The particulars in case you forgot: I’m trolling through my comic book collection, which spans 1977-1995/6ish, because I’m feeling nostalgic and want to share. I invite you to tag along with me cuz I hope it’ll be fun – I’m even taking pics of the covers with my iPhone (sorry about the quality there but honestly – who wants to go through and scan all these things?!) so you can see what I see. I’m also telling stories, which is always fun.
And since I’m grabbing boxes at random, we never know what we’re gonna get until we get it. Got it? Good – let’s move on then people! Oh – and you can always click on the images for a bigger photo.
Box #3 – Part 1 – Marvel Madness
Captain America – 3 different versions from 3 different times.
In that first Cap comic, you can see Nick Fury back when he was white – that would be pre-ultimates when he became modeled after Samuel L Jackson. The second issue up there is nearly 100 issues later and is the 50th anniversary of the character, Captain America. The third is in the 400’s when Cap had to hunt down John Jameson, and became a werewolf for a time.
The thing about Marvel is, they always have a good adventure, ya know? You can almost turn off your brain for these. They’re very straight forward, good guys and bad guys with little in-between stuff to muck it all up. Later on, things got more complicated, but for me at least, Captain America was a throwback to the early, easy days of comics. Sort of like the western of comics. You had black hats and white hats and no spaghetti anywhere…
As for the character of Cap himself – I always liked him. He changed a lot through the years, except that he didn’t really age, did he? I get the whole ‘frozen during WWII and thawed out later’ thing, but I never understood if the super soldier serum was supposed to slow the aging process as well. Also, one of my favorite moments was a flashback to WWII with him fighting side by side with Wolverine pre-Weapon X.
I also found some Avengers in this box – let’s compare covers, shall we?
I wanted to show you these covers to do a little comparison of the artwork. Comic book art really has changed through the years. Image #1 shows issue #289 – everything is sorta blocky and flat. Image #2 shows #402 – 113 issues later in Sept of 96 – the artwork is dramatically different.
Aside from the artwork – I always loved the Avengers. The team’s lineup changed a lot through the years – sort of like the Justice League over at DC. You had superheroes (Captain America, Iron Man) and mutants (Scarlet Witch, Quicksilver) working together, which was cool. To be honest, I ended up liking the spin-off – the West Coast Avengers, even better. One of the things that always bugged me about Marvel comics was that everything took place in New York (Spiderman, Avengers, the Fantastic Four, Powerman and Iron Fist to name just a few), so it was nice to see characters in a different city for a change. DC was better at spreading their heroes around.
A couple more covers from the Avengers for fun:
The last thing I wanted to show you was this: 
They’re talking about ‘The First Avenger’, a new movie from Marvel about Captain America. Well, this was the movie they did back in 1992. Well, this is the comics adaptation of that movie, anyway. The movie sucked, so the comic wasn’t much better.
The only thing worse than this was probably the tv movies from the 70’s. Yes. There were Captain America TV movies. They were horrible. They were probably trying to cash in on the popularity and success of the Bill Bixby Incredible Hulk series but it didn’t work and neither did this movie.
ANYWAY, here’s hoping that ‘The First Avenger’ will follow in the footsteps of ‘Iron Man’ and be awesome…
~P
