Captain America, despite his name, has never been a simple symbol of American patriotism — something that’s probably obvious to anybody who’s studied him or read his comics. Much of Steve Rogers’ character development throughout his tenure as one of Marvel’s flagship characters (ha) has centered around him grappling with what patriotism and national pride even mean, and plenty of academic scholarship (e.g. J. Richard Stevens’ 2015 book Captain America, Masculinity, and Violence) has examined the ever-evolving relationship between Captain America and the country that he, at least in name and dress, represents. However, what I want to focus on in this post is one particular motif in Captain America comics, as identified by Jason Dittmer (2007): Captain America facing his narrative and visual foils.
Specifically, in The Amazing Transforming Superhero (2007), Dittmer discusses a series of issues from 1972, in which Steve Rogers battles the revived 1950s Captain America, colloquially known as “Commie Smasher.” Because Commie Smasher is retconned as an impostor and because the “real” Cap defeats him, Dittmer asserts that “it is not just Captain America that is being ‘retconned’ but it is the established national narrative of the United States” (2007:44-45). I submit, though, that “retconning” the American narrative in this way could actually be dangerous, tantamount to denying some very real stains on American history. Joseph McCarthy, after all, did try his utmost to smash some Commies, and the resulting Red and Lavender Scares did damage that can’t easily be punched out of existence (Simpson 2013). My aim for this paper was initially to examine at least three battles between Captain America and various star-spangled enemies, but for now I want to focus mainly on “Commie Smasher,” specifically on three points of interest:
- How exactly, in-text, “Commie Smasher” is painted as an impostor
- The use of archival comics panels as a means of retconning Commie Smasher’s story
- Steve’s showdowns with Flag-Smasher, a villain from the 1980s, as a counterpoint
“Two Into One Won’t Go!”
The covers of the 1972 issues, #153 and #156 especially, emphasize the similarity of the two Captain Americas:
…belying the point that within the actual story, the difference between Steve Rogers and Commie Smasher is always obvious. Sam Wilson and Sharon Carter periodically draw attention to Commie Smasher’s aggressive demeanor and use of barely-printable racial and gendered slurs. Sam, for one, thinks right after meeting Commie Smasher for the first time that “Cap would never call me “boy”!” (Captain America #153), and he tells Commie Smasher and Not-Bucky to their faces that “you’re a couple of costumed bigots!” (Captain America #154). The editorial notes from Roy Thomas do even more work in this respect, thoroughly breaking the fourth wall (fourth panel?) to impress upon the reader that this “bundle of superhuman madness, spurred by his private devils” (Captain America #155) is definitely not Captain America, right? On a visual level, it’s also easy to tell Steve and Commie Smasher apart. This is due in part to a plot point wherein Steve is sunburned to a lobster-like degree, but Commie Smasher’s costume is also easily damaged — a strong visual metaphor that underlines Dittmer’s point about Steve physically and morally besting Commie Smasher.
(Captain America #156, page 4)
One character, though, destabilizes this whole idea of might-makes-right, and that’s Steve Rogers himself. Other characters see a dyed-in-the-Spandex fake, but in the narration on the last page of this story, Steve still sees an alternate version of himself:
(Captain America #156, page 20)
By calling into question the differences between the Captains, Steve undermines what Sam, Sharon, and Roy Thomas have been telling the readers for this whole story, thereby raising doubts as to whether Commie Smasher’s values really got purged from the national narrative, as Dittmer asserts.
This moment isn’t the only element of the story that casts aspersions on Steve’s dominance over his dollar-store counterpart, either. For one thing, Commie Smasher’s characterization is jarringly different between his original stories and his resurrection; the aforementioned barely-printable racial and gendered slurs were surely depressingly common in 1954, but they’re not present at all within the original Commie Smasher texts. For another, Dittmer characterizes the following exchange between Steve and Commie Smasher as an establishment of “freedom versus fascism”:
‘Real’ Captain America: “You think I’m a traitor? Grow up, fella–times have changed! America’s in danger from within as well as without! There’s organized crime, injustice, fascism–or wouldn’t you recognize that?”
1950s Captain America: “Are you calling me–a fascist? You mealy-mouthed rat! You’re scared to face up to the commies in a war, like a real man! I’m a real man! And I’ll kill you to prove it!”
— Captain America #155, pages 16 and 17
What’s odd here, though, is that both Commie Smasher’s original stories and 1940s-era Captain America stories were very much concerned with “danger from within.” Several 1940s stories dealt with “fifth columnists,” and at least nine of the fourteen total villains across all Commie Smasher stories — I checked! — are working within the US in some way. The combined effect of Steve’s rhetoric with Commie Smasher’s characterization… well, the inconsistencies kind of deflate the attempt at a retcon, purely on the level of story-craft, and it also adds doubt as to how much of Commie Smasher’s ideology has really been “purged” from what Captain America represents.
Archival Interpolations
With all that said, though, this storyline does succeed in retconning Commie Smasher’s story through one specific technique that merits a close examination:
They reproduce actual panels from an old issue. And they do so faithfully, with the exception of a few color changes, probably so that “Commie Smasher” is no longer fighting Cap’s old nemesis… 
(Young Men Comics #24, page 5)
…the Magenta Skull.
Anyway! Presented here: a page and a half of archival comic panels.
(Captain America #155, page 13)
(Captain America #155, page 14)
But then, between pages 14 and 15 of the original comic (again, I checked), Steve Englehart and company inserted something new…
(Captain America #155, page 15)
Because Commie Smasher didn’t originally have Captain America’s super-strength, Englehart and the team had to find a way to show him taking the serum and gaining that power. A more important plot point that this page introduces, though (one that’s more explicitly spelled out a couple pages later), is that Commie Smasher didn’t go through the exact same super-soldiering process as Steve Rogers. He got the serum, but not the “Vita-Rays” — and because of that, he went insane. Or at least that’s what Commie Smasher claims the government said about him (#155).
