In honor of the seventy-fifth anniversary of Captain America this month, we're doing a countdown of your favorite Captain America stories of all-time.
You all voted, now here are the results of what you chose as the 75 Greatest Captain America Stories!
Enjoy!
5. "Project Rebirth" Captain America #445-448
When Mark Waid and Ron Garney took over Captain America, Cap was pretty much dead. So Waid had to come up with a way to bring him back and his way was extremely clever, have Cap's nemesis, the Red Skull, bring him back. Why would the Skull do that? It is because Adolf Hitler, who the Skull had banished to the Cosmic Cube, was now taking over control of the Comic Cube and the Skull needs someone to stop him and who else is a better choice to stop Hitler than, well, you know. Meanwhile, Sharon Carter is revealed to not be dead but she is pissed that Cap BELIEVED she was dead in the first place. She is working with the Skull to take down the New Reich (war makes strange bedfellows). In the end, Skull has the Cube in his possession, but he needs Cap to get rid of Hitler, so he has Cap trapped in a fantasy inside the Cube, where if Cap "saves the day," he will defeat Hitler but leave the Cube fully in the Skull's power - so Cap fights all of his instincts to break free from the fantasy, and he is not too pleased with the Skull for forcing him to give up the fantasy)...
What an amazing start to an amazing run by Waid and Garney (Denis Rodier, Scott Koblish, Mike Manley and I bet some other folks inked Garney on this arc).
4. "Captain America Joins... The Avengers!" Avengers (Volume 1) #4
Stan Lee, Jack Kirby and George Roussos brought former star Golden Age character Captain America back into the Marvel Age in a classic tale that is so powerful that it seems to get re-told every other month.
The sight of Captain America trapped in ice, the Avengers finding his frozen body, Cap leaping to attention, discovering that his partner Bucky died in the same incident that ended up with Cap being frozen - it's such an amazing job by Lee and Kirby.
I mean, just look at this sequence...
How much of a stunning example of Captain America's coolness is that? He wakes up twenty years in the future and he basically just has a quick freak out and then he pulls a Fonzie and suddenly he's totally calm.
Then, for good measure, he's like, "Hey, bunch of powerful looking folks I just met, I bet I can kick all of your asses." And then he pretty much DOES JUST THAT!
That "try to conquer me" panel is just a stunning display by Kirby. So much casual awesomeness there.
It's three pages and Captain America has already solidified himself as an awesome addition to the team. What a great story by Lee, Kirby and Roussos! The "Man out of time" angle was extremely compelling right out of the gate. And that cover - it is little surprise that Cap quickly became the heart of the Avengers.
Go to the next page for #3!
3. "Secret Empire" Captain America #169-175
This arc (which you could argue goes back even further than #169) involves an evil Illuminati-type group known as the Secret Empire, who slowly turn the country against Captain America and the Falcon. Our heroes slowly build their way back to proving themselves heroes to the world, but they are shocked to learn just how far the Secret Empire's influence had grown in the United States...
Steve Englehart wrote this gem while the country was in the wake of the Watergate scandal, and it truly shook Captain America to the breaking point, as he gives up his identity in the wake of this storyline. Sal Buscema delivered the artwork.
Go to the next page for #2-1!
2. "The Strange Death of Captain America" Captain America #110-111,113
In this three-part epic by Jim Steranko (with dialogue by Stan Lee and inks by Joe Sinnott), Captain America runs afoul of Hydra and their leader, Madame Hydra, who kidnaps Rick Jones to draw in Captain America in one of the most stunning sequences of ANY comic, but especially a comic forty plus years ago!!
This leads to Cap's seeming death and when he returns - oh my goodness - Steranko fit about twenty-five issues of coolness into just these three issues (although, to be fair, it was SO much coolness that he was late with the final part, resulting in a fill-in issue for Captain America #112).
1. "The Winter Soldier" Captain America (Volume 5) #1-6, 8-9, 11-14
In Winter Soldier, Ed Brubaker achieved something that pretty much no one thought he could pull off. Heck, his own editor thought he couldn't pull it off when Brubaker first suggested the idea. But after Brubaker explained it, his editor realized what readers of the title also realized - Brubaker had a really good way to bring Bucky back to life!
In this storyline, Brubaker told a few compelling stories that interacted with each other - the major one, of course, was the revelation that Bucky not only survived the rocket plane explosion that left Cap in frozen status for decades, but Bucky was rescued by Russians who brainwashed him into a deadly assassin, keeping him in cryogenic status for months and years at a time between missions (so no one would be able to identify him - after all, five years later, they'd be looking for a 25 year old man while Bucky was still 20). This is how he gained the name Winter Soldier.
Meanwhile, the Red Skull is about to start his latest plot against Captain America when a new villain steps in a seemingly kills the Skull. This new bad guy, Aleksander Lukin, was the current operative in charge of the Winter Soldier, and he used Bucky to kill Skull and steal the Cosmic Cube.
This led to a number of daring attacks and a tragic assault on the city of Philadelphia.
All the while, Captain America had been feeling out of sorts (after the events of Avengers Disassembled), so he was in a particularly poor frame of mind to discover that his former sidekick is now a pretty deadly assassin.
Brubaker does a really great job balancing the various characters and their personalities in the series, while never flinching on the action, either. Steve Epting did an excellent job on the artwork, with some fine fill-in work by Mike Perkins for Epting and Michael Lark does his typical brilliant work on some flashback sequences.
That's the countdown! Agree? Disagree? Let us know!