Sunday, August 19, 2018

Captain America Omnibus 1

Captain America Omnibus Vol. 1 (New Printing)Captain America Omnibus Vol. 1 by Stan Lee
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Captain America Omnibus contains material from Tales of Suspense 59-99 and Captain America 100-113.

One of my earliest memories is of flipping through my uncle's Captain America 100 so I've been on the lookout for something like this for decades. Sure, there's a wee bit of overlap with the contents of Marvel Pocket Books Captain America that a different uncle gave me but this one is built to last and not a tattered paperback from the 70s.

The Tales of Suspense issues are from when he shared the book with Iron Man so a lot of them are Captain America, and later Cap and Bucky, beating up scrubs for 15 pages. I find it interesting that when Cap was appearing in The Avengers every month, they set his Tales of Suspense adventures in World War II so it wouldn't conflict with the Avengers stories, a far cry from more recent times when Wolverine was in 8-10 books a month, continuity be damned!

Highlights of the first 12 issues include a retelling of Captain America's origin, meeting Agent 13, aka Peggy Carter, a clash with Baron Zemo, and a multi-parter with the Red Skull. At one point, my wife told me about what was happening in Ann of Green Gables. Then she asked what was happening in my book. "Captain America is punching Nazis," I said. The art is Kirby in his prime for most of the first twelve issues with George Tuska doing finishes on a couple. The letters pages indicate the readers of the 1960s were just as entitled shits as today's readers.

From there, things shift to the present day of 1965. Captain America battles reawakened Nazi robots, Batroc, meets Sharon Carter and Nick Fury, and encounters other stuff. I much prefer Dick Ayers working over Kirby's layouts than George Tuska. John Romita handles some of the art chores, predating his fantastic work on Amazing Spider-Man. Kirby returns to do art chores until after clashes with the Red Skull and the Cosmic Cube and the Adaptoid.

I could easily run out of space recounting the stories. They get a little repetitive after a while. While it's Lee and Kirby in their prime, there's only so far you can go with Cap. It's not the Fantastic Four nor should it be. As a result, a lot of the stories are Captain America beating the shit out of people, usually the Red Skull, although Batroc takes more than his share of ass-kickings. Then again, they probably weren't written with a 40 year old reading them in 100 page chunks in mind either.

The final four issues of the collection were my favorites, a multi-partner involving Rick Jones taking up the Bucky mantle and the apparent death of Captain America, with three parts done by Jim Steranko.

While I think the Fantastic Four and Amazing Spider-Man from this time period were better, this Captain America omnibus was a good read and an interesting look at Captain America's early tenure in the modern Marvel universe. 3.5 out of 5 stars.

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