This is "Never Gonna Be the Same Again," a feature where I look at how bold, seemingly "permanent" changes were ultimately reversed. This is not a criticism, mind you, as obviously things are always going to eventually return to "normal." That's just how superhero comic books work. It's just fun to see how some of these rather major changes are reversed. This is differentiated from "Abandoned Love," which is when a new writer comes in and drops the plot of the previous writer. Here, we're talking about the writer who came up with the idea being the same one who resolved the change. This is also differentiated from "Death is Not the End," which is about how "dead" characters came back to life, since this is about stuff other than death.
Today, we look at how the Captain America/Falcon partnership, which even led to the title of Captain America's comic book series changing to include "And Falcon," ended.
Falcon was introduced by Stan Lee and Gene Colan in Captain America #117...
Falcon soon proved his mettle in Captain America's battle against the Red Skull's minions...
and the two of them took down the Red Skull together...
After their initial team-up, though, Cap and Falcon returned to the United States together, but went their separate ways. Cap teamed up with Falcon again in Captain America #126, but it wasn't until Captain America #133 that he actually asked Falcon to become his partner...
With the next issue, the book was re-titled Captain America and the Falcon...
With Captain America and the Falcon #143, the Falcon even got his own matching corner box!
Falcon gained wings in Captain America and the Falcon #171...
The partnership even continued when Jack Kirby took over the title, and Kirby was doing his own thing at the time, so it would have been very easy for him to choose to drop the Falcon...
Although, there was so much going on on the cover of Kirby's first issue that he omitted the Falcon's name, but it was back the next issue...
After Kirby left, Roy Thomas took over the series, but soon had to bring in Don Glut to co-write it as Thomas was doing SO MUCH at Marvel at the time. In Captain America and the Falcon #217, Thomas wrote Falcon out of the series...
He and Glut had introduced the S.H.I.E.L.D. Super-Agents and Nick Fury asked Cap to lead them and Cap instead recommended Falcon...
Cap was busy worrying about his past back then (as Thomas correctly noted that very little had ever been written about Cap's past back in those days) and so he wanted some alone time to deal with it...
It would six more issues before Falcon's name came off of the title of the book...
Cap and Falcon have worked as partners many times since, but never like that original sustained run (except their short-lived ongoing series by Christopher Priest around 2004).
If anyone else has a suggestion for Never Gonna Be The Same Again, please drop me a line at brianc@cbr.com!