Curtains for Cap

Captain America met his maker this past Wednesday when the final issue of his comicbook hits newstand racks. Oddly enough, the august flag-garbed jingoist is felled by something as mundane as a sniper’s bullet. Actually, Joe Simon, half of the creative team who first hatched the character in the Spring of 1941, is still with us, holding steady at a ripe old age of 93 and reportedly none too pleased by the demise of creation. Cap was a favorite of mine as a kid, the bright red, white and blue colors of his costume and signature shield capturing my imagination before Spider-Man wooed me away with tales of teen angst tied to super heroics. He paged through countless incarnations during his 66 years in circulation with costumes and backstories so profuse and convoluted it would take a cinema screen-sized schematic to keep track. He also inspired a cadre of copycats, my pick among them the even weirder Captain Canuck. Overtly political in appearance and bearing, writers and artists imagined an assortment of personalities for him from benevolent boy scout to facist patriot. I lost track of him sometime in the mid-80s (around the end of the Zeck/DeMatteis years), but his Wikipedia entry does a pretty decent job filling in the blanks. Also on the subject of comics, copious thanks to my pal Ted for hipping me to this Blog structured in much the same manner as musical counterparts like Church Number 9, etc. and providing back issues in generous batches while also begging the question: Is there anything that can’t be downloaded these days?