This will be a new segment on Palmer’s World to focus on some old gems that I come across and how they compare to the new stories.
Published 1981.
*note that I will have a grand write-up about the recent acquisition of some very old comic books but until I do it justice, I just wanted to give you a taste of what I’m perusing.
I’m not overly familiar with Captain America but as soon as I saw the X-Men on the front cover I cracked this one open. It has Captain America returning from an overseas trip and stuff wasn’t adding up at first for me. First they say Jack Kennedy is President in 1981 and then Bucky appears in the Avengers Mansion. I don’t know my Captain America, but I’m pretty sure Bucky is dead.
Turns out that the caption “This may be the strangest Captain tale ever told!” was pretty close to the truth.
In the end, it’s all an illusion and Cap’n keeps being jetisoned into different realities and he can’t figure out which one is the truth. The craziest part of the book started up when North America is taken over by Nazis and they are persecuting Jews and mutants now in 1981. Then reality changes again and Cap’n’s compadre The Falcon gets caught up with the Ku Klux Clan! Talk about an entertaining story. In the end, Cap’n breaks free of the illusion and kicks some illusion-maker ass.
I thoroughly enjoyed this tale on many fronts. This will speak to the points of older comics in general.
Nowadays, stories do not end in one issue. They are spread over a good four-six issues so they can form a nice tradepaperback when its collected. While I don’t MIND the serialized story format and if it’s spread over some issues, I find that sometimes you have a story that takes six issues to tell when it could have been told in two. Case in point, I can probably zip through a new issue of X-Men in five minutes and I usually go through it again to look more at the art, etc. This Captain America issue took me twenty minutes to read. It was chock full of text and story. That’s what I like about the older comics. There was some substance to them and more often than not, they had stand alone stories in them so you could just pick up one issue and be entertained.
The older paper is great and all, but boy, the colours were pretty shoddy back then even in 1981. There is still some colour bleedthrough on the lines. Also, it’s interesting to see the difference in printing technology from then to now. Even if you don’t have a glossy paged comic nowadays, the colours are more vibrant.
All in all, I found it to be an enjoyable tale where I didn’t have to know TOO much about the characters (although I had no idea who the Falcon was until they introduced him) and I must admit that this makes for a good story as well. One where you can read it without any backstory to appreciate it.