“Over the years we had tried to resurrect him, and he never worked,” Stan Lee recalled. “After World War II ended, he was just a guy in a dumb costume running around. I mean, that’s the way a lot of people perceived him.
“So I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be fun to say he had been frozen in the ice for these two decades or whatever it was, and now he’s back?’ I’m always trying to give them a personality hook or a character trait that would make them unique. And I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be great? Here’s a guy who’s been out of it for 20 years, and suddenly everything is changed.’”
That “man out of time” theme was to become the defining dramatic motif in Captain America’s various media incarnations, including his 1968 Bantam paperback novel by science fiction author Ted White — Captain America: The Great Gold Steal.
“Similar to (Otto) Binder in The Avengers Battle The Earth-Wrecker, White also depicts Cap as a man out of his time, struggling to fit into a world drastically different than the one he left behind (the sequence where Cap first sees the New York of the mid-sixties is memorable),” noted the Tain’t the Meat … It’s the Humanity! blog.
“Probably the biggest difference between White’s interpretation of the character and the Marvel version is Captain America himself. White portrays him as a professional soldier, one matured and tempered by his experiences in battle – the idealistic blue-eyed Boy Scout from the comics is nowhere to be seen.”
“And in a bold move, one very much in keeping with the times, White also has Rogers dosed with a form of LSD that rewires his brain allowing him total control over every aspect of his body, from boosting his adrenalin during a confrontation to increasing anti-bodies to fight off infection. In both body and mind, Rogers truly becomes a superior man.”
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| Painting by Mitchell Hooks |
