Issue(s): Captain America #206, Captain America #207, Captain America #208, Captain America #209, Captain America #210, Captain America #211, Captain America #212, Captain America #213, Captain America #214, Captain America annual #3, Captain America annual #4
Cover Date: Feb-Oct 77
Title: "Face to face with the Swine!" / "The tiger and the Swine!!" / "The river of death!" / "Arnim Zola -- the bio-fanatic!!" / "Showdown day!" / "Nazi "X"!" / "The face of a hero!" / "The Night Flyer!" / "Power" / "The thing from the black hole star!" / "The great mutant massacre!"
Credits:
Jack Kirby - Writer
Jack Kirby - Penciler
Frank Giacoia / Michael W. Royer / Dan Green / Frank Giacoia & John Verpoorten / John Tartaglione & John Verpoorten - Inker

Review/plot:
Ooooh, this is so bad. It's really sad how bad it is. It was very difficult to read. Kirby's art is still fun, but the plotting and dialogue is just terrible.

The main plot introduces the super-geneticist Arnim Zola - who apparently has a super-villain name: the Bio-Fanatic.

Zola works with the Red Skull and... they fight Captain America and Sharon Carter and stuff.

    

They send "Nazi X" after him; an android with Hitler's brain.

The Falcon gets sort of sidelined fighting a giant genetically altered bird - the conclusion of that fight doesn't even happen on panel.

It's painfully delivered.

There is a sequence with Sam raving about the apple pie dessert he's going to get that i enjoyed.

This is sort of contrasted with a bad guy that we lose sight of early on; some jerk that runs a prison camp and makes people eat too much.

The last two issues introduce "The Corporation", a mysterious businesslike organization that will appear in a number of future stories. They're after a mysterious patient being held by SHIELD called "The Defector" . We meet Kligger and Veda from the Corporation...

...and Veda's agent the awesome Night Flyer.

The Corporation also have a SHIELD agent on their payroll. Cap and the Falcon aren't able to defeat the Night Flyer but SHIELD is able to determine that he's powered by his Glider that's hovering over the hospital, and by taking that out, the Night Flyer is "scarred -- charred -- and thoroughly a dead issue". That won't stop him coming back once more for an arc in Hulk.

There are also two annuals. The first deals with Cap fighting aliens.

    

It's pretty standard stuff, but it's interesting because it shows how the military deals with all the aliens that come to Earth:

General (to Cap): Aliens are easy for you to understand. You've fought Kree and Skrull alike, consorted with a living... god. But what does the average man know -- or care -- of Galactus, or the Watcher... or any of the myriad nightmares we've discovered these past few years? And if the average man did know... good lord, man, just imagine the panic... the terror. We downplay UFOs because we have to, Cap... to preserve mankind's collective sanity... but who knows, maybe someday we'll be able to meet these aliens on their level. Someday, but not today...

The second is more interesting, with Cap working to save an alien who is presumed to be a mutant from Magneto and a new band of Brotherhood of Evil Mutants.

    

The names of these Mutants are Burner, Lifter, Peeper, Shocker, and Slither, but, with the exception of Slither, they all later change their names to Crucible, Meteorite, Occult and Paralyzer, respectively. Not sure if it's necessarily a change for the better, but i'm listing the characters by their later names.

Arnim Zola is awesome, and his creations and the aliens are good fodder for Kirby's artwork, but overall this is bad.

Quality Rating: D+

Historical Significance Rating: 6 - first Arnim Zola, first Corporation. First Burner (Crucible), Lifter (Meteorite), Peeper (Occult), Shocker (Paralyzer), and Slither. First Threkker (the Captive).

