Steranko's Captain America: Techniques in a Top-Notch Trilogy

CAP #110 “Alone No More!”

From the first panels, we get the essence of noir, and a very cinematic approach: the figure, against a repeating background, advances to the fore. The deft caption tells us it’s Steve Rogers- the man who is Captain America. The star literally walks up from the anonymous streets, towards a concert appearance poster of his star-spangled public identity, hanging on a wall. If you happened to be a lonely young person yourself, this moody opening is a sure-fire grabber.

Steve lights a pipe- maybe he was depicted smoking occasionally back then still, it’s so out-of-character for the interpretation with which I grew up, but maybe that one was too lilly-white anyway. The dark overcast on his countenance is the beginning of a recurrent visual, where Cap will be presented in silhouette in key moments where our fearless hero feels angst. I love how literally he becomes ‘alone no more’- but we’ll get to the Hulk’s hands bursting through the wall momentarily. I want to stop and focus on the way Steve stands, facing away towards the poster, whose image now contains more nuance than we first saw, more trouble and loneliness in the eyes peering back gigantically. He’s confronting the titanic, larger-than-life nature of his life as Captain America- how it’s separated him from the lot of ordinary men, with their loves, friendships, jobs, concerns, dreams. You might say the image before him is as he sees it: not the poster itself, but staring back at the truth in his own eyes, as Steve sees the man behind the mask in his own mind.
All brilliant-still not two pages in!
I could linger over every page, and let me tell you, I am in my second-only reading of this classic tale, but I can’t stop flipping back and forth now, looking at it with a second vision of its techniques besides reading the story. This guest appearance- by the skinny but limber and powerful Hulk-is just superb. The central dilemma of his existence parades through these pages in seven pages: wild, defensive, incredible, confused, destructive. Straight from his ongoing narrative, Rick Jones appears to try once more to calm his emerald friend, but we’re heading right back to the original switch-off from Marvel’s earliest days (just five years before): Rick will end up beside Cap, leaving the Hulk. First, we have a quick battle, two very reluctant foes with no especial malice, separated only by the bestial nature of the Hulk, united by the nobility of Captain America. Alas, as the night-bound battle concludes- the military once again stymied-Cap can only settle for rescuing Rick, snatching him from the Hulk’s grasp as he leaps away in one fantastic perspective panel. Strangely, Hulk’s unconcerned for Rick- if anything, here, he’s regressed too far to really recognize his human friend.
I make all these observations- I am in such a long line of admirers, I can only hope to pick out something in a unique way, and don’t wish to retell what the tantalizing pages so expertly do! Every single choice not only tells the story, but does so with a deeply thoughtful, unique choice. I am hardly the only one to observe what a pity it is that Steranko couldn’t do a longer run, but he stopped after he got it just perfect- maybe the masterpiece is the point. So many major points, too: it’s not just a well-done tale, but one full of pivotal innovations for the evolution of the strip and adding an enduring villain, at that, in Madame Hydra/ Viper. The Hulk strip’s changed by Rick’s move here (for now- he won’t be going back for a long time), even if the encounter’s one of the endless nightmares he’ll never remember. But the danger also legitimizes Cap accepting Rick into his company: he’s insistent, in his thoughts, that Rick can’t go back to the Hulk! And there’s not a breath taken before Rick shakes up Cap’s world by appearing again in the Bucky costume (with no reference to when he did so previously), defying Cap to give him a chance in plain-spoken dialogue. I love how Cap sees his endangerment of Bucky in Hulk’s imperilment of Rick, too. After all, Cap sees another lost soul in Hulk, someone he wanted to help, who he would’ve gladly protected if only Hulk had not already been enraged by the pursuing military. And yes, there’s something interesting about Cap being at cross-purposes with the military, where he got his beginning: it’s a quiet symbol of how the young people of the day were increasingly divided by the forceful certainty of military deployments, to debatable purposes in the face of eminent threats. Even the Hydra plot to pollute the water is super-timely!
Best of all, between drama and action, it just...never...stops!!! So exciting!!!!
That’s true all the way through this trilogy. Each one has a slam-bang trademark double-page spread- I daresay, from my knowledge of comics history, Steranko innovated those, at least, showed how to do them so memorably. Slender, powerful, graceful anatomy; angles that really make me wonder, every page, if this was the first thing that came to mind, or how often did he play with certain layouts or where from his notes did he draw on them; cool lighting, excellent coloring, characterization, maybe the most inspired Stan Lee scripting you could ask for, and of course, the callback to the original Captain America and Bucky in this new partnership. I love how they both struggle with the new roles, but Rick proves Cap’s gut determination to have faith in him to be spot-on. One more development: the re-establishment of Cap’s secret I.D. All this, and Cap saves the Avengers? We get the first female Captain America villain? OH, my Lord. That’s all I can say.

I am on the fence as to treat these like you’ve never read them and keep from spoilering anything critical, so let me state, if you have never read Captain America #110, 111, and 113, don’t toy with my humble words any further! Get the Visionaries volume, skip the X-Men stories, and dive straight into a comic that defines superhero comics. If you don’t like this, you probably don’t like superhero comics! If you don’t read comics, these epitomize what all the fuss was about. These are the kind of comics that are the reason we have blockbuster movies about the concepts, today: because if you depict events thoughtfully, mix in characterization while ripping the governor off the action, and know how to connect with true “hell yeah!” moments, you can entertain most audiences. I will tell you, comic books, God love’em, are not usually this good. You might find yourself wondering with me how effective Cap’s strategy is, long-term, for his personal life dilemma, but if we are talking about just three comic books, I don’t see how anyone on God’s green Earth could cram anymore excitement and nuance into just 60 pages of material. To say nothing of three awesome covers!

