watchdogs, AND is the mastermind who organized the Resistants. So all that stuff about different groups with a similar aesthetic was not Grueny being lazy, it was actually a clue that those groups had the same backer. Clever, Grueny, clever!

We also learn that Grueny has his own “Scourge” working for him. I had thought that Gruenwald was suggesting here that the Skull was the founder/backer of the Scourge concept and the original Scourge from the original “villain massacre” crossover, and also behind the second Scourge who killed the first. However, at a later date, Gruenwald will reveal that the Scourge concept has an entirely different origin, and the Skull’s Scourge is just his own copycat version. It’s a little needlessly muddy. My gut instinct is to say that Gruenwald is going a couple bridges too far here, making the Skull the mastermind behind ALL these different villains. Still, it does allow for a very climactic 350th issue, with all these familiar costumes and identities showing up for the big anniversary spectacular.

Besides, it’s all tangential to the main attraction, in which the Skull manipulates the two Caps into fighting each other. It’s awesome, and ends with Steve Rogers victorious. There is lots of talk about how Cap had doubts about himself going back to the early 320s, with the Flag-Smasher incident hot on the heels of his not being able to defeat the Super-Patriot. And his own self-doubt is what led to him folding before the Commission without a real fight. But now, his time as the Captain has hardened him and made him reaffirm his own dedication to fighting for America … all that good stuff. Gruenwald writes it better than I do. And symbolically of course, this is all driven home by Cap fighting John Walker once again and this time decisively defeating him.

This leads to a confrontation with the Red Skull, whose consciousness now inhabits a clone of Steve Rogers, grown from cell samples taken during the previous Skull storyline 50 issues earlier. I never read that story so I don’t know if DeMatteis actually showed the thing with the cell samples or if it’s a ret-con “inserted between the panels” kind of deal.

At any rate, the Skull is just about to blow his “red skull toxin” at Cap with his cigarette, but a reawakened John Walker hurls his mighty shield at the exact right time, so that instead the red dust poisons the Skull himself. He survives, but his face is mutated into an ACTUAL Red Skull, whereas past iterations had always had Johann “Red Skull” Schmidt as a normal dude in a mask. The bad guy escapes, and his new status quo is set: He’s the literal physical equal of Captain America (not just in terms of fighting prowess, but down to the fingerprints), and he no longer needs a red-skull mask cause his face IS a red skull. Dang, dawg.

Then, Roger and Walker appear jointly before the commission. Walker gives up the costume and shield and name of Captain America and the Commission offers it back to Rogers. Rogers refuses initially, but in a last bit of dramatic irony, Walker convinces Steve to say yes as no one else is worthy, thus bringing Walker full-circle from someone who – as the Super Patriot – arrogantly mocked Steve’s Cap as a behind-the-times fuddy duddy, to a man who humbly respects both the identity and Rogers’ worthiness to hold it.

Awwww … !

Issues 350-353

Ya gotta love those “giant-sized” anniversary issues. So much bang for your buck! In addition to the awesome conclusion to the awesome “The Captain” arc that was loaded with an awesome amount of awesomeness, issue 350 also has a backup story! Written by Mark Gruenwald, illustrated not by Kieron Dwyer, but instead by Dwyer’s grumpy dad-in-law, John Byrne. Grueny and Byrne indulge in something they both love … the ol’ “continuity” fix! In this case, it’s basically a biography of the Red Skull, collating and contextualizing all of the villain’s appearances up to his last in issue 300, then explaining what he was up to between issue 300 and his behind-the-scenes return at the start of the “Cap No More” epic circa 332.

It’s a good bit of cliff notes for me, not being a Cap fan at all and thus unfamiliar with every single story that Gruenwald references here. And it looks great, since it’s illustrated by Byrne. It also brings Arnim Zola into the mythology. He’s a perennial Cap villain of course, but doesn’t really enter the Gruenwald Capverse until this story. But going forward, the Red Skull himself as well as subordinates of the Skull’s like Zola, will be a consistent presence in the series, kind of taking the place of the Serpent Society as the “omnipresent” villain organization of the comic.

It also establishes the Red Skull’s new modus operandi, replacing Nazisim with nihilism, his ultimate goal being the downfall of the United States government, and it’s supplanting by anarchy. (Coincidentally or not, this was also the aim of the newly-rehabilitated Chameleon as re-introduced into the Spider-Man mythos by David Micheline and Todd McFarlane only a few months earlier.)

Issue 351 is an epilogue to the “Cap No More” epic, opening with a press conference held by the U.S. Government and featuring speeches by both the John Walker Cap and the Steve Rogers Cap. (Both are in their Cap uniforms for this conference.) But Gruenwald’s press conferences never go well, and this one is no exception, as Walker’s Cap is assassinated by a Watchdog the moment he takes the podium. Steve gives chase, but the Watchdog is gunned down in turn by the Scourge. Which Scourge? The “real” one, the one who replaced/assassubated the first “real” one back in Cap 320? Or is this the Red Skull’s pet copycat Scourge? Hard to say! Later stories will strongly suggest it’s the “real” one, however.

Issues 352 and 353 are a pair of Gruenwald/Dwyer classics that I call “classics” because I bought them off the rack in March of 1989 after coming into some sweet, sweet birthday money. Gruenwald at this point hadn’t done many “Cold War” type stories, and since the America/Russia stalemate of the 1980s was soon to end, I guess maybe Grueny thought he would sneak a couple in, which is what leads to this two-parter in 352-353 which I loved at the time and which I think still holds up as a snapshot of the era. (And it should be noted that even as a ten year old I had been saturated with “The Russians are America’s arch-enemy!” propaganda, which is why the covers to these Cap issues seemed so cool to me, the idea of the American icon fighting Soviet villains, and why I couldn’t resist buying them off the rack.)