This moment of archival interpolation is the most successful and dangerous way in which Marvel rewrites history over the course of this storyline. The editorial note at the beginning frames the whole flashback as the unadulterated truth, and the inserted page isn’t specifically heralded as modern. There are clues, of course — Commie Smasher’s narration is one (though that could have been superimposed over existing panels), and the slight difference in font styles is another. But overall, it would be easy to simply not notice. The effect this has is to attribute Commie Smasher’s extremism to a mental illness, diminishing his status as an ideological foe to the “real” Captain America and therefore making him far easier to write off. It can hardly be said, ultimately, that Steve “purges” Commie Smasher’s ideology from the American narrative, because this plot point alone robs the conflict between them of much of its power, its potential.
Flag-Smasher
Flag-Smasher, from 1985 and 1986, might seem an odd character to bring into this paper, because he’s explicitly anti-nationalist — not anti-American, to be clear, but anti- the entire concept of nations and cultural borders. But while he doesn’t really qualify as a star-spangled foe per se (his costume is black and white, for the most part), Steve’s encounters with him provide what I see as a far more satisfying take on the comparative morality that Dittmer attempted to highlight with Steve and Commie Smasher. Mike Dubose has talked before about Captain America’s first encounter with Flag-Smasher, noting Steve’s relatively nuanced response to Flag-Smasher’s rampage — “even explicitly anti-American villains,” he says, “are not berated by Captain America for their ideals but for their execution of those ideals” (Dubose 2007: 929), and in this case Steve takes exception to Flag-Smasher’s use of violence to get his points across. Dubose doesn’t even mention Flag-Smasher’s appearances in two subsequent issues, #321 and #322, however, which are even more fascinating in terms of Steve’s morality and ideology.
To return to Commie Smasher for a moment, his story mirrors Steve’s in one significant way: he gets frozen too. His extended ice baths are deliberate rather than accidental, though; in the 1950s, the US government puts him in suspended animation when he smashes too many Commies for their liking (Captain America #155), and the second comes at the end of the 1972 storyline, after Steve defeats him (#156). Supposedly, Commie Smasher will only be put on ice until somebody can cure his violent tendencies. But Steve’s words in that scene rang hollow to me after I read about Flag-Smasher. Steve’s battle with Flag-Smasher in the Swiss Alps, in issue #322, leads to Flag-Smasher falling off a tall mountain, seemingly to his death. And for a moment, Steve considers just assuming Flag-Smasher is dead. But he doesn’t — he finds Flag-Smasher alive but seriously wounded, and from there he actively prevents Flag-Smasher from meeting a similarly icy fate. He makes a splint for his broken leg, builds them a shelter to wait out a howling nighttime snowstorm, and sleeps right next to Flag-Smasher in order to share his body heat. Come morning, when Flag-Smasher still can’t walk, Steve tows him to safety with his shield. The very last words in issue #322, as well, are Steve’s:
(Captain America #322, page 22)
Steve gives Flag-Smasher another chance at life, at great personal risk. Commie Smasher, put back in the icebox after Steve punched him out, never got that same chance.
I should note that the Flag-Smasher stories engage in some historical revisionism themselves. Steve has a huge moral crisis in the beginning of issue #322 about having killed a man in the prior issue, avowing that he’s never killed anyone before. He has, however, let villains die on at least two occasions, one being the Red Skull in the 1940s and the other being a Communist spy in issue #76 from 1954. The latter is a “Commie Smasher” story, but the former was certainly never retconned, to the best of my knowledge. It’s a testament to the strength of Steve’s convictions in this story, however — the determination with which he acts on his principles, as well as this issue’s visceral first-person narration — that these details seem like minor quibbles at most.
Future Directions
This research has several potential next steps. For one thing, I’d love to expand the scope of this paper to include Nuke and Isaiah Bradley, and even Super-Patriot. I also recently found out that the 1950s Captain America pops up for the last time in 1979, as a leader in a KKK analogue (Dittmer 2007: 45), which would be another fruitful avenue to explore.
What I’d really love to investigate further, though, is archival interpolation of old comic panels in new stories and the rhetorical effects this technique can have. If anybody knows of any other comics that do this, please feel free to get in contact with me.
Last note: you can catch me presenting on this same topic this Thursday, September 24 at the Flyover Comics Symposium! My panel is from 12-1 PM Central Time, and although you have to register to receive the participation link, registration is free/pay-what-you-can.
Works Cited
Captain America #76, 77, 78, 153, 154, 155, 156, 312, 321, and 322.
Dittmer, Jason. “Retconning America: Captain America in the Wake of World War II and the McCarthy Hearings.” The Amazing Transforming Superhero!: Essays on the Revision of Characters in Comic Books, Film and Television, ed. Terrence Wandtke. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, 2007, pp. 35-51.
Dubose, Mike S. “Holding Out for a Hero: Reaganism, Comic Book Vigilantes, and Captain America.” The Journal of Popular Culture 40.6 (2007): 915-35. Print.
Stevens, J. Richard. Captain America, Masculinity, and Violence: The Evolution of a National Icon. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2015.
Simpson, Alan K. and Rodger McDaniel. Dying for Joe McCarthy’s Sins: The Suicide of Wyoming Senator Lester Hunt. Cody, WY: WordsWorth Publishing, 2013.
Young Men Comics #24.