Commie Smashers

Back in the 1950s, Captain America returned triumphantly to Comics in the pages of Atlas in 1953, three years after the cancellation of his magazine. But Cap was back with a new enemy.

Commies.

Captain America Commie Smasher appeared in 1953 and 54 and was cancelled in the midst of the waning portion of the golden age of Comic where if you weren't Batman, Superman, or Wonder Woman and you were a superhero, you didn't have much of a chance.

In 1963, Captain America returned from the dead literally. The story was that Bucky had died at the end of the War and Captain had been frozen in ice. In Avengers #4, he was brought triumphantly back into the Silver Age.

And what about those few months of comics in 1953-54? Stan Lee claimed to have forgotten about them and that's certainly possible. Lee worked on a lot of titles and very few superhero ones, plus given that he was thinking of going into another line of work before he brought the Fantastic Four to life in 1961, he may not have been as engaged.

Subsequent to Stan Lee, Steve Englehart took over the helm of Captain America and introduced the concept that the 1950s Cap hadn't been real the Captain America but a McCarthyist imposter who'd go on to wreak all kinds of havoc.

However, when you read the pages of Iron Man or Captain America or even the Fantastic Four, you see that the reason for Cap's regeneration had little to do with a lack of appetite for fighting communism. When you I read Essential Iron Man, Vol. 1, I was struck by how many times Iron Man was up against communists such as the Crimson Dynamo, Titanium Man, and Black Widow. And it was out of a battle with the Vietcong that Tony Stark was injured and Iron Man was born. Then, early on you have Captain America facing off against the Viet Cong. The Fantastic Four did battle with a Soviet Scientist called the Red Ghost in Fantastic Four #8 and Spidey faced off against the Chamelon who was a commie spy in the Amazing Spider-man #1.

Even in the 1960s, there were a whole lot of Commie smashers at Marvel. This is mostly downplayed in Marvel history and fans will often count it a point against the book if Communists were villains.

Some of this is result of a revisionist sentiment that has taken place over the so-called "Red Scare" with some innocent citizens being tarred with the Communist label. The revisionist thought is that all allegations of Communism were unfounded or that Communists were really just harmless and that it was just another political belief system.

The truth is that yes, there were Soviet Spies in America, the Venona project provides evidence of that. Secondly, the harmlessness of Communists may have more to do with them not having won than being Communist in themselves. The TV show Sliders in its premier episode featured the main reality where on the campus of Berkeley a homeless man ranted about the evils of capitalism and the glories of communism. They traveled to an alternate dimension where the Soviets had taken over America and he was high party official oppressing the country.

Even more than that, in their own lands, the Communists wiped out hundreds of millions of people. These were not nice guys, these were very evil regimes. And honestly, actual Communists who supported those regimes really shouldn't get off the hook either in terms of public disapproval at the very least. We really wouldn't care for someone who thought Hitler was great, and it shouldn't be any different with someone who loved Stalin.

Yet, you have comic industry guys and fans embarrassed about fictional stories where these guys are fought. This contrasted with World War II where stories about the War continued to be very popular decades after it. Roy Thomas wrote some retcon World War II stories with the Invaders in the 1970s for Marvel and then went to DC and did the same thing with All-Star Squadron. Sergeant Rock, a World War II military man continued to appear regularly in his own comic book until 1988.

Yet, anything with the Cold War in it in any genre is passe or dated. There's a part of me that would love to write a series of Cold War tales (superhero or otherwise.) The Cold War ultimately was a story of heroes who worked tirelessly and risked everything to "smash Communism" and the high casualty count makes clear that Communism needed smashing.