In issue 352, the Soviet Super Soldiers – Vanguard, Darkstar and Ursa Major – arrive at Avengers Island and tell Captain America they want to defect. The fact that these heroes who wear the iconography of their nation have become dissatisfied with their own government – and that their government hasn’t taken to this very kindly – parallels Steve’s own recent situation in the “Cap No More” epic, but that analogy is left implicit, some nice subtlety from Grueny. (Quick recap: Vanguard absorbs energy attacks and then can direct them back at his attacker, Darkstar is master of an ebony energy called the “darkforce,” and Ursa Major turns into a giant super-powered bear.)

Cap is summoned away on an Avengers alert, leaving the three Super Soldiers to hang in some temporary lodgings for a while. There’s a great bit where the three of them are shown watching Reagan give a televised speech, each having decidedly different reactions to his rhetoric. When Cap returns, he tells the three of them that they are going to have a sort of “exhibition” battle with him and his fellow Avengers, so that they can see them using their powers and prove they are indeed the Soviet Super Soldiers. Cap and these Avengers are obviously fakes – obvious to the reader – but not to the Soviets, who don’t know them terribly well.

What follows is, as with issue 346, another brutally violent sequence that blew just-turned-eleven-years-old-Doot’s mind, with the “Avengers” beating the three Soviets nearly to death before a woman called Fantasia drops her “illusion” and reveals the Avengers to be a government-sponsored Russian team .. the Supreme Soviets, tasked with preventing the Soldiers’ defection. Dang, dawg! (After the Soviet Union came apart, this team was renamed the People’s Protectorate, and they showed up in a Peter David issue of Hulk, which I thought was super-awesome when I was 14, cause I was like, “I know who these guys are!”)

The Supreme Soviets vacate and Cap returns from the false alarm (presumably also created by the Supremes). The three Soviet Super Soldiers are not dead, but the next issue reveals that all three of them are now in death-like comas.

In Part Two, Cap flies to the Soviet Union, ostensibly on a mission of diplomacy but actually because he believes that the Soviet government might be responsible for the attack. (Spoilers, he’s right.) Almost as soon as he arrives in Moscow, the city is attacked by a giant bear (hmmm) that is composed entirely of darkforce (hmmm). Cap is unable to do it damage, but it disappears as mysteriously as it appeared. Later, Cap teams up with his Russian counterpart, a man wearing all red and white and who wields a star-adorned red shield, and who is called “Red Guardian.” (Gruenwald informs us this is the third Red Guardian. As I recall from an issue of Hulk, one of the earlier ones was female.) Cap and Guardian fight the black bear during its second appearance, and the black bear absorbs the Guardian into itself, then disappears. During the bear’s third appearance, Cap again fights it, this time allied with the Supreme Soviets: Crimson Dynamo, Fantasia, and … two other ones, whose names I don’t recall. During the fight, the bear is able to absorb energy attacks then redirect them (hmmmm). Eventually the bear absorbs all the other Soviets into itself. Before it can disappear, Cap forces himself into the essence of the bear as well. There, he meets the animating intelligences behind the bear: Of course, Vanguard, Darkstar and Ursa Major, in some kind of spirit form. They want revenge against the Supremes for the attack at Avengers Island in the previous issue. Captain America talks them out of the cold-blooded murder of the Supremes, and they agree. The Supremes are freed and the bear disappears.

When Cap returns to the island, all three Super Soldiers have made a miraculous recovery. Cap learns they experienced the entire “Giant black bear” incident as a shared dream that they later awoke from. Despite the fact that he doesn’t understand how all this mystical stuff went down, he’s satisfied that at least no lives were lost, and indeed some lives were miraculously saved, and that’s enough for him to declare it a happy ending.

Love it!!!! Such a nifty li’l two-parter. Cheers to the Gruenwald/Dwyer team!

Issue 354

David Fiore once suggested to me that Mark Gruenwald is as subversive in his way as writers like Alan Moore or Grant Morrison. (David if you’re reading this and I am mischaracterizing your point of view, please correct me.) Certainly I have heard people suggest that “Squadron Supreme” was Watchmen before Watchmen was Watchmen.

To the extent that this might be true, I think the difference is that Gruenwald doesn’t really have any pretensions of being “literary” in his comic-book writing. When Moore and Miller and Morrison were getting deep and dark, Gruenwald was writing stuff that feels more of a piece with old corny pulp adventures, or Silver Age DC and Marvel – source material that was also subversive in its own way, but none of it is material that will ever be considered literature-with-a-capital-L. (Granted, there are still people who scoff at the idea of Watchmen or Maus being considered in any way literary, but … there is still a marked difference in literary merit, I’d say, between V for Vendetta and, say, Gruenwald’s “Quasar.”) Still, every so often I’ll see something in a Gruenwald comic that almost seems like a predictor of a Moore idea. Squadron Supreme predated Watchmen after all … and! Four years before Alan Moore created “USA, the Ultimate Secret Agent,” for his 1960s Marvel pastiche “1963,” Gruenwald gave us … The U.S. Agent!

