Issue(s): Captain America #193, Captain America #194, Captain America #195, Captain America #196, Captain America #197, Captain America #198, Captain America #199, Captain America #200
Published Date: Jan-Aug 76
Title: "Screamer in the brain!" / "The Trojan horde" / "1984!" / "Kill-derby" / "The rocks are burning!" / "Captain America's love story" / "The man who sold the United States" / "Dawn's early light!"
Credits:
Jack Kirby - Writer
Jack Kirby - Penciler
Frank Giacoia / D. Bruce Berry - Inker

Review/plot:
Reading this was kind of sad. This is Jack Kirby's return to Marvel after spending about five years at DC where he created the New Gods and they redrew the heads on his Superman. Reading all of the Marvel books chronologically, you can tell what the reaction would be. In many ways, comics were a lot crappier in the mid 70s than they were in the Silver Age, but they'd also grown up a bit. This reads like a Silver Age book; worse, it reads like one without Stan Lee's tongue-in-cheek humor. The dialogue is incredibly stiff and full of exposition. There's very little attempt at character development, and the story is actually fairly empty of characters; aside from Cap and the Falcon, there aren't any fully developed characters at all. The plot is fairly mundane, something we've seen a few times at Marvel already, and doesn't provide Kirby an opportunity to draw any of his big, crazy ideas. The fact that Kirby was plotter, scripter, penciler, and editor on this book was definitely a mistake; there was no one to counterbalance him and prevent him from going off in a bad direction.

A group called the Elite (who are very much like the Secret Empire and would eventually get folded into that organization) develops a device called the Madbomb that causes people to go crazy and fight each other. After getting hit by a mini-version of the bomb...

    

...Captain America and the Falcon are recruited to find the Elite's base and defuse the bomb before it goes off on the day of the celebration of the US's bi-centennial. They discover an underground empire in the desert where people are genetically modified to enjoy working for their "superiors".

Those that do not successfully undergo the modification become genetic freaks.

Cap and the Falcon are captured and then break out of their prison, and they fight their way through the empire, even getting engaged in a skateboarding "death dirby".

In what feels like a mangling of the plot, the army subsequently finds the base on their own, and basically come to Cap and the Falcon's rescue. They learn absolutely nothing about the location of the bomb at this point, but luckily a government spy locates one of the Elite's scientists visiting the house of his sick daughter. With Cap and the Falcon, SHIELD takes over the daughter's sick house and eventually gets their hands on the scientist, who has had a change of heart and tells them the location of the bomb.

The Falcon defuses it while Cap goes after the Elite leader.

And that's the other bizarre and silly thread in this story. The Elite leader, whose last name is Taurey (i.e., Tory)...

...(the leader of the Elite's army is General Heshin, i.e., Hessian), had an ancestor who was a royalist during the Revolutionary War, but was defeated by a revolutionary named Stephen Rogers. He's been hunting for the ancestor of Rogers, who turns out to be... Stephen Rogers, who he doesn't know is Captain America. But Cap hears about this and challenges Taurey to a duel, but Taurey wimps out.

It's a really decompressed story with no subplots or twists or anything. The stilted dialogue is especially problematic in a story that involves mind control and a conspiracy that leads to a lack of trust - are people talking like that because they aren't themselves, or is it just written poorly? Cap and the Falcon aren't even significant drivers of the plot - a lot of the successes in the story come from faceless soldiers and spies. Really weird. And the Falcon says the word "Jive" every three panels.

Generally speaking, nice art, though.

Quality Rating: D

Historical Significance Rating: 3 - Jack Kirby's return to Marvel, first Elites

Chronological Placement Considerations: N/A

References: N/A

Cross-over: N/A

Continuity Implant? N

Reprinted In: Captain America and the Falcon: Madbomb TPB

Some of Kirby's text in his earlier issues was apparently rewritten to reflect elements from previous issues, as you can see from the caption in the Falcon panel up top.