Captain America and the Struggle of the Superhero

For more than 60 years, Captain America served as an iconic figure in popular culture, and one of Marvel Comics’ flagship characters. He represented everything good and positive about the classic American ideal – truth, strength, liberty, and an unflappable belief that justice would always prevail. When his alter ego, Steve Rogers, was assassinated by a sniper outside a federal courthouse, his death rocked the comic world and left fans and critics with numerous questions about his life and how it ended. Did he die a political casualty of the Global War on Terrorism, or was it just another Marvel marketing ploy? Had he become an anachronism in tights, or was he still a self-conscious, larger than life figure who tried to bear the full existential weight of what American military power had become? And how is his death in the Civil War series to be reconciled with his second death, in Morrell and Breitweiser’s series The Chosen? This book brings such speculations into sharper focus, compiling critical essays by a wide range of authors, including art and literary scholars, professors and graduate students, historians, and Captain America writers. The range of topics discussed include the ways in which Nazi Germany was represented in Captain America Comics from the 1940s to his resurrection in the 1960s; the creation of Captain America in light of the Jewish American experience; the relationship between Captain America and Captain Britain, who was featured in a few rare UK Marvel comics; the groundbreaking partnership between Captain America and one of the first mainstream African American superheroes, The Falcon; and, the various successful and unsuccessful attempts that were made to kill Captain America before his ‘real’ death.