And it all happened in Cap 354. I remember very distinctly the day I came into the store with birthday money in hand and bought issues 352-354 all in one pop. The 352/353 two-parter appealed to me because of the “Soviet” stuff on the covers. Issue 354 was appealing because it showed a guy in the black “Captain” costume, abandoned by Steve Rogers at the end of issue 350.

If issue 351 was the epilogue to the “Cap No More” saga, then this issue is the epilogue to the epilogue. Battlestar has been investigating Walker’s assassination as he thinks there is something suspicious about it. Meanwhile, Val Cooper has been promoted to being the new acting head of the Commission, after the previous acting head was revealed to be in the Red Skull’s pocket, and also killed by the Red Skull (not necessarily in that order). In this issue, Battlestar tells Val that he believes Walker to still be alive, that the assassination was faked, but Cooper is dubious. But Cooper will soon learn that she should listen the next time someone mansplains the truth to her, for in the very next scene she is called in – along with the rest of the commission – to witness the training exercise of the U.S. government’s new operative: The U.S. Agent.

Clad in the black-white-and-red costume that Rogers discarded, the Agent battles a guy in some armor, while the Agent’s patron, General Hayworth, explains to the commission that he deceived them all by faking the assassination of John Walker. The Watchdog was not really a Watchdog, although he was – unfortunately – a casualty, murdered seconds later by the very real bullets of the very real Scourge.

The assassination allowed them to protect Walker’s secret identity by re-establishing it anew. After the fake murder, Walker was re-trained in a completely different fighting style, and also given speech therapy so that he no longer even speaks the same way. I always thought it was a great example of Gruenwald’s love of classic comic-book corniness, that he had Rogers and Walker switch costumes, like little kids trading identities when playing pretend. Certainly as an eleven year old, I dug it. I also dug that John Walker was alive, and wearing the badass black version of the suit, as he was the first Captain America I met, when I first read issue 346. The whole concept and execution made me very happy.

Meanwhile, this issue employs a bit of narrative visual novelty, wherein each page is split between a top and bottom half. The top half follows an adventure of Captain America, while the bottom half tells the Battlestar/USAgent tale just now described. (It’s noteworthy as well that Battlestar quit working for the government after Walker’s apparent death, so he wasn’t invited to the meeting that Cooper and the others did. When this issue ends, the readers know that Battlestar’s conspiracy theory has been vindicated, but Battlestar himself does not.)

As for the top tier of the comic, I never found the Captain America side as compelling. He fights a giant robot called The Sleeper (I liked that name, because it made me think of Wild Cards), and the Sleeper ends up being a servant of the Machinesmith, an old Cap villain, and another one who – like the Red Skull – had been presumed dead. The Machinesmith isn’t terribly interesting to me: I don’t like his visual and his power isn’t particularly exciting to me either, at least not as typically presented. So the top half is a bit of a “meh” for me. As a kid I confess I was also *slightly* disappointed by the blurb at the end of the issue that suggested the USAgent’s next appearance would be in West Coast Avengers, presumably to join the team. That is indeed what happened, but the West Coast Avengers was a comic that eleven year old me was never going to pick up, so I kind of reluctantly waved goodbye to this character I thought was so cool, after reading this issue.

(Forty-one-year-old me ALSO has no interest in reading West Coast Avengers, but for different reasons. Back then, I just thought the title was lame. Now, it’s because I know it’s a comic with dialogue by John Byrne. [SHUDDER])

Thus ends the adventures of eleven-year-old Doot and Gruenwald Cap. Going forward, it’s all material that I didn’t read until I was a mature, comic-book reading adult.

Issues 355-364

As a kid, I had really dug issues 352-354 when I bought them off the rack, so there was actually a chance I might pick up 355 when it came out. Then it came out, and … that cover …

As fodder for the theory that Gruenwald had a great love for Silver Age DC, this cover could be used as Exhibit A, no doubt, no doubt.

To a young comics fan looking for awesomeness, this cover was quite the turn off. No wonder so many of us 80s kids turned to vandalism, hard drugs and Liefeld.

So, Cap is magically transformed into a teenager by Cerci so he can investigate the disappearance of teenage runaways into an evil HATE CULT! The cult, it turns out, is run by yet another stray Red Skull underling a la Arnim Zola … this time, it’s the fiendish “Mother Night.” A cool name but she doesn’t make for a very compelling villain in this story. The story is so thin that it doesn’t quite manage to fill three entire issues. It concludes halfway through issue 357, in fairly low-key fashion, and the second half of the issue is billed as Part 1 of “The Blood Stone Hunt,” a story that will run for six parts total. But actually this format in which Gruenwald tells two stories in every issue will last far beyond issue 357. In fact, I’m up to issue 397 in my reading, and he’s still doing it. Generally speaking, the lead feature runs 17 to 18 pages, with the backup running either four or five, in order to keep the total page count at 22. I actually like that idea. Gruenwald obviously did too. He said at one point that he believed he was still putting 22 pages worth of story into the lead feature, but the reduced page count forced him to be more economical and “trim the fat” from his own writing.

Certainly the Bloodstone Hunt’s next five parts rip along fairly quickly. It’s a very pulpy, swashbuckly, “Indiana Jones” type deal, in which Cap and Diamondback (on a leave of absence from the Serpent Society) and John Jameson (Jonah’s son, formerly the “Man-Wolf,” now Cap’s pilot) go globe-trotting, trying to assemble the five pieces of the “blood stone,” a macguffin tied to Ulysses S. Bloodstone (Marvel’s answer to Vandal Savage). Racing them is Baron Zemo, the son of Baron Zemo, who wants to use the stone to reanimate the corpse of his dead father. Zemo’s team is made-up of Cap foes like Batroc and Machete, and … another guy. Not an interesting trio to me (well, besides Batroc ze leapaire, who’s always great), but they were actually some of the last villains Cap fought just before Gruenwald began his tenure on the series.

