Captain America: Still Fighting Nazis, Decades Later
One year before the attack on Pearl Harbor launched the United States into World War II, a pair of comic book guys mobilized their own metaphorical strike against Nazi Germany. Their weapon of choice? Captain America.
“A lot of people don’t realize that Hitler came first,” co-creator Joe Simon said in a 2011 interview for the New York Daily News. “Captain America was designed to be the perfect foil for the Führer.”
The image on the cover of Captain America #1 features the star-spangled sentinel punching out Adolf Hitler, and it immediately resonated with many in the United States.
An antidote for powerlessness
For Simon and his partner Jack Kirby, who were both Jewish, there was a pervasive feeling of powerlessness reading dispatches in the New York newspapers about the persecution of Jews in Germany. US neutrality in the war up to that point was also a source of frustration.
There was already a patriot-themed superhero splashing red, white and blue on the comic spinner racks: MLJ’s The Shield, who debuted late the previous year. But in Hitler, Simon and Kirby found a real-life villain more insidious than anything their peers dreamed up for the panels of their books. They needed a hero who could provide them catharsis they weren’t getting in the real world.
Captain America #1 reportedly sold one million copies, a major success in the industry, after its release in December 1940. And the character is still punching out evil-doers nearly 80 years later, with his latest comic book series penned by noted author Ta-Nehisi Coates arriving in time for the Fourth of July.
No small feat
It took no small act of heroism for Timely Comics, the precursor to Marvel, just to publish. Timely publisher Martin Goodman was Jewish, but he sold comics to kids who for the most part weren’t, across a country where the popular opinion was to keep American troops on this side of both the Atlantic and Pacific.
“Don’t forget, many Americans didn’t want the US to enter the war,” said long-time Spider-Man editor and veteran comic writer Danny Fingeroth. “To have taken a stand for entering it would have risked alienating much of the audience.
“Also, many of the publishers had histories of publishing porn, although the material would now be considered pretty tame. [New York Mayor Fiorello] LaGuardia had clamped down on it. That’s part of why they switched to comics. They didn’t now want or need the extra attention getting political would bring them.
“That’s why it was such a big deal to have Captain America punching Hitler.”
And such a big deal for another comic-book declaration of war that came a few months earlier — a two-page Superman story from writer Jerry Siegel and artist Joe Shuster in a February 1940 issue of Look magazine in which the Man of Steel took out Hitler and Stalin. By then Detective Comics’s Superman had already soared to the top of the industry in a single bound; his political stand was noticed.
“I do know that Siegel and Shuster were living in a very predominantly Jewish section of Cleveland and they were very emphatically obsessed with the idea of social justice,” said Arie Kaplan, author of From Krakow to Krypton: Jews and Comic Cooks. “That sense of social justice was a very big part of the early history of Superman.”
Fomenting anti-Nazi fervor
Many Jews in the United States were alarmed by the lack of contact with family members overseas, Kaplan said, which further galvanized those in the comic book industry. Future Mad magazine artist Al Jaffee, for example, learned after the war that his estranged mother and brother likely died in the Holocaust.
Captain America’s right cross could especially be seen as a punch in the nose of the Nazi-sympathizing German American Bund, then a year removed from filling Madison Square Garden for a 22,000-person strong rally — just seven blocks up Eighth Avenue from Timely’s offices.
“It had an immediate impact,” comic historian Michael Uslan said of the release of Captain America #1. “There were written and phoned-in death threats from the German Bund. There was protesting in front of Timely offices.
“Joe Simon and Jack Kirby were seriously afraid someone would be standing outside waiting for them with a Luger under their coat.”
The character’s anti-Nazi fervor became such a part of his legend over the decades that a wave of social media outrage recently ensued when Marvel introduced a storyline in which Captain America was unmasked as a fascist Hydra agent. (It all turned out to be a cosmic brainwashing by the Red Skull, a condition from which the hero has since recovered.)
Rallying the home front
In 1941, after the United States entered the war, the distinctions between the good guys and the bad guys became a lot more black and white — even in the four-color panels of comic books.
“Anything was okay after Pearl Harbor — but of course there were even stronger feelings against the Japanese because of the sneak attack,” former Marvel editor-in-chief Roy Thomas said by e-mail.
Fingeroth said Timely continued the fight, pitting its second-most-famous hero, Sub-Mariner, against the Axis powers. The company’s fan club was called “Captain America’s Sentinels of Liberty,” and donated part of its fees to the war effort.
Industry-wide, superheroes took to the covers of their titles to pitch war bonds. And on the pages inside those covers, saboteurs and the Axis powers’ “evil” scientists replaced mobsters and thugs as the industry’s favorite foils during the war.
“What greater villains could you possibly have than Nazis?” asked Uslan, the historian. “They were as monstrous and evil as you can get.”
Ethan Sacks is a freelance journalist and comic book writer who currently writes for Marvel Comics.