So what else? I like the static foreground element of Rick sleeping while Cap moves away.
Cap’s a master of misdirection. In the first battle with Madame Hydra and company, he uses a victory out-of-sight to come back as a cybernetically-enhanced Hydra goon. He makes the call to send Rick out of the battle to safety, too- which not only protects his untrained partner in the melee, but serves to separate Hydra forces. The conclusion’s nicely sequenced: Rick loses handily to Madame Hydra, who decides to drop him to be washed away rather than “waste a single bullet on the likes of you!” Cap calls for his arm; the rescue becomes a convenient distraction for Madame Hydra’s escape, which is almost certainly her plan.

I like Captain America’s positive assessment of their successes in the end: for one, they’re both still alive, but the contamination plot’s broken up, too. The story’s nicely self-contained while setting up the trilogy: Rick’s succeeded in his audition. Hydra’s depicted as utterly ruthless in their abandonment of their own to be swept away in the sewers. Cap’s decided he will indeed take on a partner- and while this union’ s short-lived, in the upcoming years, that’s the main way he’ll work, especially with Marvel’s first African-American hero, The Falcon!

#111 “Tonight You Live, Tomorrow I Die!”

Steve walks into an arcade for a secret meeting with Nick Fury- seems like a code word might have saved a lot of trouble, but the point made is, if you can contact Steve Rogers, you can create a trap for Captain America. The depiction of the arcade creates menace: the knives, the signs promoting shooting games, even the creepy fortune teller robot- and of course, the cowboy robot, pistol drawn. Steranko uses aspect-to-aspect: time ticks forward suspense-fully in the seconds it takes the eye to move over panels with each detail. It’s great story-telling: he’s laying out the field of the ensuing melee. The usefulness of concealing your shield on your back’s also apparent!
I love the thoughtful sequence where Cap’s demonstrating his fighting technique to Rick. You not only get multi-image acrobatics, but a breakdown of how they’re incorporated to shift from defense to offense to defense.

The brooding Jones becomes collateral in a kidnapping attempt,which merges his characterization of doubts in his role as “Bucky” with an eerie sequence inspired by Dali and psychedelics. First we get one more use of a technique Steranko inspired that gradually disappears from comics after a spell of imitation, where he puts what a character sees in a panel with the character, juxtaposed. In #110, Cap sees a Hydra agent, in a bold graphic colored differently, drawing a bead with his gun, and we see this too, while most of the panel’s focused on a frame of Cap under siege of brute force. In #111, we see the card in Bucky’s hand, as he sees it, poised above him as he’s depicted reading it. This merging of two visual aspects into a single moment in time in a panel works well; it’s tricky if not laid out just-so. It's reminiscent of the Cubist use of the "fourth dimension" technique, composed of differing figures turned in space across an additionally-implied temporal dimension. (In other words, same background space, different figures, and each depiction's a progression!) We’ll get a different variation on the idea when Steve walks in to find Rick kidnapped, then turns from the doorway to spring out at the reader, resulting in a smashed window exit to the street! Most comics storytelling depicts a single figure in a single place, with one clear action- even if an agile movement across the panel is implied with speed lines.

The spring outwards takes us straight to a double-page spread where Cap’s thigh is actually much thicker than his head! But try turning the page to capture the perspective of the body’s twist in the plane of the movements: it totally works. Making anatomical exaggerations look right has a long-standing tradition of artistic headaches. It takes a sharp vision to turn a body in an angle that, particularly at the time, had no models!

Particularly in the Hydra headquarters scenes, Steranko uses bodies and equipment to make unconventional panel borders. Using a quirky view screen to shape a panel is straight out of Kirby, but leave it to Jim to use a sensual leg! He may well have an antecedent in Eisner: I haven’t seen all of Will’s work, but he’d been very playful with graphic designs-merged-with-storytelling.

The ending twist- as revealed in #113’s conclusion-seems very old-school-comics, but the essential idea (of a decoy bearing the physical evidence meant to misdirect one’s foes) could be readily updated many ways. The end of #113 has a neat visual: Steve’s doffing his hood and turning away, concealed, as he explains how his plan has terminated the idea of Steve Rogers being his true identity. When you consider it as the bookend to #110, we’ve got Cap exiting Steranko’s narrative exactly as he came into it: trench-coated solitary mystery man. Undeniable noir coolness.

We’re reminded Captain America’s a soldier, too, in one moment that seems fatal to the Hydra assassins: you know the one, where he tells Buck to shoot his motorcycle fuel tank! Granted, in World War II, most soldiers were not trained to kill, still, though circumstances necessitated what would elsewhere be straight-up hand-to-hand murder. But Cap and Bucky fought their battles on their own terms, not the Code-Approved superhero morality. I think Steranko’s pretty clear, Hydra’s blown to pieces. The unintentional (according to the dialogue) hoisting of Madame Hydra by her own petard is big movie cool. I especially think Cap would try to avoid killing a female combatant at the time, even one so vicious.

I didn’t mind her background story: it moved quickly and added some depth with a touch of grim realism about struggle producing a life of crime. Good symbolism, too: she’s apparently quite beautiful, yet so haunted by her hair-hidden scars that she cannot allow herself to be a beautiful person.

The single “buy” I found difficult is one every super-team writer encounters: how do you knock out beings of differing amounts of strength with a single gassing? It seems like what would anesthetize Thor would kill Hawkeye. And why would it work on the Vision at all? (I think it’s safe to assume he was thought of as a synthetic man at this point, meaning, an artificially-generated physical simulacrum mostly identical to humanity.) You’d never get Iron Man that way, today, either. But it’s not today: it’s 1968 as these pages are inked and lettered. And damned if it isn’t the very essence of all a superhero comic aspired to be in that era, too!