At some point, a third party also makes himself known. A big bruiser guy, an original Gruenwald creation called Crossbones. Boy, Gruenwald ends up really liking THIS guy. The gag of course is that it turns out he’s the numer uno henchman of the Red Skull. (“Skull and Crossbones,” you see.) He also has some mysterious connection to Diamondback, presumably from before either of them were costumed characters. But yeah, Gruenwald loves him. Crossbones shows up in SO many Cap issues going forward. I mean, he’s an all right character, but I don’t think he’s as cool as Gruenwald thinks he is, frankly.

Anyway, Gruenwald says that his “17-page issue” format forced him to trim the fat, but really the whole Bloodstone thing feels kind of rushed, and Gruenwald leaves it with so many loose ends that he has to devote two EXTRA issues to fully flesh out the “Crossbones/Diamondback” part of the arc. He doesn’t actually explicate their secret shared past, but there’s a whole deal with Crossbones kidnapping Diamondback to Madripoor and Cap having to rescue her, etc. etc. It’s perfectly enjoyable actually, but the fact that this whole thing lasted eight issues even though it was billed as a six-parter kind of puts the lie to the idea that the storytelling has gotten more economical.

As for the five-page back-up features that appear concurrent with the “Blood Stone” saga, it’s a pretty neat one that seems Gruenwald gathering together a bunch of his stray creations in a single story: Curtiss Jackson, whom Gruenwald has redubbed the “Power Broker” is there, as is Priscilla “Vagabond” Lyons, as is Scourge (the “real” one), as is the U.S. Agent. Hooray!

As to what happens … well, Priscilla Lyons goes to the Power Breaker so she can take part in the augment process, but while she’s there, they are both attacked by Scourge. U.S. Agent arrives to protect the Broker from Scourge (the government still having a vested interest in keeping Jackson alive and healthy). While US Agent and Scourge fight, the Broker and Priscilla are trapped in his facility with no way out if the Agent should fail. So Jackson exposes himself to his own process, but it goes badly, and he ends up with giant muscles that are so inflated he is effectively paralyzed.

As for Scourge, U.S. Agent captures him, but before he can do anything, this Scourge is killed by his successor, to the familiar “Justice is served!” refrain.

So at this point, putting aside the Red Skull’s fake Scourge, there are now three “real” Scourges:

The original, captured by Captain America in 320 and killed by …

The second one, who went on to kill the phony Watchdog from the staged Walker assassination, and now ironically captured by Walker, before being killed by …

The third one, now at large.

One can certainly see why people found this plotline somewhat unnecessarily protracted. (Which, to be fair, I am only assuming people did. Maybe I’m wrong and readers thought this whole Scourge-cycle was awesome.)

For the “Kidnapped to Madripoor” sequence with Cap/Crossbones/Diamondback which lasted for two issues (363 and 364), Gruenwald does a “Vagabond” story, set just she was rescued from the Power Broker incident. She is taken by Jackson’s right hand man, Dr. Karl Malus, who wants to take over the entire “Broker” operation now that Curtiss Jackson is paralyzed and stuck in a hospital bed. He wants Vagabond to visit Jackson in the hospital with a macguffin that will get his fingerprints, which Malus will use to create a glove that will grant him access to the Broker’s fingerprint-activated safes and such.

Though Priscilla is fairly green to the superhero game, with no powers and just a bit of training from D-Man before those two went their separate ways, she quite cleverly gets the better of Malus, defeating him and chaining him to a toilet in a public restroom. She then phones the Agent so he can pick Malus up. Very tidy. Nicely done, Priscillla.

I liked this whole sequence, as I’m a fan of U.S. Agent, Vagabond, AND the Scourge concept, so seeing them all combined into one story was rather neat. Gruenwald apparently agreed, as he would later do a sequel to this story, a four-part “U.S. Agent” solo miniseries which would also feature Priscilla, AND would finally resolve the entire Scourge mystery definitively.

But that’s still a ways off.

Issues 365-382

With issues 365-367, we have entered the Avengers crossover “Acts of Vengeance,” with its Illuminati Villain Conglomerate: Loki (in disguise), Kingpin, Wizard, Red Skull, Magneto, Dr. Doom, the Mandarin … maybe one or two others?

With Red Skull being in there, and with Cap being an Avengers, he ties pretty heavily into this crossover. I liked almost all of the ancillary Acts of Vengeance comics I’ve read … most of the stuff I followed was not really tied strongly into it, so it just featured characters fighting new villains. Hulk fought Grey Gargoyle, Wolverine fought Tiger Shark and the Mandarin, Spidey fought … well, the Hulk, which doesn’t seem to fit the theme, actually.

I seem to recall Byrne saying that his original idea was just that it would be several months of superheros fighting villains normally associated with other superheroes, and he didn’t like that instead other cooks in the kitchen evolved it into the “villain conglomerate” idea that Byrne wasn’t keen on. Is that right? Maybe I’m wrong.