Chronological Placement Considerations: The Falcon and Leila start this storyline at SHIELD's psychological unit, declaring that they are no longer brainwashed. I'm allowing some time after the end of Cap #205 for the Falcon to be fully checked out and for SHIELD to apply whatever technique they use to fix Leila, since she wasn't cured by Agron as Falcon was. In annual #4, Captain America says he was unable to reach Xavier in order to get the X-Men's help in dealing with Magneto, perhaps because Xavier was currently waiting by the portal for the X-Men to return from Shi'ar space. In Uncanny X-Men #112, Magneto says that this appearance took place after his fight with the X-Men in Uncanny X-Men #104. Captain America is blind for a while towards the end of this arc, but recovers by issue #214. My trade reprint places both annuals after the issues from the regular series, and i've simply left things in that order. Issue #215 - by Roy Thomas - makes it clear that Cap's recovery from blindness is still a recent thing, but i'm still allowing that the events of the annuals could have taken place between #214-215.

References:

• Captain America faced Magneto previously with the Avengers in Avengers #110 and Avengers #111.

Crossover: N/A

Continuity Insert? N

My Reprint: Captain America And The Falcon: The Swine TPB

The South American dictator was called the Swine, and he got killed by that big red fish-monster-thing.

After these issues, Donna Maria never appeared again(I don't think, anyway).

Man, I could really go for a "Big A" right now. Why you get apple pie and ice cream at a Spanish (or maybe Mexican) restaurant is beyond me, though. Kirby you maniac!

Mark, Donna Maria did appear again- Gruenwald brought her back for a few issues in the 400s of Cap.

I remember reading one commentator who noted Magneto's obsession with always having a homuncular sycophant around in these early mutant groups (Toad, Amphibius, Peeper).

Occult should probably be listed as Peeper (as he's named here) or Peepers (as he's named in Wolverine #164 onwards). He doesn't use the name Occult after his Resistants appearances (solely in Cap books) and later returns in various X-Books (Wolverine, various Decimation tie-ins, briefly Messiah CompleX) and usually fills the role of "prominent loser".

Thanks Scott. I've updated the tags for all the Mutants to show both names.

I do want to caution that there will always be cases where characters have had multiple names of (more or less) equal prominence, and i don't want to get in the habit of constantly rethinking the tag i've chosen or listing strings of alternates. In other words, i've changed the tags this time, but it doesn't establish a precedent. ;-)

You've left Lifter out of you Characters Appearing links.

Thanks Jay.

Night Flyer was indeed awesome (with Kirby scripting him, anyway). No matter what our heroes came up with, he seemed to be prepared for it. I was disappointed in the ending to his story here. But really the endings to all of the stories in this Kirby run felt like they had rushed. I loved the big ideas and awesome artwork and I'm not even a big detractor of the corny dialogue, but the plotting left a lot to be desired. It felt like Kirby was pacing a story that would last a dozen issues, only to give up halfway through (perhaps because of reader complaints or something, I don't know) and wrap it up too quickly.

Arnim Zola said the cast-iron box he discovered in his castle that contained the secrets of genetic engineering had been "brought back from the near-east during the Crusades…"

You don't suppose the box could have been stolen from Prester John?

Also, how would Zola know this? Did his ancestor's own the castle at the time of the Crusades (and they left a log)?

Also, if so was it Zola's ancestor who stole the box from Prester John and brought it back to Switzerland?

And where do people think Kirby intended Prester John to have learned the secrets of genetic engineering? That is, we saw his technology, but no evidence of him being knowledgeable about genetics!?

With Kirby' Marvel work of the 19670s, the best bet would be the Kree, since they also created the Inhumans. Kirby doesn't seem to have seen the Kree as evil conquerors, but rather as a humanlike species that had simply advanced further.

At some point Arnim Zola received information and/or technology from Phaeder and Maelstrom. This was first suggested in Avengers #250 when the Vision observed that the clone bodies used by Maelstrom and his minions were very similar to the clones of the Hulk that Zola had created. It was later confirmed in the OHOTMU.

Also, the cast-iron box containing the secrets of genetic engineering that Zola discovered hidden in his castle originated with the Deviants.

