The hardest part about deep-diving into Silver Age adventures of your favorite characters is often the same frustration present in interacting with a lot of 1960s media. No matter if you’re taking a look back at questionable Hollywood studio films, works of important literature, or the comics in Captain America Epic Collection: Bucky Reborn, you’re bound to wince to yourself over ridiculous, outdated, or offensive behavior. The ’60s and ’70s were not that great, no matter how nostalgically viewed and misremembered.
Certainly, Captain America isn’t the worst offender of that era, if only because Stan Lee and Gene Colan were doing their best to hold Cap to the progressive, oppression-hating standards set in place by his creators, Jack Kirby and Joe Simon. The character’s very existence is meant to engender goodwill, to bring together disparate peoples, and to oppose prejudice.
The problem, as ever, is that no matter how progressive the creators and their character might be, social norms between 1969 and 1971 hadn’t advanced as much as we’d like for sterling Steve Rogers. One of the book’s dangling dramas lies between Captain America and his occasional girlfriend, Sharon Carter; Cap feels that Sharon should leave her job as a field S.H.I.E.L.D. agent. This is ostensibly because it puts Sharon in harm’s way, though the clear concerns lay mired in pre-feminism gender roles: Sharon is meant to be okay with Cap’s dangerous work, but Cap is not alright with Sharon working at all. As a result, Cap is a Peter Parker-level moping mess.
Marvel Comics
Worse, of course, are the lingering misunderstandings concerning race. Despite his willing – indeed, eager – acceptance of a Black partner in Sam Wilson, the book itself has the uneasy defensiveness of two white creators concerned with being perceived as racist. In issue #126, while discussing some local hoods, Sam himself describes them as “a Black version of the Klan! All they preach is hate whitey!”
That Sam’s in the Cap costume as he says it feels like a strange endorsement of the idea.
Marvel Comics
That’s a big statement coming from people who don’t seem to understand how gruesome and horrible that group was (and continues to be). It also deeply mischaracterizes the baddies Cap and Falcon are up against, whose main crime appears to be running protection rackets in Harlem.
The issues collected in Bucky Reborn shouldn’t be dismissed for poorly-aged social handling. Present is the usual bombardment of colorful villains with ridiculous schemes, including quick appearances of the Scorpion, Modok, Mole Man, and the Mandarin. The titular Bucky story revolves around a Red Skull plot that relies on finding an amnesiac who looks like Bucky, manipulating him into thinking he is Bucky, and Cap being stupid enough to believe it all.
Gene Colan’s art is on fine display in the collection. Near the end of the book, he gets to lean into the horror he would become famous for in Tomb of Dracula, when a disconcerting S.H.I.E.L.D. scientist develops a formula that will turn him, Hyde-like, into a giant gorilla. He does this because one of his coworkers won’t date him.
That classic idiom: the way to a woman’s heart is *become a great ape*.
Marvel Comics
He and Cap are summarily thrown down a very, very deep hole.
Surely they could have put up some guard rails to this thing.
Marvel Comics
The most important thing to happen in Bucky Reborn is the series title changing, with #134, to Captain America and The Falcon, a title that would last six years (until Jack Kirby returned to the character with #200). Regardless of all the misunderstood social justice malarkey noted above, Captain America and the Falcon was one of the earliest examples of a person of color credited in the title itself. It was slow progress, but it was progress nonetheless.
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