Captain America has become one of Marvel‘s most popular heroes, with the character’s role in the Marvel Cinematic Universe making him a household name. However, Cap had been an icon for decades before the MCU was ever thought of. The character was created in 1941’s Captain America Comics #1 by Joe Simon and future Marvel superstar Jack Kirby. He was the most popular Marvel hero of the Golden Age and would reappear in the Silver Age in 1964’s Avengers #4. The character would become the de facto leader of the superhero community and would eventually get his own solo book back, with stories from legends like Stan Lee, Jim Steranko, and a returning Jack Kirby.
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Captain America has starred in some amazing stories over the decades, with some of the most talented creators in comics working on the character. His books sold well in the ’60s and ’70s, and the ’80s saw some of his best stories. However, the ’90s became a problem for the character. The ’90s were the X-Men’s decade, and the rest of Marvel suffered badly. Fans just weren’t really interested in heroes like Captain America anymore, and the House of Ideas didn’t really know what to do with the character. We’d get Cap-Wolf and a weakened armored Cap, but 1995 would bring the best change to the character in years. However, Marvel had other plan,s and they almost ruined everything.
Heroes Reborn Derailed the Best Cap Run in Decades
Captain America had fallen down the charts, as had Avengers, Iron Man, and Fantastic Four. Marvel had tried everything (basically just copying ideas from the X-Men and Image Comics) to fix the problem, but nothing worked. So, in secret, the company began to negotiate with Rob Liefeld and Jim Lee, superstar artists who had left the House of Ideas to form Image, to take over the books. However, before this became common knowledge, the publisher put a new creative team on Captain America in Mark Waid and Ron Garney.
The two of them came on the book after several years of bad stories, with Cap’s supersoldier serum not working and him becoming an armored hero. Captain America #444 would end this plotline and lead into Waid and Garney’s first story, “Operation: Rebirth” in issue #445. This story was back to basics Cap, literally a rebirth of the character. Sharon Carter was brought back, he was working with the government again, and he had to stop Red Skull. It was simple, it was elegant, it was everything that fans wanted and it was praised to high heaven. Sales started to climb as the comic press praised the book and fans realized how great it suddenly was.
Things were starting to ramp up and then Marvel announced Heroes Reborn. Fans were outraged, because they had finally gotten a Cap book that they loved. Even worse than fan disappointment was what Marvel did to Waid and Garney. The creators didn’t know that they were going to have less than a year on the book; they had no idea they were being replaced. It left a bad taste in a lot of fans’ mouths, one that would be compounded by just how bad the Heroes Reborn books were, including Captain America (Vol. 2).
Marvel has long been a shady company, but this was beyond the pale. Back then, their shadiness wasn’t as well-known to fans; the situation with the Waid/Garney run on Cap was the first time that the comic press covered Marvel screwing over creators in real time. Heroes Reborn was a failure, and Captain America (Vol. 2) is widely considered the worst part of it. Readers were turned off to the book not just because no one wanted Liefeld’s Cap, but because they were outraged by Marvel’s treatment of two great creators.
After Heroes Reborn‘s failure, Marvel would bring the two of them back for Captain America (Vol. 3), but even then, Marvel wasn’t done messing with Waid. One of his stories from the book changed so much that he had his name taken off the story and he would leave book after a little over a year before the end of 1999. Marvel, in their zeal to get some of that Image readership, basically destroyed the best Captain America run in decades and then finished the job a few years later.
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