Issue(s): Captain America #267
Cover Date: Mar 82
Title: "The man who made a difference!"
Credits:
J.M. DeMatteis - Writer
Mike Zeck - Penciler
John Beatty - Inker
Lance Tooks - Assistant Editor
Jim Salicrup - Editor

Review/plot:
This issue begins with Captain America addressing a group of high school students. The students include Karen Berger...

...who will become so embarrassed by this incident that she'll devote her life to creating a line of high quality non-super hero comics just to show Cap and Marvel up.

And also these guys.

Don't know if the guy on the left is meant to be anyone, but the one on the right is part of a radical gang of teenagers. This guy pulls a gun on Cap and gets knocked out and arrested, but the leader of the group decides to dress up in really one of the most dashing costumes i've ever seen.

Really, the low cut shirt, the chest hair, the giant belt with EM (Every-Man) plastered on it, the amazing color coordination... it's no mystery that this guy got elected the head of a group of hippies and/or toughs.

Cap, meanwhile, is distracted by the earlier incident at the high school...

...so he goes out for a ride on his motorcycle. He winds up in a slum, where some younger kids are happy to see him (i guess no one wants to help that homeless guy in the alley)...

...but the older kids less so.

But you see, Cap has a pretty high tolerance for detractors and troublemakers. He tries to think the best of everyone, and thinks he can reach even people that are being real dicks. So instead of beating them up or banning them from his website, he invites them over to the Avengers Mansion to hang out.

It works for him, anyway.

It's at that point that Every-Man kills some police on television to get Captain America's attention.

Every-Man isn't much of a fighter...

...but he does resort to hostage taking, and he makes it clear that he'll even kill the young woman from his gang.

Cap still stops him, of course. And everyone is pretty pleased about it except Cap, who i think acknowledges that the problem Every-Man was trying to address might have been valid even if his methods were wrong. But the woman and Cap's new friends tell him that he's being overly pessimistic.

Here's Every-Man's origin.

If Captain America is a living symbol representing the American ideal, then on paper i like the idea of opposing living symbols that challenge Captain America with ideology as much as with their fists. But they never work out for me (see also Flag-Smasher). Every-Man is handled particularly poorly, as he's immediately a cop killer and later a traitor to his friends and essentially just a simple psychopath. So any kind of political debate is right out the window. And not only is that a letdown in its own right but it takes whatever ideas they are meant to be representing and trivializes them. And that's before you get to that outrageous costume.

Quality Rating: C-

Historical Significance Rating: 3 - first Every-Man (later Zeitgeist)

Chronological Placement Considerations: The MCP places this between Avengers #213-214.

References: N/A

Crossover: N/A

Continuity Insert? N

My Reprint: N/A

Aren't you glad to have found out what the "boys Cap was bringing to the mansion" reference in Avengers 218 really meant?

Everyman gets put to some retconned Scourge-like uses by Mark Gruenwald late in his Cap run. One of Gru's oddest stories.

Wait, you put this issue after Tigra quits the Avengers?

Thanks Ataru. Short answer: made a mistake; fixed it.

Long answer: i had the issue in the right place based on the sequence code i use (the little white date at the top of the page) and it was showing up in the right spot for individual character chronologies, but i had checked off the wrong date category so it was showing as the first entry on the 1982 page. (Uninteresting inner workings revealed!)

@Michael - Relieved!

Karen Berger had already been laboring in DC's salt mines for a few years by this point.

"Tub-ball"? Is that supposed to be a combo of tubby and butterball?

I have all the issues of Zap Comix, and none of them touch on any of the things Tigra mentions. If anything, the work by Robert Williams, Rick Griffin, and Victor Moscoso would give her a headache to look at, and some stuff by Robert Crumb and everything by S. Clay Wilson would make her toss her cookies(or given her feminist background, she'd probably toss it in the shredder). That's not an actual Zap cover, but that is a typical Crumb figure.

Iron Man sez "The country was split down the middle over a war nobody wanted." That's an interesting approach to calculation.

I get the feeling that DeMatteis agrees with your take on Every-Man's first appearanbce, because he retcons his backstory quite a bit when he takes a second run a the character in Marvel Team-Up #132-133.