Whatever the case, the ancillary comics stuck with the theme. (I’ve not yet read Daredevil’s infamous beating of Ultron by hitting him with a stick, but I do own the issue and look forward to it greatly.) But Cap doesn’t really fight unusual villains. In 365, he fights Sub-Mariner, in 366 he fights some dude called the Controller (whom I don’t know, but Cap seems to), and issue 367 features the Red Skull. So, whatevs.

The other bummer is that 365 is Kieron Dwyer’s last issue, and he’s replaced by Ron Lim, and artist I generally don’t like. He has his moments, I suppose, but more often than not I find his visuals incredibly unappealing.

That said, I do have a soft spot for issue 367, in which Magneto has learned that his fellow conspirator is the ORIGINAL Red Skull the Nazi. Cause boy, Magneto don’t like Nazis, lemme tell ya. The whole sequence of him hunting down the Red Skull is pretty great. Pret-tay, pret-tay great. Meanwhile, the three-part backup tale over the course of 365-367 takes us back to the Serpent Society. The Cobra at some point became the new leader of the Serpents. I’m not sure when exactly … I think they were involved somehow with Atlantis Attacks? (Diamondback and Dazzler switched bodies in an X-Men “Atlantis” crossover annual that was not written by Chris Claremont and therefore sucked.)

What was I saying? Oh, so the Cobra has a paralyzing fear of his former partner, Mr. Hyde, and it affects every aspect of his life, including his leadership of the Serpent Society, which has been tested and found wanting, not standing up to that of the retired Sidewinder. So Cobra goes out and hunts down Mr. Hyde, and defeats him. Yay! His confidence takes an upswing, and assembles the serpents to tell them he is now “King Cobra,” and the Serpent Society is about to go back to being awesome. They’re going to kick some A.S.S.! (Awesome Serpent Society, get it?)

For me, the series at this point starts to lack the focus and direction it had during the “Cap No More” saga. After the debut of U.S. Agent in 354, things just seem kind of unfocused, although at least for a while I was still enjoying Dwyer’s work. But now … I don’t know, things are starting to feel a bit tired. And I have to admit, I am getting sick of the Serpent Society.

Issues 368-370 continue threads from the Acts of Vengeance stuff. Cap knows that Magneto did something to the Skull, so he’s trying to find Magneto. Diamondback has kind of evolved into being his new sidekick, and the attraction has definitely evolved to a two-way street in the wake of the Blood Stone Hunt. Meanwhile, the Red Skull’s henchmen are also searching for the Skull. At this point, the Skull has an entire “Skeleton Crew” working for him (Gruenwald’s nomenclature, not mine.) They are: Zola, Crossbones, Mother Night, and Machinesmith. (Issue 368’s backup feature is an origin recap of Machinesmith for folks like me.)

Magneto by this time has moved on to other, better, Claremont-penned stories, but the Skeleton Crew DOES eventually find the Red Skull. Cap, meanwhile, has been kind of in denial as to whether the guy he fought back in issue 350 truly is the original guy in a new body, or just a clever imposter. But eventually he is convinced. (Issue 369’s backup story is a kind of neat little psychodrama about the Skull, trapped in the room Magneto left him in, fighting the phantoms in his own mind.)

Issue 371 is a “downtime” issue in which nothing happens except … wait for it … Steve Rogers and Rachel “Diamondback” Leighton on a date. Ain’t that sweet? The backup feature is called a “Diamondback” feature, but it is similarly lacking in incident, basically the story of Rachel unwinding minutes after the date came to an end.

Issues 372-378 are a SEVEN-part story. Seven parts, which again kind of gives the lie to the idea that the shorter page count were creating economy on Gruenwald’s part.

This one definitely feels a bit dated: Seven parts dedicated to a “say no to drugs” message that seems awfully square. But I guess it was pretty in vogue in the 80s. (This was published in 1990, but hey.) The high concept for the story is that Cap accidentally ingests a new illegal drug, the chemical composition of which interacts with the “super soldier serum” in his system, so that it never “wears off,” leaving Cap perpetually mood-altered, possibly … forever! Dun dun dun

The most striking aspect of the story, to me, is that it’s a Daredevil story without Daredevil in it. Ann Nocenti was writing Daredevil at this point (though she was soon to leave the series), and I know she and Gruenwald got along marvelously. (Well, by all accounts, Gruenwald got along marvelously with everybody.) So perhaps the two writers thought it would be fun to “cross over.” At any rate, I lied, Daredevil DOES appear, but in only two middle parts of this seven-part drug-saturated saga. However, while DD’s presence is minimal, the story also features Black Widow, Typhoid Mary, Bullseye, AND Kingpin in prominent roles. There’s a whole thing with Red Skull trying to set himself up as one of the big druglords of NYC, so he ends up horning in on Kingpin territory. There ends up being a big fight between Kingpin and Red Skull, which Kingpin actually wins, which is kind of cool. Along the way, the two black-and-white clad enforcers clash (Crossbones and Bullseye, I mean.) Daredevil fights drug-addled Cap, and Black Widow fights Diamondback.

It’s okay. The inclusion of a bunch of Daredevil supporting characters elevates it, but as a story on its own, it kind of highlights the fact that Cap’s enemies are a bit lamer. Bullseye is way cooler than Crossbones, and Kingpin is way cooler than Red Skull … at least Vincent Donofrio is way cooler than that guy who was in the First Avenger.

