According to sellmycomicbooks.com, this particular issue is noteworthy for being the first solo appearance of Captain America in the “Silver Age,” and has sold for as high as $6,800.
The copy we bought at the Goodwill for 10 cents earlier today? It’s coverless and has a page missing — the title page for the second story — which renders it effectively worthless to collectors.
But it’s interesting, in its own way. The two stories were nothing much, really: in the first, Iron Man must battle the Black Knight, and most of the story is an extended fight scene, while at the same time, Pepper Potts and Happy try to break into his steel-reinforced private office because Tony Stark has retreated there looking desperately ill, and (unlike the movies) Iron Man is his secret identity, so they don’t know he needed to recharge his “protective chest device” and then suit up for battle. In the second, Captain America is alone at the Avengers Mansion when a mob outfit attacks with the plan to “grab all the Avengers’ secret plans we can find.” Apparently in this incarnation, Captain America doesn’t have any superpowers, so they figure he’ll be easy pickings, but his exceptional training means that he can overcome this team of villians.
Was this a typical storyline? No clue. Surely there was usually more of a storyline than just “hero battles villian.”
In any event, a couple weeks ago, I took the boys to the comic book store that’s kitty-corner from the upscale ice cream place in the suburb next-door, and they picked out a couple — though in the end, they were disappointed that the X-Men weren’t the X-Men of the movies, and the Avengers weren’t the movie Avengers. I was also surprised at how soap-opera-like the modern comics are, by which I mean that the story seems to be extended over a great many issues, with relatively little happening in each issue. And, of course, I’d read that Marvel is now fully-PC and introducing gay characters, and, lucky us, we happened to get one in which the gay X-Man agonized over his relationship with his boyfriend, culminating in a proposal, and, we’re shown as a preview of the next issue, a gay wedding. (The used comics were cheaper, and I figured it wouldn’t make a difference, but they were all packaged in plastic bags, so, other than looking at the cover, there wasn’t any pre-viewing possible.)
What’s also interesting are the ads: in the modern-day ones, there are ads for toys and other merchandise. In 1964, these were the ads:
- A correspondence course in auto repair
- The Mike Marvel System of building a super-muscular body in 10 minutes a day with no exercise required
- Lots and lots of offers for stamps on approval
- A model rocket catalog
- Sell shoes door-to-door in your spare time
- If you’re a boy 12 or older, sell “Grit” to earn cash and prizes; “over 30,000 boys make money and get dandy prizes without 1 cent cost.”
My son wants to send the coupon in, just for fun, since “Grit” still exists as a magazine targeting rural families.
The artwork, too, is radically different — the 1964 style looks more like Rex Morgan, M.D., than today’s comic artwork. And the Wasp and Pepper Potts are fully clothed and fairly unexceptional in appearance, in contrast to the modern female characters, who are either wearing outfits so form-fitting that there’s nothing but the coloring that distinguishes them from simply being nude (they draw in the belly-button), or else baring midriffs, or in one case wearing little more than a g-string, in all cases being very busty.
Besides all this, my son has gotten a couple books from the library lately, in the one case, with profiles of all the Marvel superheroes and, in the other, describing the history and all the characters in the Avengers. And plotlines have evolved to a startling degree. Oh, sure, every now and again you read about Superman getting killed off, or, just recently, Thor losing his title and being replaced by a woman, but I had no idea just how many twists they’d taken, with multiple storylines including alternate universes, time travel, and one crazy way in which a person gained superpowers after another, plus the whole roster of X-Men mutants who are born with the ability to become invisible, or shoot out fire, or control all energy sources, or any number of crazy powers.
Putting these two comic books side by side is enough to make me wonder: is the comic-book reading demographic really the same after all these years? Does the kid who’s picked on and finds refuge in stories of Peter Parker-ish tales of a nerd becoming a superhero really identify with gay weddings? And how are they going to succeed in their ambitions of finding new, female readers, when their female characters are half-naked?
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