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So, without nazis, would captain America comics still thrive? i would love to see him fight someone beside Nazis (and i am sure he has, and i just don't know about it.).

Well there's also dramatic duality with Red Skull. Cap is a man from another time, he in a way represents what Tom Brokaw refered to as The Greatest Generation. So to is the Red Skull out of time and presenting the danger of a force like the Nazi's making a comeback in the modern era. Also let's face it, Cap tearing through a horde of Nazi's or even amored robots with nazi symbols on them is just fun. Nazi's make great bad guys because...they were bad guy's. The reason why super villans were create in the first place was because we actually had something like that in real life for awhile.

As for the dramatic engine I'm partial to him working for SHIELD. Maybe because of the name or because I think Steve Rogers can use a little something of the dynamic between Steve Austin and Oscar Goldman from the Six Million Dollar man. Where the government is shady but Roger's Cap has someone directly over him who will also go to bat with the big boys to see that the right thing is done and that Steve is treated fairly.

And as an aside, it’s interesting the way Marvel and DC took two different approaches to World War II in their fictional universe; DC kept its heroes out of the war via the plot conceit of the “Spear of Destiny”, making it a war fought strictly between humans, while Marvel gave both sides super-powered soldiers, turning “supers” into another theater of combat alongside air, land and sea

It should be pointed out that the Spear of Destiny was a retcon that happened 40 years after America entered World War II. Editorial fiat, for whatever reason, was kept them out of the War. My best guess is DC kept its characters out of the War because they realized that it was an insult to the troops to have superbeings wading in.

See, I'd argue that many of the very best Cap stories are not Red Skull tales -- those seem to be fallback positions for writers more than vital and grand struggles.

The bulk of Steve Engelhart's Cap, one of the creative high points for the title, was Skull-free; the Skull story was the one that Engelhart left halfway through. Likewise, the Skull was kept safely behind the scenes for virtually all of Gruenwald's great "replacement Cap" story, and was dead or inactive for much of the two Mark Waid runs on the character. And Ultimate Cap gets by just fine without the Red Skull around.

I don't dislike the Red Skull, despite my general distaste for using real-world political atrocities and monsters in superhero comics; the Skull's simply been around long enough and been developed well enough that he's not "just" a stand-in for Nazism anymore.

But surely the concept of Captain America is flexible enough to do more interesting things than rehash World War II again and again and again. As I've also said elsewhere, the sheer number of WWII-era war criminals and villains who turn up in superhero stories makes me wonder if the Allies actually won in the Marvel and DC Universes.

The Skull's villainy goes beyond the Nazi origin to become an archetype of the death impulse or "thanatos", the ruthless use of power to either oppress or kill. The Skull treats others as "disposable" tools or hindrances. He's an attitude, a way of relating to the world.
Cap represents the use of power to defend the life force and create a world "safe for democracy", where the largest number of people can live without fear. FDR's "Four Freedoms" would have made a good credo.
I used to wonder why they didn't include Steve Rogers' civilian life as a frustrated cartoonist to show his "dream" of a world without bullies, where people left other people alone to dream. Maybe he just wants to draw funny animals and children's books, but these mass murderers keep intruding on his peace... (the writer would have to be vigiliant to avoid "Mary Sue" bathos).

My best guess is DC kept its characters out of the War because they realized that it was an insult to the troops to have superbeings wading in.

Close, but not quite so, I suppose. While I can see how tales of supers smashing Nazis can be felt as disrespectful to real troops, the fact remains that we've had plenty, even from DC (although now that you mention it, DC seems to indeed refrain from using metahumans agains Nazis, more so than most other publishers).

Then again, DC is somewhat remarkable for its long tradition of publishing war stories, as opposed to Marvel basically having only the Howling Commandos and a few minor derivative books to exploit that genre. It's probably not a coincidente either that most of DC major properties are from the forties, while Marvel's are from the sixties.

I believe DC was more concerned with keeping its own options open and sparing itself from the headaches of having Sargent Rock fighting alongside Superman and Doctor Fate in a regular basis.

