Here is the latest cool comic book moment in our year-long look at one cool comic book moment a day (in no particular order whatsoever)! Here's the archive of the moments posted so far!

Today we look at one of the best moments to appear in Marvel Fanfare, courtesy of one Frank Miller.

Enjoy!

Marvel Fanfare was an odd book - it was a deluxe direct market comic book, with really nice production values - and it published, well, inventory stories, basically! So it is really quite odd to see such a lavish design given for stories that were never got published during the time when they were actually produced. Of course, with all the great writers and artists Marvel had working for them over the years, that meant that they had unpublished stories from some legendary creators, so Marvel Fanfare was where those stories would go. The problem was that it was ALSO the place where unpublished stories from not-so-great creators would go, so the book would be madly uneven (the comic also would come with neat back-ups consisting of pin-ups by notable comic book artists at the time).

This time around, in Marvel Fanfare #18, we got a story written by Roger Stern and drawn by Frank Miller and Joe Rubinstein, so it was well worth the deluxe treatment.

I know Stern wrote the book, so I suppose I should be giving him credit for the cool comic book moment as well, but I just happen to think that the art carries this scene just so much that I tend to lean towards giving Miller the lion's share of the credit here.

The story is a slight one about a group of raving loons complaining about paying too high taxes, and they're going around burning down buildings to extort the city out of a bunch of money. Cap is brought in to help out, and he spends his time kicking ass and chewing gum (at the beginning of the issue, Cap runs out of gum).

Eventually, Cap corners the bad guys at their home base (where they have tons and tons of gasoline), and the lead bad guy tries to set fire to the Unites State flag. Cap lays him out.

Beaten, the guy decides to light himself on fire and soon the whole building goes up in flames.

Cap helps everyone there escape, but then shocks everyone when he runs back into the flaming building! "Where are you going? There's no one left to rescue in there!" "You're wrong. She's still in there."

And that leads us to the cool comic book moment of the day...

Over the top?

You bet.

Awesome?

You bet.

There's some sweet Butch Guice pin-ups in this issue, too - anyone have a scan of them?