Captain America

Series Introduction


If you were suddenly gifted with powers that set you apart from ordinary humanity, what would you do?


For the first generation of comic book super heroes, launched in the late 1930s, the answer was obvious: You used your special abilities for the benefit of others. You became a "champion for the helpless and oppressed" and waged an "unceasing battle against evil and injustice."


It was a fantasy predicated on the effortless fusion of moral certainty with aggressive action, the national appetite for which only increased after America's entry into the Second World War in 1941. More than seven hundred super-powered do-gooders debuted in the boom years of 1938-1945. Collectively, they helped to transform the comic book business from a vestigial limb of print culture into a muscular arm of the modern entertainment industry. With the social tensions and abiding inequalities of US culture temporarily obscured by the Nazi threat, super heroes even came to emblematize the (sometimes contradictory) principles of individualism, democracy, and consumerism: the American way.


After the war, comics remained big business-the genres of romance, Western, crime, horror, and humor all thrived-but audiences turned decisively away from super heroes. Indeed, by the summer of 1953, the costumed crime-fighter appeared on the verge of extinction. Of the hundreds of characters that had once crowded the newsstands, only five still had their own titles: Quality Comics' Plastic Man and DC Comics' Superman, Superboy, Batman, and Wonder Woman. Old-fashioned products of a simpler time, they were ripe targets for satire. There were sporadic attempts to revive the craze, of course-most notably in 1954, when a wave of national hysteria over the putatively negative effects of crime and horror comics on younger readers led several publishers to seek more parent-friendly alternatives. The companies of Ajax, Atlas, Charlton, Harvey, Magazine Enterprises, Prize, and

Jack Kirby, Joe Simon, Stan Lee, Jim Steranko, and John Romita Sr.; Foreword by Gene Luen Yang; Introduction by Ben Saunders; Series Editor: Ben Saunders

A groundbreaking example of comics representation in literature.
Publishers Weekly

Penguin provides introductory essays; superb analyses by the series editor, Ben Saunders; and extensive bibliographies.
Michael Dirda, The Washington Post

Stories become classics when generations of readers sort through them, talk about them, imitate them, and recommend them. In this case, baby boomers read them when they débuted, Gen X-ers grew up with their sequels, and millennials encountered them through Marvel movies. Each generation of fans initially fanboys, increasingly fangirls, and these days nonbinary fans, too found new ways not just to read the comics but to use them. That s how canons form. Amateurs and professionals, over decades, come to something like consensus about which books matter and why or else they love to argue about it, and we get to follow the arguments. Canons rise and fall, gain works and lose others, when one generation of people with the power to publish, teach, and edit diverges from the one before ... A top-flight comic by Kirby or his successor on Captain America, Jim Steranko barely needed words. You could follow the story just by watching the characters act and react. Thankfully, Penguin volumes do justice to these images. They reproduce sixties comics in bright, flat, colorful inks on thick white paper unlike the dot-based process used on old newsprint, but perhaps truer to their bold, thrill-chasing spirit.
Stephanie Burt, The New Yorker