In every Look Back, we examine a comic book issue from 10/25/50/75 years ago (plus a wild card every month with a fifth week in it). This time around, we head to September 1974 to see the debut of Captain America’s new superhero identity, Nomad, the man without a country!
It’s fascinating how there is such an interesting balancing act with comic book history when it comes to certain types of tropes. What I mean is that there are certain kinds of stories that, depending on the particular era of comic book history, are either notable or commonplace, and that boils entirely down to the way that comic books handled continuity. If you are telling just one-off stories, like comic books did for MANY years during the Golden Age and most of the SIlver Age, you could try all sorts of crazy ideas, because everything would be back to normal by the end of the issue. Nowadays, we are ALSO used to comic books trying drastically different things all of the time, since it is so much harder to get readers to pay attention to things.
That, therefore, leaves an interesting period in time when comic books had real continuity, so a major change would last for more than an issue, and that readers weren’t used to this sort of thing, therefore giving the changes real gravity to them. This is a long way towards explaining why it is was such a big deal fifty years ago when Steve Rogers not only abandoned his identity as Captain America, but adopted a brand-new superhero identity in September 1974’s Captain America #180 (by Steve Englehart, Sal Buscema, and Vince Colleta.
Why did Captain America abandon his identity?
As I detailed in a recent Look Back, Captain America was framed for murder, and was forced to go on the run, hunted down by a supervillain, Moonstone, who was pretending to be a superhero. Cap and his partner, Falcon, discovered that this had all been engineered by a shadowy organization known as the Secret Empire, who planned on using a faked attack by a flying ship powered by mutants to attack Washington D.C. The only people who could stop the mutants were the Secret Empire, and the President would then declare martial law, and install the Secret Empire as the rulers of the country.
Captain America foiled the plot, and exposed all the lies, but was shocked to discover that the head of the Secret Empire was actually the then-current President of the United States, who then took his own life in the Oval Office in front of a shocked Captain America.
Captain America struggled with his role as the symbol of America, and ultimately decided that he could no longer, in good conscience, call himself Captain AMERICA, so he quit in Captain America #176…
For the next two issues, the Falcon was forced to fight crime by himself without Captain America, while Steve Rogers adjusted to no longer being a superhero. Then, in Captain America #179, Steve and his girlfriend, Sharon Carter, were accosted by what appeared to be a supervillain. Steve was forced to subdue the “villain” in his civilian identity, and it turned out to be his Avenger teammate, Hawkeye, who was trying to show Steve how he really was too good to STOP being a superhero. He said that if Steve really didn’t want to be Captain America anymore, then fine, but he should be SOME sort of superhero.