Monday, April 9, 2007

Captain America Is Dead! Long Live Captain America!

The annoucement a few weeks ago that Marvel had killed off Captain America came as a bit of a surprise to the comic community and certainly helped get a lot of people that don't normally step into comics shops, in there in droves to purchase one or more (if they were able to) copies of issue #25 of Captain America. Within hours, copies of the issue were up on Ebay, selling in many multiples of dollars of the original cover price. Will Captain America stay dead? Well, the issue in which he's killed is just Pt.1 of an ongoing story arc. Marvel never said they were cancelling the Captain America title, so I think we can imagine that he'll be back in some form, somehow or other down the line. It'll be interesting to see how many issues of Captain America will be published without ever showing Cap himself. Maybe they'll do alot of flashbacks. Here are issues #100-#110 of Marvel's solo title for Cap, following his resurrection in the mid 60's in Marvel's Tales Of Suspense comics. Tales of Suspense ended with issue #99, and became Captain America, continuing a story begun in the earlier book. All the covers from #100-#109 are the work of Jack Kirby. #110 is by new Cap artist, Jim Steranko, who brought dynamic new design work, heavily pop art influenced, to the title and Marvel Comics. The dynamism and exaggeration of proportion are what draw me to the Kirby covers - and the use of color, especially on #107, which also has a terrific cover layout. My copies are for the most part in pretty nice shape, with a few, in beautiful, Near Mint condition. The #100 is a decent enough copy, but unremarkable, with several surface flaws. The back cover has a small burn hole of some kind and there is general cover wear and dulling of the ink reflectivity. The spine has it's share of creases as well. I'd rate it a Fine-. On the other hand, the #103, #106, #107 and #109 are in really great condition, with amazing cover color vibrancy. My first series Cap collection ends in the mid 200's after the John Byrne run, in the early 80's. I then picked it back up with a bunch of runs of issues in recent years, particularly the John Cassady pencilled issues, as well as most of the latest series.

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