@Omar: So how do you propose the "secrets" ended up in the near-east, and where exactly in the NE?

@Ben: I was asking about Kirby's original intent. Phaeder and Maelstrom would not have been in his mind since they'd not been created then (and not by him). And he didn't intend the Deviants to be part of the MU proper then. The Celestials mythos was introduced into the MU after he left.

@Omar: So how do you propose the "secrets" ended up in the near-east, and where exactly in the NE? -- Nathan Adler

Given Kirby's interest in Von Daniken's ideas and Forteana around this time -- ancient astronauts stuff turns up a lot in his work, and Black Panther has a lot of stuff about out-of-place artifacts and the mutations from the Vibranium landfall and so on -- I'd guess he was reviving his ":ancient astronauts" idea from the old stories the Kree creating the Inhumans.

In that case, it was the Kree who also left behind the super-science that would become Prester John's Avalon just as they left behind the Terrigen Mists the Inhumans used. Perhaps it was also Kree technology that created King Solomon's Tomb, which one would also imagine would be located in the Near East.

This all assumes that Kirby intended all of his Marvel work to weave together into a greater mythos, of course, and I don't know that he would have given that level of detail to Marvel after the way both that company and DC had treated him

@Omar: Re: the Inhumans, don't forget apart from the Kree, they also began conducting dangerous, experiments (?forbidden?) which brought the Kree Sentry to come and warn them of the risk and danger, and attempt to halt it (but he arrived too late). Upon this realisation, the Sentry warns them that they will be shunned by their fellow man; in essence they are no longer human but have made themselves In-human (what he meant by this I can’t recall but am assuming it was their exposing themselves to the Terrigen Mists). After this meddling the Sentry assessed them to be a failed Kree experiment. It's further implied the Kree didn’t put the Terrigen Mists there! If so, where did Kirby intend Terrigen to have derived from, and why did the Kree consider it a problem/ taint? Does the term "Terrigen" mean not "Earth-gene", but "Terrible Gene" after the Latin prefix terri- from "terrible" and -gen "that which is generated"? Is this why the Sentry dubbed them the "In-humans"!? If so, what terror did the Kree Sentry believe they would release upon Earth, or the Universe? It sounds foreboding now, doesn't it!?

On a more prosaic note, "terrigen" is probably a play on the medical term "teratogen", any substance that causes abnormal physiologic development, from the Greek, meaning "monster making".

I had not considered that beforehand, but I do like the idea that the secrets Zola found were somehow related to the Kree or their subjects the Inhumans. I really like the implicit ties to Prester John and Kirby's Black Panther stories.

I don't believe Kirby had any master plan, but he did like to work within a mythos and certainly built on his past concepts.

Thinking about it, I wonder if they took the name "Primus" from one of the characters in Czech writer Karel Capek's play "R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots), an early Sci-fi work which among other things, introduced the word "robot" to English and other languages. Capek's robot were not metal beings but artificial humans designed to to the work of humans (Robot comes from an old czech word meaning slave labour) and they were made from a synthetic skin, much like Primus here and revolted against their programming (ideas swiped by Phillip K Dick for "Do andriods dream?/Blade runner.)

I actually rather enjoyed the two-page Cap/Monster spread, Liefeldian physics notwithstanding.

To say nothing about the rest of the artwork here, I've always felt Magneto is the one Kirby co-creation that Kirby himself never draws right, even 10+ years later. The helmet always looks too big rather than stylistic, and then there's those psychic eyes. All his dialogue seems like it should be delivered in a shrill yell, which is jarring for someone who grew up with David Hemblen's dignified yet commanding voice in the 90s cartoon (with respect to McKellan and Fassbender). I realize THAT characterization of Magneto comes a bit later. Still.

Arnim Zola's awesomeness alone makes it all worthwhile. Jim Hendricks' name might be an homage to Jimi Hendrix, and Donna Maria Puentes' name, to Donnie and Marie Osmond.