(Comic) Book vs. Movie
Captain America
By Russ Bickerstaff
July 28, 2011
BoxOfficeProphets.com
And in this corner: the Movie. A 112-year-old kid born in France to a guy named Lumiere and raised primarily in Hollywood by his uncle Charlie "the Tramp" Chaplin. This young upstart has quickly made a huge impact on society, rapidly becoming the most financially lucrative form of storytelling in the modern world.
Both square off in the ring again as Box Office Prophets presents another round of (Comic) Book vs. Movie.
Captain America
Joe Simon was a successful commercial artist just seven years out of high school when Germany invaded Poland in 1939. At the time, he had been successful enough to land a job as editor for a comic book company named Timely Comics. There was debate at the time whether or not it was a good idea for the US to enter a growing war in Europe. Simon was solidly on the side of US involvement, creating a patriotic hero named Captain America to promote the idea. His publisher Martin Goodman must’ve been sympathetic because he’d green-lit a comic book exclusively for the character. (Starting off a character in his or her own book generally didn’t happen back then.) Goodman wanted Captain America Comics to hit the stands as soon as possible.
Essentially a 20-page political cartoon supporting US involvement in the war, the first issue of Captain America Comics went on sale about one year prior to the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Released in December of 1940, the debut issue sold nearly one million copies. With an image of Captain America socking Hitler on the jaw, the issue prompted quite a bit of hate mail from those who opposed US involvement in the war. (The issue had a cover date of, “March, 1941,” but the practice of post-dating a comic book cover in the interest of keeping it on the magazine stands longer is a long and distinguished one that goes back many, many years.)
Captain America Comics promptly became very successful, regularly selling somewhere around one million copies per issue. (It routinely outsold Time magazine.) Simon and his collaborator Jack Kirby left the series and its publisher for a more financially lucrative career at the company that was to become DC comics, but they left behind the first ten issues of a comic book featuring a character who is still quite popular today.
Over 70 years after the character debuted, he is the subject of a major film being released by Paramount pictures. Captain America is a character that first debuted when the US was about to enter a major war in Europe. He is now the subject of a big-budget film being released in an era where popular sentiment is growing against US military involvement beyond Europe. How do those first ten issues of the wildly successful comic book of the 1940s compare with a contemporary big-budget film inspired by them?
The Comic Book
Captain America Comics hit the stands in December of 1940 - the same month that Franklin D. Roosevelt suggested that the US become the “Arsenal of Democracy,” by helping fund Britain’s war against Germany through what would become known as the Lend-Lease Act.
Presumably written at some point in November or December of 1940, the first issue of the comic book envisions what have been seen as a dark near-future looming on the horizon. This was a 1941 where “ruthless war-mongers in Europe focus their eyes on a peace-loving America.” (Germany did, in fact, declare war on the US in 1941, but not until a year after Captain America debuted.)
Here, we see German spies have infiltrated the U.S. They talk about how easy it was, “joining the [U.S.] army with forged papers…to carry out the fuehrer’s [sic] plans!” They blow-up a US munitions factory. The story shoots over to a conference between FDR and a couple of military officers who lament that their ranks are “spotted with spies.” FDR then introduces the men to FBI chief “J. Arthur Grover.” (Evidently, everyone - even Joe Simon - was afraid of upsetting Hoover back then.)
The military advisors change into plainclothes, and follow, uh, “Grover” to a shabby curio shop in the tenement district that serves as a front for a gleaming, modern 1940s sci-fi laboratory. The old woman who leads them there turns out to be the beautiful government agent X-13.
The men sit in an observation room as an unnamed doctor administers a “strange, seething liquid” via a rather large hypodermic to a thin blond man in green pants. As the blond man begins to undergo some kind of change, the doctor tells us that the man had been turned down for military service just earlier that day due to his generally unfit condition. A serum courses through his blood that is “rapidly building his body and brain tissues,” thus increasing his stature and intelligence. The military representatives are impressed at the man’s transformation. The doctor proclaims it a success. The recently frail man is dubbed Captain America - envisioned to be the first in a corps of “super-agents,” who will become a terror to foreign spies and saboteurs.
As one could probably guess, though, Nazi spies have seen the demonstration and kill the doctor immediately. As the serum is destroyed as well, it is lost forever. (Evidently he didn’t write anything down.) Captain America defeats the spies. In a single panel, we see that the hero now wears a patriotic flag-inspired costume and is actively rooting-out spies in the U.S. military. Evidently as a day job, he serves as army private Steve Rogers. The final page and a half of the story involve a kid identified as “mascot” of Rogers’ army regiment named Bucky Barnes. He comes into Rogers’ tent and sees him changing into the Captain America costume - thereafter fighting alongside him in a similar costume as the companion hero, “Bucky.”
