Following the conclusion of the six-part National Force epic, which was janky but which had held my interest well enough, CAPTAIN AMERICA entered another period of aimlessness. This was characterized primarily by the book having a rotating creative team, which prevented it from getting any momentum going in terms of ongoing plotlines and character-building. A bunch of Marvel books during this time had this difficulty, but CAPTAIN AMERICA in particular had been plagued by this feeling practically to the point where Jack Kirby came off of his three-year run. Even when new creative teams came on board, their tenure wound up being far shorter than initially intended. So the book felt aimless, and it was solely the appeal of the character himself that kept me coming back.
As I mentioned when talking about the preceding issue, which contained a page not by the book’s regular creators that set up a segue into the events of this story, this two-parter looks to have been commissioned as an evergreen fill-in job at some point and was pressed into service when the schedule had slipped badly enough. It was enough out of step–Cap takes on a mission from Nick Fury and SHIELD here despite being recently on the outs with them–that the set-up in #237 was necessary to make it fit into the continuity. The writer was Peter Gillis, who did an assortment of work around Marvel at this time and who is probably best recalled for DOCTOR STRANGE and STRIKEFORCE: MORITURI today. The artist was Fred Kida, an old hand who’d been in the business since the 1940s–he drew AIRBOY, among other strips. His storytelling was on point, and Don Perlin’s inks helped to bridge the gap to the then-current Marvel look.
As this was intended as an evergreen story, there isn’t any business with supporting players to be dealt with–it’s straight on into plot. The issue opens with Captain America scaling a snowy cliffside. He’s attacked by men riding gigantic hawks who wield laser guns–Cap can’t do much fighting back while he’s hanging off the cliffside, but he’s at least got his shield on his back, which can take their shots. The Hawk-Riders try to knock Cap off of the cliff face, but they come in too close, the winds kick up, and they all smash into the cliffside and fall to their deaths–leaving Cap’s hands clean. As the Sentinel of Liberty continues his climb, his thoughts race back to how he got into this mission–in other words, after an obligatory action sequence, we were now going to be given a briefing on the plot of the story in flashback.
Cap recalls how he was summoned by SHIELD Director Nick Fury in response to a dozen of his agents all dropping dead of brain aneurysms. The agents were all disconnected from one another, but each one was carrying a nondescript metal disk the size of a coin. Fury gives Cap these coins, and suddenly Steve Rogers finds himself in mental conflict with a woman who calls herself Snowfall. She tells Cap that she needs his help to rescue her from the mountaintop citadel in which she’s being held prisoner, her mental powers being coerced into assisting her captors. She tells Cap that she’s at Dovecote, a safe house that will hide out anybody willing to pay the exorbitant fee. Nobody has ever broken their security–but Cap resolves to be the first.
Back in the present, Cap finishes his climb to the summit. But he’s being spied upon by armed guards. With a bit of help from spy gadgets provided by Fury, Cap takes all of these men on single-handedly and bests them, then continues on his way towards Dovecote. He’s able to swipe a hover-car from the guards to proceed faster through the snow than he would have been on foot, but as he drives, he comes under attack from more Hawk-Riders. Cap tosses his shield at them, and one of the hawks snatches it out of midair. Bad move as it turns out, as Fury’s SHIELD boys have gimmicked the shield to emit an electric stun-charge when Cap throws a triggering switch. But before he can retrieve his shield from the fallen Hawk-Rider, Cap’s hover car hits a mine and explodes. Cap is all right, but he’s now standing in the middle of a minefield.
It’s at this point that more riders appear, these ones mounted atop fast Diatrymas, which can run at over fifty miles an hour. The leader of these guards, though, respects Cap’s courage, and he guides the Sentinel of Liberty through the minefield so that he might stand before them and surrender. But that’s not how it goes, of course–Cap feints, then knocks the leader off his mount and attempts to steal it. But no dice–the Diatrymas are trained only to accept their regular riders. Cap is unarmed and outnumbered, but he’s no pushover, and he leads the riders in a chase–one that he circumnavigates so that they wind up crossing over into the minefield. Cap hits the deck just before he hits the mines, but the racing Diatrymas can’t stop that quickly, and they’re all utterly annihilated in the ensuing explosions. Cap muses that they did it to themselves and that it’s a senseless waste of life, but this feels a bit like scripter Gillis attempting to soften Cap’s involvement in the deaths of all of these men and animals, possibly in deference to the Comics Code, which might object.
Finally, Cap’s journey is almost finished as he approaches the gates to Dovecote. But there’s one final guard for him to face: a mountain of a man who introduces himself as Widowmaker. And in the final two pages, Widowmaker winds up beating the heck out of Cap–he tells the Sentinel of Liberty that while Cap fought in the was for four years before being frozen in suspended animation, Widowmaker has been fighting for decades, and so he’s simply better than Cap is. And that’s where this issue is To Be Continued, with Cap defeated on the verge of entering Dovecote. As a single issue, it’s kind of sparse and weirdly paced, which makes me wonder if possibly this two-parter had started life as a proposed CAP Annual or something, and later was split into two single issues. This sort of surgery happened a lot in the late 1970s and beyond.