As for storytelling engines, I tend to agree with Omar Karindu. Cap-vs-Red Skull tales tend indeed to be somewhat of a refuge, a fallback position when the writer does not really have a better and more original tale to tell.

Cap is a tough character to write, among other reasons because he is very political in concept but practically forbidden to have significant political choices in his actual stories. More often than not he tends to look a bit self-righteous in discourse and fairly passive in demeanor. (As an aside, I understand that to be a major change from the 1940s portrayal of the character. Confirmation would be welcome).

Good writing can, of course, overcome those traps. But when it fails, having an uncomplicated tale of Cap vs Skull to tell can provide breathing space while the writer seeks to obtain more inspiration.

"And Ultimate Cap gets by just fine without the Red Skull around."

but ultimate cap doesn't have his own series, nor do i think it would work well if he did.

While I can see how tales of supers smashing Nazis can be felt as disrespectful to real troops, the fact remains that we’ve had plenty, even from DC

Not in the comics published during World War II. Aside from some post-Pearl Harbour rallying, most DC superheroes pretty much stayed Stateside.

Then again, DC is somewhat remarkable for its long tradition of publishing war stories

War comics which were for the most part post-1950 in origin.

Graeme: AFAIK, the Spear of Destiny explanation was retconned into place in the late 1970s, if not in the 1980s altogether. GI Combat, the last ongoing war book from DC to cease publishing, did so in 1987.

All I am saying (based on little things like the covers of early issues of Superman) is that it doesn't quite look like DC ever found the idea of superheroes acting in the war front particularly insulting. Or, at least, it was more worried about the plot difficulties involved.

Is the article cut off for anyone else? For me it ends:

It’s difficult to create a villain that good. Certainly Cap would have had problems i

It cuts off there for me, too. Take a look over on his blog, linked at the top for the rest of that final sentence.

"Certainly Cap would have had problems if Batroc the Leaper was his arch-enemy all these years."

All I am saying (based on little things like the covers of early issues of Superman) is that it doesn’t quite look like DC ever found the idea of superheroes acting in the war front particularly insulting. Or, at least, it was more worried about the plot difficulties involved

While I can't say I've read every DC comic produced during World War II, I've read a lot of them and know about many more. For the most part, the propaganda based covers are about the only place DC characters--particularly the major ones--were directly involved in the war.

We can argue why til the cows come home, but (unlike Timely) DC avoided putting most of their characters into action in the European or Pacific theaters and Green Lantern is about the only character I can think of who enlisted in his civilian identity and even then that was just after Pearl Harbour and I don't think he was in the service very long.

In fact several characters were given non Spear of Destiny reasons to stay Stateside: The JSA was explicitly told by the War Department to stay out of the war because the fact that the characters had enlisted in different branches of the service was creating unnecessary rivalry amongst the generals (hey I didn't write 'em) and they were asked to form a special "Justice Batallion" which went into Europe once I think and stayed stateside the rest of the time.

Superman, by the by, stayed out because Clark Kent was declared 4F!

And while the Spear was introduced in 1978, its use as a retconned reason superheroes weren't involved in the war wasn't until All-Star Squadron #4 in in 1981.

To me, the Red Skull is just about comicdom's greatest villain. I'd be very happy reading long, long storylines that feature the Skull working through all manner of subordinates to bring down the US government and Cap countering him at every turn.

Regarding Captain America himself, I prefer an emphasis on Cap, the super-hero as opposed to Cap, the government agent. Sure, the SHIELD connection is cool but I'd rather that Nick Fury be the government's go-to guy.

As for the DC heroes not being more active in the war, my completely uniformed and ridiculously simplistic idea is this - many of the DC heroes are just too powerful to make for good battlefront combatants. How does a war last so long if the Spectre or Superman or Green Lantern gets involved? Maybe (again, uninformed and simplistic here) DC realized there was no way to tell a story featuring their powerhouses going to war that didn't end with the entire conflict over in 5 panels. Since the war was definitely not going to be over that quickly, why publish the story? Okay, there was that one story (published in Time? Life?) showing how Superman would end the war but that’s kind of the exception that proves the rule, isn’t it? I assume it was decided that if the big guns at National and All-American aren't getting involved in the war, it might seem weird if Batman and Robin show up fighting alongside the French underground or if Dr. Mid-Nite takes on Japanese forces in the Philippines.