The origin story was eight pages long - it is followed in the first issue by another couple of stories typical of the golden age era of comics. Stalwart hero accompanied by teenaged sidekick fight to defend the U.S. at home from fifth columnists. There’s kind of an espionage thriller aspect to the stories - kind of a cross between Batman and James Bond dressed-up in red, white and blue. Over the course of the next ten issues, Cap and Bucky fight villains with strange appearances employing bizarre gimmicks not unlike the rogues gallery in Batman or Dick Tracy. The first issue has stories pitting Captain America against a strange psychic homunculus, a man named “the Crusher,” and, most notably the Red Skull, a Nazi spy named after the mask he wears. True to form for the period, all stories were wrapped-up quite nicely in just a few pages. (The Red Skull turns out to be an aircraft company executive who was promised a position of great authority under a Nazi-ruled U.S.)
Contrary to the image on the cover, Hitler does NOT specifically show-up in the first issue. Captain America doesn’t even leave the U.S. That doesn’t actually happen until the second story in the second issue - a story that involves Cap and Bucky dressing undercover as a grandmother and schoolboy on a plane to Germany. It’s a story that ends with Cap and Bucky personally knocking out Hitler and Goering. That story (“Trapped in the Nazi Stronghold”) was one of the few to feature direct confrontation between the hero and the Nazis prior to 1942. True, there were a few Nazi spies that showed up in a handful of the brief stories that made the pages of the comic book. The Nazi spy thing didn’t exactly dominate the pages, though.
In a typical story of the era, Cap and Bucky square-off against “The Wax Man” - a spy with a German accent who looks to take over the world with futuristic tanks in the interest of establishing a “new order.” There’s no specific mention of the Nazis or Germany for that matter… Of course, once open hostilities exploded between the two nations at the end of 1941, things changed.
Through it all, Captain America is an indestructible hero. He gets captured, but never actually hurt. Out of costume as a perpetual private, he gets casually reprimanded as a lowly private. He smokes a pipe. Aside from a general swashbuckling bravado, we never get a deeper image of who the characters of Steve, Cap or Bucky really are. The stories all follow a very regimented formula involving a monstrous villain from (or funded from) overseas who is trying to destroy US morale by some sinister plan that ends up getting foiled after a tussle with Cap and Bucky.
Occasionally, tiny bits of personality do filter through the story. Most notably, there was kind of a chilling scene at the end of the first Red Skull story in which the Skull accidentally rolls over a hypodermic of poison in a tussle with Bucky as Cap looks on. After the Red Skull dies, Bucky asks Captain America, “…you saw it all - why didn’t you stop him from killing himself?” To which Cap replies, “I’m not talking, Bucky!” And it's never brought-up again. The US could have presumably learned a lot from a US-based Nazi super-spy and Captain America let him die - presumably out of spite. It’s an uncharacteristically dark moment in an otherwise cheerily grandiose action/espionage series. (Red Skull, of course, returns a couple of issues later having survived the poison.)
The Movie
Whereas the original comic book was created and produced by people with a great deal of interest in US foreign policy, the producers of the current film version aren’t all that interested in current events. The idea here is to make money to expand business for Marvel Productions’ growing line of superhero films. A single piece in a highly ambitious, highly interconnected series of big-budget action films, Captain America: The First Avenger is more interested in telling a good story than influencing public opinion.
The film opens with an extended present-day discovery of the title character. He’s in suspended animation in a crashed aircraft in an arctic wasteland. The scene draws its inspiration from the resurrection of the character in the Marvel Comics’ superhero renaissance in the mid-1960s. Much of the film owes its inspiration to Marvel Comics ideas that came out of the ‘60s, but at its heart, the film is firmly rooted in Joe Simon’s original comic book of the ‘40s.
After an extensive series of scenes that help tie this film into the matrix of the rest of Marvel’s Avengers family of movies, we get introduced to Steve Rogers in the form of Chris Evans. Whereas the original comic book introduces Rogers roughly seven panels before he’s turned into Captain America, the film spends a good hour getting him there. The comic book wasn’t all that interested in who Steve Rogers was as a person, but the film centers a good portion of the drama on it.
Captain America wasn’t alone in getting relatively little of the spotlight behind the mask. In general, heroes of pop fiction in the ‘30s and ‘40s didn’t get the kind of comprehensive background that our modern heroes do. Whether the hero in question was in a comic book, a movie serial or a radio drama, action heroes back then never really had much of their backgrounds delivered to the audience. The move to more character-driven hero fiction in the past half-century or so is partially due to maturation of hero fiction as a genre, but I like to think that there’s a healthy skepticism in there as well. It may have something to do with a healthy mistrust of authority.
