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Joseph Parrott. But first, a clip from a rare interview given by Jack Kirby, one of Captain America's creators. Let's take a listen. I've always tried to do the timely thing. The timely thing, I think, is.
what people understand. Captain America is a product of his time. If you're talking about Captain America, I mean, the first place you have to start is with that origin story. Look! Up in the sky!
It's a bird! It's a plane! It's Superman! You had an explosion after the appearance of Superman in the late 1930s, of these superheroes who were selling really well. And so you had a lot of new heroes popping up.
And you had a number of mostly young guys concentrated in New York trying to create these new heroes. And one of these guys was somebody named Joe Simon. And Joe Simon was working with another guy named Jack Kirby, his name was Jacob Kurtzberg at the time. But Joe Simon's trying to come up with one of these heroes and the first thing he kind of thinks to himself one day, I mean there are a bunch of stories about this, but if we listen to Joe Simon's version, which I think is pretty good, here's Captain America's co-creator, Joe Simon, in the 2011 documentary, Captain America, The First Avenger. I was 24 when we first created Captain America.
Jack Kirby was 22. At the uh beginning there, Batman was doing very well. Basically, on the use of his villains.
So I said, maybe that's the answer. You know, get yourself a good villain and then get a foil for the villain. set it the other way around. Joe Simon asked himself essentially, all right, how do we get the best heroes? And he said that essentially the best heroes, the ones who sold the best, were the ones who fought the best villains.
And so, if you're trying to think of the kind of best villain of the era, why create a new villain when you have the best villain possible? Adolf Hitler. I figure, well, he's alive with one on his own brutal way. He'll be the villain. And who do we get to fight against the Nazis?
Who better than Captain America? Here's Jack Kirby, the creator of Captain America, explaining more about that in 1988. This was at a time when everybody was patriotic. Uh there wasn't a day Pass by That uh You know, we didn't get news from Europe in the newspapers, and it was ridiculous not to do Captain America. There was an idea that would have been brought by everybody.
So Joe and I did that. Our job was to sell comic books.
So they essentially create Captain America, Joe Simon and Jack Kirby do, as this kind of antithesis to Hitler and this Nazi regime. And so he has to stand for kind of all the best parts of the United States, stand for democracy, stand for freedom, stand for a certain level of, you know, ideal equality, right? Which contrasts against Hitler in Nazi Germany, which is fascist, targeting Jews and gypsies and all these other folks, and also invading much of Europe, invading Poland, invading France by 1940, isolating Great Britain and bombing London over and over and over again. Captain America essentially stands for everything that Hitler does. And that's how we get in December of 1940, a full year before Pearl Harbor, this first issue of Captain America, where he's jumping through the window and I had Captain America beating up on Hitler, punching Hitler in the face.
and Captain America. breaking into Nazi strongholds. That's the introduction to Captain America. And the introduction to this kind of superhero that stands not just for kind of might and taking care of the little person, but for all these values that the United States is going to become associated with. Captain America became the symbol of everything that was happening.
It's first released just after the peacetime draft started. Captain America is this little scrawny 4F guy. We later get to know his name as Steve Rogers. He wanted to be a soldier, but he was skinny and not very muscular and so forth. But because he's so patriotic, he's selected essentially for this experiment to create American super soldiers, to in many ways fight this kind of ideal of the German super soldier.
The chemical is perfected, gentlemen, and the time has come at last.
Well, there's nothing more to be said. I wish you Godspeed. And he becomes the singular Captain America because, as this experiment is happening, it's shown that there's actually a German agent who's infiltrated the experiment. You and your accursed experiment shall die within this room. Down with democracy!
Down with freedom! Dr. Erskine. Take cover, Rogers, and I'll stop that murderer. No, it's my job.
It's what I was created to do. He kills the scientist who's in charge of this. He destroys Formula before Captain America is able to take him out. And by the end of that story, it's revealed that he's actually Private Steve Rogers, so he's Captain America, the superhero. But in real life, he's this relatively low-ranking guy.
So if Hitler's the number one villain, we also get this creation of this kind of ultimate comic book Nazi film. I used to go to a place called Schras and I had my lunch here. I usually wind up with a hot pod Sunday. I'd sit there looking at the fudge Sunday thinking of a a bill. And I see this brown fudged tentacles coming out of it.
I say, Wow, that's a very weird looking creature Dillon and looks something like that and we call him Hotfudge. And then I uh kept looking at it and kept looking at it. And then I saw the big cherry on top of it. And I said, that's it. The Red Skull!
It was the cherry. He's originally kind of an American fifth columnist. He's actually killed, but he's such a good villain, the Red Skull. He's so memorable. He becomes so associated with Nazism.
He gets trotted back out a number of times in the 1940s. He tends to get killed, and then he kind of magically reappears. But he kind of captures that threat of Nazis being one, kind of, you know, just constantly there, constantly fighting, constantly reappearing, but also that kind of almost visage of death. Captain America. But you will not interfere with my plans.
Nothing can stop the Rift's cow. One of the things I think is really important is really to emphasize when Captain America came out. It is a full year before Pearl Harbor, I can't stress that enough. And we're coming out of this period where the United States was extremely Isolation is even though Britain looks like they're kind of the last great democracy of Europe against this fascist threat. There's still a real sense of hesitance, of fear, of this isn't our fight, that we have this free security provided by oceans.
Joe Simon, Jack Kirby, a first-generation Polish-Jewish American from Manhattan, these two kind of New York Jews, they understand exactly what this threat from Hitler is, partially because of this Jewish identity, and partially because they're in New York. I once had six Nazis call me up and they said, well, we're waiting for you downstairs. We're going to beat the daylights out of you, you know, for writing these stories about Hitler. These were New York Nazis, and they had a camp on Long Island. And so I says, Hold on guys, I'll be right down.
But of course I I Take the elevator down. But there was nobody there. I looked in the street and of course they wouldn't be there and I I didn't feel disappointed, and I felt disappointed. It didn't matter to me one way or the other. You know, if they wanted a fight, well, what the heck?
In New York, there's this kind of sense that the United States needs to get involved in this fight, and this is especially strongly felt in the Jewish community, among others. And so, when they have Captain America jumping through this window, punching Hitler in the face, this is essentially a call to action. All I miss. All our legends. reflect our Addiction.
to create legends. And I feel like a human quality. I felt that it was time. to create A new kind of legend. He did those daring things which Americans dreamt of doing and were on the brink of doing.
But We were still biting out time. And then, once the United States is actually into the war, he's actually going to the front line, whereas Superman and Batman actually tend to hang back.
So, this really legitimizes Captain America, becomes central to. His identity as a hero, that he's out there fighting that good fight for democracy. And it seems just kind of fun, fanciful, comic stuff to grab kids' and adults' attention. But it's more than that. In many ways, it taps into some of the real anxieties that existed in the United States about this potential for Nazi invasion.
And Captain America and these superheroes are kind of the American psychological answer, right? Let's kind of trot these guys out. They're our own super soldiers. They represent our own, you know, best ideals for how we'd like to fight these things. And then offering, you know, a fun message that, hey, you know, we're going to beat these guys.
We're going to win. This is going to be great. All those who chose to oppose his shield by shield. They've let your fight and the duel is duke, and the red and the white and the blue come through and cast them around. The story of Captain America here on our American Stories.
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Why are companies really asking workers to come back to the office? Does boycotting a business actually work? Should we quit social media? We're here when the news gets personal and the headlines hit home. Join Molly and me every Friday on Impromptu from Washington Post Opinions.
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