December 16, 2011
SHOULDN'T THAT BE "WIMPY, BUT DECENT"?:
Joe Simon, a Creator of Captain America, Is Dead at 98 (BRUCE WEBER, 12/16/11, NY Times)[M]r. Simon's most enduring character, which he created with Mr. Kirby, is that defender of (among other things) the national honor, Captain America. The alter ego of a decent but wimpy young fellow named Steve Rogers who has volunteered to take an experimental serum that turns him into a perfect specimen of human athleticism, Captain America was a supersoldier. Muscular, masked, clad in red, white and blue and carrying a shield he could fling as a weapon -- though not possessed of any explicit superpowers -- he appeared for the first time in December 1940 (the issue was dated March 1941), a year before the United States entered World War II. On the cover he was pictured delivering a right cross to Adolf Hitler. It was Hitler who provided the impetus for the character.
"The comics that were doing really well at the time were ones with clever villains in them, so I started by looking around for the perfect villain," Mr. Simon wrote in his autobiography, "Joe Simon: My Life in Comics." "I thought to myself, Let's get a real live villain. Adolf Hitler would be the perfect foil for our next new character, what with his hair and that stupid-looking mustache and his goose-stepping. He was like a cartoon anyway."
Posted by Orrin Judd at December 16, 2011 7:30 PM
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