Back in the early-to-mid 20th century, people were more willing to take their heroes on faith. Now we’re less trusting. We’ve been burned before with the whole hero thing and we want to see a resume. Whereas once we were willing to take on faith that our hero was a fine, upstanding man representing all of the more noble ideals of a nation, now he needs a thorough background check.
Various authors had tried their hands at fleshing-out the background of the character over the years. Roger Stern did a good job in the pages of the comic book for the character’s 40th anniversary in 1981. Fabian Nicieza did an equally admirable job for a mini-series celebrating the character’s 50th ten years later.
With a history now going back 70 years, Captain America’s screenwriters could’ve drawn inspiration from a lot of different sources. The film’s interpretation of the character paints him as a kid from Brooklyn who wants to serve his country. He has tried to enlist quite a few times under various aliases - rejected every time due to physical frailty. He refuses to give up. And Evans does a good job of keeping this kind of altruism grounded in the kind of earthbound emotion that we can accept. So the new incarnation of the hero passes the initial job interview from a cynical audience. Fine, but that’s only the first part of the journey.
Eventually, Rogers runs into the scientist in charge of the super-soldier project. The process of turning him into Captain America is considerably more dramatic - involving several shots and the administration of “Vita Rays,” which only sound like they’re a ‘40s sci-fi concept. (They weren’t introduced into the origin until after the character’s resurrection in the ‘60s.) Duly satisfied that our hero isn’t some raving lunatic hiding behind a mask, the film proceeds to get Captain America involved in a series of events that make the character that much more believable. Why would the US government dress its prized success in some ridiculous costume? To become a symbol and sell war bonds, of course.
There are a number of characters introduced into the movie for various reasons - some of them from the silver age…a couple of them have made it more or less directly from the ‘40s. One of the two most important characters to have survived the 70-year period is Captain America’s sidekick Bucky. Here Bucky is re-envisioned as a man who was the Alpha male who knew Steve Rogers back before the program. They were both kids growing-up in Brooklyn. Now that Rogers is the Alpha male, things have changed, but there’s more of an equal footing between them that fits the modern buddy film image of two guys working together than the vaguely creepy man-boy thing that was so popular amongst heroes in the early days of super hero comics.
It’s kind of difficult to trace an exact idea as to where the origin for that early aesthetic came from. I’d like to think that it was the authors feeling that teenagers reading the comic book needed someone to more directly relate to the hero through. They were completely extraneous, of course, but the authors might have felt that it was necessary.
The arch-villain here is the Red Skull, but rather than being an American industrialist Nazi sympathizer, here he is a genuine German who was the first to take an earlier version of the super-soldier serum that makes Captain America who he is. This fits the desire to make Red Skull a full-fledged German villain. This has its origins in directions taken with the villain at the end of the Simon/Kirby issues in the ‘40s, but it wasn’t really fully fleshed-out until the resurrection of Captain America in the ‘60s. In the comic book, Red Skull was a man who had been trained by Hitler himself. The film envisions him as the first to experience the serum that made Captain America who he is/ As a result, it makes the two that much more equally opposed than previous incarnations.
The film quickly deviates from the comic books’ vision of the Red Skull as a Nazi, placing him at the head of an independent terrorist organization called HYDRA. And while this is expressly drawn from plot elements that developed in the ‘60s, the concept of a man wielding advanced technology with designs on a new world order bears quite a bit of resemblance to the Waxman story from the second issue of the original comic book series way back in 1941.
The Verdict
As familiar as the plot elements are, Captain America: The First Avenger comes from a decidedly more commercial origin than the original comic book it was based on. Both the film and the original comic book it’s based on are attempts to tell an interesting story, but whereas the comic book had more of a political agenda, the film is more focused on telling a profitable story.
Whereas the comic book was specifically looking to engage people’s political opinions about the war, politics have become divisive in the modern world in a way that can be very unprofitable. Somewhere near the end of the film, Red Skull tells Captain America that he wants a world without flags. Captain America doesn’t want this and says as much, but in the modern world he emerges into at the end of the film, flags are losing the meaning they used to have, thanks in large part to the emergence of global corporations that are far more powerful than individual world governments.
Marvel itself is now owned by the single largest media conglomerate corporation in the world. (That’s Disney, of course.) Whereas the success of the original character meant increased nationalism and enthusiasm about a war overseas, the success of a new film based on the character will, in some small part, increase the power of a multi-national corporation which sees individual flags as decoration in an increasingly pluralistic corporate world. Judging from opening weekend, the new Captain America film will be big, but in a world where Captain America is part of a ridiculously large catalogue of properties owned by a multinational corporation, his significance is reduced considerably. It’s a small world after all.