The seven-part backup feature that runs parallel is more interesting, story-wise, although visually it’s ugly as sin. (It’s by Bagley and Panosian, which in 1990 was a guaranteed eyesore of a combo.) Battlestar has finally tracked down the living John Walker, at West coast Avengers headquarters, but when he confronts him, Walker denies knowing him, and says his name is “Jack Daniels.” (What a silly cover-identity.)

Later, Battlestar is kidnapped by agents of the Power Broker. The Broker, now in an exoskeleton that lets him move despite his engorged muscles, has been having people kidnap all his augments, to test out some de-augmentation technology on them. So that he can de-augment himself, you see, and get his muscles back to normal. He manages to de-augment LeMar, but U.S.Agent shows up to the rescue. U.S.A. forces the Broker to give LeMar his power back, and then wrecks the machinery, stranding the Broker in his deformed state. Harsh. I love John Walker.

Walker tells Battlestar he was following him ever since their confrontation at the West Coast compound, and that he was lying to protect his cover identity, and OF COURSE he remembers LeMar, they were friends and partners. It’s pretty sweet. I dig the Johnny/LeMar friendship.

Issue 379 is total filler, a team-up to showcase Gruenwald’s pet character Quasar. The back-up tale takes us back to Ye Merry Old Marching Serpent Society, with Diamondback (who is still on leave) being kidnapped back to S.S. headquarters to stand trial for Serpent Treason.

Issues 380-382 are a three-parter in which King Cobra and the Serpents try Diamondback for betraying the Society by entering into a romantic relationship with their arch-enemy, Captain America. She is rescued from execution by Sidewinder, who wants to repay the debt he owes her for when she stuck by his side during the Viper mutiny of 30-some issues ago. Diamondback hires Paladin, the soldier-for-hire, to help her re-infiltrate the society so she can rescue her two friends who stuck by her during the trial, Asp and Black Mamba, as she believes they are now in danger. (They’re the ones who asked Sidewinder to rescue her.) She’s right, they are, but she, Paladin and … of course … Cap manage to rescue them AND take down the Society. FINALLY the Serpent Society has been defeated. They’re goin’ to the bighouse, and without Sidewinder, they won’t be able to teleport out.

Good call on Gruenwald’s part to finally end that arc, although a few serpents who alluded capture will still hang around, as will the relatively “good” serpents, Black Mamba, Asp and Diamondback.

The backup arc during the serpent three-parter is a retelling of John Walker’s origin. Nothing new to anyone who’s been following Gruenwald’s entire run, but as a primer for newbies I guess it’s a cool way to get people caught up on the U.S. Agent … who he IS and how he came to BE, all that stuff. Also, it’s sort of nice to see Walker’s journey synopsized, as it did play out over a very long period, with Walker having THREE costumed identities during the saga, from Super-Patriot to Captain America and finally to U.S. Agent (and he kind of had a completely different personality in each incarnation). To Gruenwald’s credit, I think he really pulled off the John Walker arc well, creating a credible persona with a lot of dimensionality to it. I think you could argue that Walker constitutes Gruenwald’s most successful original character creation during the Cap run.

The Serpent Society were awesome villains. That's all I had to say.

They should have been named Snake Force.

I just looked at this storyline and I agree with Doot. I think that the art didn't always support Gruenwald's stories until Dwyer got really good. By the way, I drew sample pages of The Captain in action at this time.

Issue 383

This is the big 50-year anniversary issue published in January of 1991. As such, it is TRIPLE-SIZED!

The main story is a self-contained one-shot and it is not great. Captain America has an adventure that may not have happened (but then again MIGHT’VE!), where he goes to some imaginary realm and meets fellow “personification of the spirit of America” types: Paul Bunyan, John Henry, Johnny Appleseed, Uncle Sam, etc. There’s not much of a theme to it, other than to say that Captain America is also such a personification, destined to eventually be part of that pantheon. But for now, he’s still fighting the good fight! I can’t say that premise particularly thrills me, but I’m sure decent execution could have made it work, but this is all feels fairly workman-like.

There are three backups, one written by Fabian Nicieza so it is RIGHT OUT.

Another one shows the first meeting of the Red Skull and his number 1 henchguy, Crossbones. It involves the dude-who-would-become-Crossbones invading the Skull’s castle on behalf of some organization or other, as part of a larger team. The other team members are all repelled easily by the defenses of the Skull and Arnim Zola, mainly a giant dough-creature called “Doughboy.” A Gruenwald creation? It immediately puts me in mind of the Wild Cards character of that name, who is a wonderful character and part of some great scenes and stories. The Gruenwald Doughboy is less interesting, but … not totally UN-interesting, I guess.

At any rate, the man who would be Bones is almost killed along with his team, but he puts up such an amazing fight that the Skull spares him, and then makes him his new right-hand man.

Decent enough story, I guess.

Finally there’s a solo feature for my favorite character, USAgent. It’s not the greatest USA outing from Gruenwald, but it’s all right. It ties off the thread of the Left and Right-Wingers, both of whom were badly injured by USAgent in a fit of vengeful violence back in issue 347. In this issue, Walker learns that both of them committed suicide as they could no longer stand the constant pain of living in the state that Walker left them in. Torn up by guilt, Walker contemplates taking his own life to atone, but ultimately decides the best way to atone is to go on living, and being the best he can be. Decent enough.

All in all, though, as anniversary issues go, this one is as weak as they all tended to be back then (“back then” being the early nineties). I remember loving the 30th-anniversary Hulk one, but that was by PAD and Keown, so. Of course it was going to be great. But most of these special issues were awful. The Amazing Spider-Man one was abysmal, as I recall.

