WWII Superheros Return

It sounds like Marvel is sorry for having killed-off Captain America. In recompense, they have dug through the company archives and revived twelve super-heroes from the last days of WWII. Like Steve Rogers, these heroes have been in frozen animation. Unlike Cap, it was no accident in the Arctic. Instead, the story is that all twelve were captured by the Nazis and placed in frozen stasis for later study. It is only new construction in Berlin that has located them, purely by accident.

Since none of these characters have seen print in over sixty years, it will be interesting to see what the Marvel writers are going to do with them. While we think of the superhero genre as well-defined, back in the forties there was a blurry line between supers of the four-color comics and grittier, less morally defined characters of the pulps, like The Shadow or Doc Savage.

Wiki Distractions

It has been too long since I have updated this all. My excuse is that I roped myself into building and maintaining a wiki for the bi-weekly GURPS WWII Supers RPG campaign I am in. I debated linking Doolittle's to that wiki, but most of the other players thought that it would be a boring read for you all.

In summary, it is now April 1943 and I am playing the character of a Polish cavalryman who has been turned into a perfect soldier ala Captain America through the use of a stolen Nazi serum. Now he is fighting the Axis alongside four American superheroes in North Africa, Palestine, Italy, and soon Germany! All in all, quite fun to take my historical knowledge and watch it bump up against the other players' comic-book based assumptions.

Captain America, Dead at 66

Marvel Comics has killed-off Captain America.

The patriotic character was created by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby 9 months before America entered WWII and was centered around that conflict for his first few years. Later, Cap was used by writers to reflect on what they saw as an earlier era's morals and courage.

Of course, there is something ironically fascist about a blond-haired, blue-eyed, super soldier at the 'peak of human potential.' But the comics industry has always had a the problem of how to tell their epic stories without falling into the trap of supporting 'Big Man' theories of history. Captain America's problems are nothing compared to Superman, inspired by Nietzsche's Overman philosophy.