Featuring: Captain America
Release: November 11, 1965
Cover: February 1966
12 cents
Blazing story: Stan Lee
Burning layouts: Jack Kirby
Blistering artwork: George Tuska
Burnt-out lettering: Artie Simek
10 pages
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| Tales of Suspense #74 | Reading order | Tales of Suspense #75 |
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Nazism, and all the evil it stood for, are dead! They must never live again!
Solid cover design.
This arc opened pretty strong. Red Skull vowed that his revenge would come 20 years after the day of his death on “Der Tag” when the Sleepers awakened. And the Sleepers turned out to be giant robots that combined together to make an even bigger robot. Solid premise. But hasn’t done much with it. We met one robot, then another. In the finale, we meet the third.
This is the brain, shaped like Red Skull’s head.
Cap has a pretty crazy theory that they’ll head to the North Pole and blow up the Earth. I don’t see much evidence to support that, and in fact I don’t think the North Pole is as close to Earth’s core as Cap thinks it is.
The flaw in the Sleepers is that they can’t actually think.
Why this story is disappointing is it just ends so damn fast. After 29 pages of build-up, Cap deals with the unstoppable menace of the Sleepers in a single page. It just doesn’t amount to much and kind of feels like they just ran out of space.
I do appreciate that the loyal Nazis expect the Sleepers to spare them, but then they get slaughtered as well. Shocked to learn their evil leaders don’t actually care about them.
Cap is slowly growing into his quotable self.
“What in blazes are you doing now??”
“The only thing I can do!! Perhaps the one deed I was born to do!!”
“It wasn’t all in vain! The world still belongs to the brave– and the just– and the free!!”
The story is flawed. The art is passable. But Cap gets some good quotes in.
This is plainly a good pause in Cap’s story, whereas Iron Man’s story in this issue ended with a cliffhanger. We also need to be careful about how Cap’s story interacts with Nick Fury’s. To that end, we’ll pause our Cap reading here, but read a couple more Iron Man stories, and then catch up with Cap eventually.
While this blog is mainly about Marvel, I guess it’s worth noting that yesterday, April 18, marked the 85th anniversary of the introduction of Superman. He’s something of an inspiration for many of these characters.
Rating: ★★★☆☆, 51/100
Significance: ★★★☆☆
I read this story in Marvel Masterworks: Captain America vol. 1.
Characters
- Captain America
- General Logan
- Schlag/Agent Three
Story notes:
- Captain America meets General Logan at NATO base.
- Third Sleeper hidden at base of statue of General Frederick Uberholtz.
| Previous | #454 | Next |
|---|---|---|
| Tales of Suspense #74 | Reading order | Tales of Suspense #75 |
| Tales of Suspense #74 | Tales of Suspense | Tales of Suspense #75 |