Onward!

384 –386

I forgot to mention that back during the “Cap No More” epic, one of the major things that happened during those eventful final four issues was that Dennis “D-Man” Dunphy sidekicked with the Captain when they invaded the Flag-Smasher’s arctic abode, and he was KILLED!!!! (seemingly)
Issue 384 sees Cap heading to the Arctic to investigate reports of an “ice man” that he is hoping is D-Man in a block of ice, having survived his ordeal in the same way Cap did. After all, D-Man is augmented, so he may well be able to go into suspended animation upon plunging into icy waters, rather than dying. There is precedent!

Alas, when he gets there, it is not D-Man, but is instead Jack Frost, who is one of them Invader types, if I’m not mistaken?

One of my earliest exposures to the Marvel Universe proper was an issue of the original OHOTMU (thank ye, Mr. Gruenwald), specifically one that covered the latter part of the H’s, all of the I’s, and just a few of the J’s. That tiny type was way too small for me to actually read when I was six or seven or however old, but I would page through that thing over and over, fascinated by all the disparate characters, and the weird juxtapositions that occurred when you place them alphabetically. (“Impossible Man. Impossible Woman. In-Betweener.”)

Anyway, the Invaders were on there, and I thought for years that they were all actual Golden Age characters. But turns out almost none of them are! But Jack Frost was one of then, right? Or do I just remember Jack Frost from his solo entry, which also would have been in H through J. (Amongst the funny juxtapositions is that Iceman was only a few pages away from Jack Frost in that classic Marvel mag.)

Whatever the case … Cap teams up with Jack Frost against an “Ice Worm,” then he leaves. The final shot depicts a totally separate part of the Arctic wear a certain bald guy with a “D” on his chest is, indeed, encased in ice. Dun dun dun

After that, 385 and 386 comprise a tidy two-parter that tests the new resolve that the U.S.Agent found in the big anniversary issue, wherein he vowed to not be motivated by vengeance any longer. His vow is put to THE ULTIMATE TEST when he teams up with Captain America against another local chapter of the Watchdogs, the very group that murdered Walker’s parents. Does Walker succeed? He does! Another subtle bit of subversion on Gruenwald’s part, undercutting the “cool” factor of vengeance-porn characters like the Punisher, who never are able to move on from that insatiable quest for revenge that is their entire raison d’etre. Back in the 340s, Gruenwald basically turned Walker entirely into the “Punisher” archetype, but not for its own sake; instead to first to comment upon it, then eventually to evolve from it. Quite canny, Mr. G.

The backup tale in issues 385 and 386 are about Diamondback, Black Mamba and the Asp, the “good girls” of the now disbanded Serpent Society. In this story, they decide to become a team, named after their initials “B.A.D.” Bad Girls, Inc. Oh, Grueny! Alas, the trio won’t have a very long career before one of their founders ends up quitting. (Spoilers, it’s Diamondback.)

387 – 397

Up next, a six-parter entitled the “Superia Strategem” in issues 387-392

This might be where Gruenwald starts getting a little carried away. With his whole idea of putting all the snake-villains into one giant conglomerate now played out to its conclusion, Grueny creates a much larger conglomerate … female villains!

Obviously a much, much broader category (har!), so while the Society was only 20 or so, this Superia collection of ladies numbers closer to fifty. Yowzers. The leaders of this group is the eponymous villainess Superia, and she’s recruited badgals from every hero’s rogue’s gallery (including Black Mamba, Asp and Diamondback, which is how Cap ends up being involved). I was surprised to see a member of Claremont’s Marauders show up, and not necessarily pleasantly, as I consider the Marauders to be a collection of awesome villains, none of whom deserves to vanish into a giant wash of fifty other characters.

That’s one of the flaws in this concept, I think, is that the story is so overloaded with characters, that very few of the individual villainesses stands out as being particularly interesting or cool. It doesn’t help that the regular artist on the title at this point is a very non-descript and workmanlike artist by the name of Richard Levins (not a name I’m familiar with).

While it’s a mildly fun game of “spot your favorite villainess” (kind of cool to see the visually cool Cockrum creation Dragonfly in the mix), the overall effect of so many costumed characters on panel is numbing.

And as far as the general thrust of the continuing Grueny cap saga is concerned, the only particular developments of note involve Ms. Diamondback. To wit, one of the other members of Superia’s supergroup is Snapdragon, who has some untold history with Rachel (possibly also connected to the still untold history between Rachel and Crossbones). Whatever the history is, it didn’t end well, so Snapdragon attempts to murder Rachel and nearly succeeds. So at the end of the story, Rachel gives up the identity of Diamondback, quits the only just-formed “Bad Girls Inc.”, and becomes a secretary for the Avengers.

Meanwhile, the parallel backup story involves the Red Skull and his “Skeleton Crew” coming into conflict with a group of German superheroes, Blitzkrieg, Zeitgeist and Captain Germany (i.e., “Hauptmann Deutschland”). Presumably all three are Gruenwald creations. The Skeleton Crew eventually escape, which feeds into the main storyline that runs through issues 393-397, wherein Captains America and Germany team up to search for the escaped Red Skull. They eventually find a fake Red Skull, seemingly killed at the hands of Scourge. But of course this is a fakeout, and this is the work of the Red Skull’s pocket-Scourge, not the real one. Mercifully for the sake of narrative clarity, the Skull kills his phony Scourge during this arc, which leaves only the cycle of “real” ones to worry about in upcoming issues.

