A revolutionary era for the Sentinel of Liberty, culminating with the return of Jack Kirby!
Steve Rogers has renounced his role as Captain America! The Falcon fights on while Rogers wrestles with his place in the world, becoming Nomad, a man without a country. In his new identity, he must overcome the power of Madame Hydra and the mystical Serpent Crown. The return of the Red Skull forces our hero to make a choice. Then, comes Jack Kirby’s return! As writer, artist and editor, this is Kirby unleashed. In an intricate storyline that built month after month toward America’s Bicentennial, Kirby’s “Madbomb” saga featured an aristocratic cabal seeking to wrest control of the country. Also featuring Kirby’s Bicentennial Battles, an 80-page masterpiece that encompasses American history from the Revolution to the Old West to both World Wars!
Steve Englehart went to Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. After a stint in the Army, he moved to New York and began to write for Marvel Comics. That led to long runs on Captain America, The Hulk, The Avengers, Dr. Strange, and a dozen other titles. Midway through that period he moved to California (where he remains), and met and married his wife Terry.
He was finally hired away from Marvel by DC Comics, to be their lead writer and revamp their core characters (Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Flash, and Green Lantern). He did, but he also wrote a solo Batman series (immediately dubbed the "definitive" version) that later became Warner Brothers' first Batman film (the good one).
After that he left comics for a time, traveled in Europe for a year, wrote a novel (The Point Man™), and came back to design video games for Atari (E.T., Garfield). But he still liked comics, so he created Coyote™, which within its first year was rated one of America's ten best series. Other projects he owned (Scorpio Rose™, The Djinn™) were mixed with company series (Green Lantern [with Joe Staton], Silver Surfer, Fantastic Four). Meanwhile, he continued his game design for Activision, Electronic Arts, Sega, and Brøderbund.
And once he and Terry had their two sons, Alex and Eric, he naturally told them stories. Rustle's Christmas Adventure was first devised for them. He went on to add a run of mid-grade books to his bibliography, including the DNAgers™ adventure series, and Countdown to Flight, a biography of the Wright brothers selected by NASA as the basis for their school curriculum on the invention of the airplane.
In 1992 Steve was asked to co-create a comics pantheon called the Ultraverse. One of his contributions, The Night Man, became not only a successful comics series, but also a television show. That led to more Hollywood work, including animated series such as Street Fighter, GI Joe, and Team Atlantis for Disney.
Okay, I might have taken an easy shot at Jack Kirby's writing skills in an update for this book, but golly it's fun to see him back drawing the Star-Spangled Avenger. The whole shadowy government conspiracy thing is good fun even if it's frustratingly vague up until it's not, at which point the perpetrators just come across as ridiculous, sort of like me trying to explain why my jokes are funny.
Originally published between Watergate and the American Bicentennial, this comic collection is appropriately schizophrenic. While much of the material is dated, the hero's struggle to discover the true face of America is just as timely as ever.
This Captain America collection really runs the gambit. This volume collects stories that largely came out in 1976, America's bicentennial. So AMERICA is a big theme here. Which is good and bad.
The bad is that coming off the last volume this starts off with Steve picking up a new identity since he had abandoned his Captain America alter ego. So Nomad is born....and almost as quickly gets dropped. I was extremely disappointed at how fast this gets dropped. I would have liked to have seen this explored more. Then some really wonky artwork plagues the book for most of the middle section. This appears to be the end of Steve Engleharts run which, over all, really disappointed me. Then the last good chunk of this book is the beginning of Jack Kirby's return to the character. I also found this extremely underwhelming. This is mostly the "Mad Bomb" story which I had always heard of and sadly does not live up to expectations. Also going with the theme of wonky art, as someone who considers himself a pretty big fan of Jack "The King" Kirby, this was some really disappointing artwork. It read almost like he wanted to be drawing Fourth World instead as all the sci-fi gadgets get lots of detail and design work, but his characters just aren't as good as normal for him.
Ultimately this is a collection where the title character starts off disillusioned with America, and by the end is celebrating the 200th anniversary of America and in no way did it feel like a natural evolution to that point.