Anyway, Captain America is not convinced that the Skull is really dead, but neither is he nor his patriotic German equivalent able to find him. Bummer. Somewhere in there, though, Cap gets to fight Doughboy, first introduced (to me, at least) in the 50th anniversary issue.

Meanwhile, there is some decent soap opera when Gruenwald writes Bernie Rosenthal back into the series. She was last seen studying law in UW Madison (there’s a good lad), and now she is back, with her law degree, and she’s got a job at a firm based in NYC, the same place the Avengers (and therefore Cap) are! Alas, Rachel is now hanging at Avengers mansion all the time, so whenever Bernie stops by Avengers HQ to visit, it’s … awkwaaaaard.

As for the backup tales around this time, they involve Black Mamba and Asp, the only members of Bad Girls Inc, which is now a duo, I guess. They’re on the run from some of the escaped members of Superia’s crew, including Anaconda, a female serpent who was both part of the Superia collective AND an original member of the Serpent Society, so she’s got a ton of history with the Bad Girls. Trouble! But ultimately the Bad Girls decide that they’re not going to run from the Superia cult … instead, they’re going to go on the offensive, specifically because they want to find and capture Snapdragon, the lady who so badly traumatized their pal Rachel. Thus is their mission set!

Also, the Red Skull fires Crossbones and allies himself with the Viper. Status quos are shifting, and presumably a lot of these threads are going to come crashing together in the big issue 400, but Marvel rather stupidly decided to end this last Epic Collection on issue 397. How utterly dumb, and who knows how long it’s going to be before the next one comes out. Alas. Maybe for Christmas I’ll buy myself the floppies for the final 50 issues of Gruenwald’s run. But until then, I must stop for a bit.

But wait! I already DID buy some floppies!

Specifically I bought Gruenwald’s four issue U.S.Agent miniseries from 1993. So …

US AGENT 1-4

Chronologically speaking, I am probably reading this a BIT too early, as the series came out congruently with roughly Cap # 410 or thereabouts I think. But, reading it now, it actually worked fine.

Marvel wasn’t really at their best in 1993, so I was a tad concerned this would be a disappointing outing for my man John Walker, but I ended up loving this. It is essentially a sequel to the backup story that ran in Cap issues 358-364, with the USAgent rescuing Priscilla “Vagabond” Lyons from the Scourge. While the US Agent has been very busy since that story, both Vagabond and Scourge were in limbo after that. Gruenwald uses this series to give some closure to both Vagabond and the Scourge concept, and also does some more great character work with John Walker.

It’s pretty awesome. It also gives us a more comprehensive and linear “origin” story for Priscilla, who initially appeared kind of out of nowhere as Nomad’s girlfriend with a drug-dealing brother. That loser brother guy was another loose ends, tied off in this series.

The twist here is that Ms. Lyons has been recruited by the organization churning out Scourges, so she actually becomes the newest in the line of Scourges, but she washes out of the program when she is unable to bring herself to kill the Matador in cold blood. (I loved that cameo as well, as I really dig Silver Age Daredevil.)

Washouts of the Scourge program aren’t allowed to live, so now a Scourge is after her, so she asks the US Agent for protection, which he is willing to give. Over the course of the story, he dismantles the entire Scourge program, taking down Domino, the Scourge “sidekick” who had been a part of the original storyline way back in Cap 319 and 320, AND bringing to justice the mysterious founder of the whole organization. Who is this mystery fellow? He’s the original Angel from the Timely comics of the 1940s! Dun dun dun. I confess that didn’t mean much to me, BUT … I do like the idea of making it an old man who starred in actual old WWII era Marvel comics. (The character actually has a brief cameo in the first issue of Alex Ross’s MARVELS, the one set during the 40s.)

More online research revealed to me that Gruenwald didn’t stop here with his wacky continuity involving the 1940s Angel. About a year later, Peter David would introduce a character in Hulk called “Angel” (common name in the MU apparently). I think PAD’s intention was that the guy was actually an Earthbound angel, but I guess Gruenwald would eventually bring PAD’s character into Cap and reveal him to be the son of the 1940s guy. Man, ya gotta love MU continuity, don’tcha?

But I digress. Point is, this series was awesome. I’m glad I was able to find it in the discount bins during my last comic-store trip, as it was well worth the three bucks I dropped on it.

Grueny, you da man!

Doughboy is a Kirby creation. He debuted in Cap #209 with Armin Zola.

My reading of Mark Gruenwald's work was mostly confined to the original OHOTMU, and to the Hawkeye mini. OHOTMU came out not long after I really started getting interested in superhero comics. Since I had little pocket money, I couldn't afford much except OHOTMU while it came out. Which put me in the odd position of knowing all this stuff about stories that I had with rare exceptions never actually read! That sort of foreshadowed my eventual choice of profession.

Later I read "West Coast Avengers" regularly for a time, and caught every month's "Mark's Remarks" editorial column there. He always seemed like such a nice guy. I've read that during the troubled times at Marvel in the 1990s he was the one person who had the respect of all of the factions at the company. When he died suddenly it was a great blow to everybody. There's speculation that the stress of trying to be a peacemaker at that time may have been a contributing factor in his death.

Oooo, dat's cool.

That's from the later run, in the 70s? That Kirby wrote and drew?

I feel like that run gets a bad rap, but it sounds like a lot of awesome stuff came out of it.