OTOH Marvel really didn't have anyone close to the power level of DC's mightiest heroes. The Human Torch and Toro are pretty fearsome but a high-powered water cannon takes them down easily enough. Namor can play havoc with a u-boat or two but he can't possibly fight for days on land to capture Berlin. Who's left? The GA Vision, who I admit to not knowing a heck of a lot about but who doesn't strike me as being anywhere near the power level needed to end the war on his own. Red Raven? The Whizzer? The vast majority of Timely's war-time heroes are like The Patriot, well-trained guys with bright costumes. So, since these heroes could fight the Nazis month after month while the war continued to rage on and no one needed to explain why ... well ... the war continued to rage on.

Like I said, completely uniformed and ridiculously simplistic.

The reason I heard about why DC kept the heroes out of WWII is fairly simple.

How quickly would Superman be able to end the war?

Obviously, with a war that ridiculously big, the U.S. government (and many civilians) were trying to increase patriotism, commitment to the war efforts, etc. If Big Blue got involved at all, the war would be over in a matter of hours.

Once that story was published, DC would have been in no position to publish war-propaganda, negatively affecting both the morale of comic-readers (many of whom were enlisted men) and and the bottom line of DC or Timely or whoever they were at that time.

As for Cap, he's my favorite character out of all of them. And he was created as someone who COULD fight, continually win, and not immediately end the war. But my fave storylines are the ones where he's forced into a corner and needs to choose between the lesser of two evils. The Skull has often been the mastermind behind said corners.

But even still, a good writer can write up something that really messes with him. And, as we all know, the worse you treat your protagonist, the better the story.

Clark Kent was declared 4-F in the Selective System?

Now that's surprising. He sure doesn't look physically unfit...

Clark was 4-F'd because he accidentally used his X-ray vision during the eye test and read the chart in the next room (or so I've heard--I've never read the story in question myself).

I agree that the reason the DC heroes didn't participate more actively in the War was because they would logically have ended it quickly, or at least changed it dramatically from what was going on. Besides, it's hard to write about real-life tragedies like Wars while they're going on; how many comics on the War on Terror do we have now? I don't even think the Iraq war (either of them) actually happened in the DC Universe (in fact, doesn't Qurac replace both Iran and Iraq there? I think I saw that in a Who's Who in DCU once.)

Anyway, the Spear of Destiny retcon was necessary, because it's hard to believe the Justice Society would have allowed to stop them from tackling the Nazis.

As for Cap and the Red Skull, while I realize the RS is Cap's archenemy and will always come back, I'm bored of him constantly being behind things. I don't find him a particularly interesting villain. (Ironically, for a Nazi, he comes across as less vile than guys like Lex Luthor these days.)

And as much as I like Cap, I feel he needs a secret identity. He needs to be someone BESIDES Cap 24 hours a day. Maybe if he did, he wouldn't be out of touch with America like he seemed to be during Civil War. Not that I'm defending that "Cap Doesn't Know MySpace" nonsense; I'd just like to relate to him as a person, beyond his heroic missions.

You know, one thing occurs to me: WHY must there be a Captain America? Beyond the trademarking, I mean. In the comics, the CA identity was created only after the Super Soldier program failed, to give people a morale boost during the war. But afterwards, there was no need for it, except perhaps as a way to make the public feel safe that the Government had a non-superhuman hero leading the "nonhuman" ones. Rogers saw it as something he HAD to do, something that was needed, perhaps to remind everyone of the American Dream- but did Cap ever really embody the ideals of America in any official fashion? Or was he CA mainly because he had nothing else to be or do? It felt like that sometimes.

As for Cap and the Red Skull, while I realize the RS is Cap’s archenemy and will always come back, I’m bored of him constantly being behind things. I don’t find him a particularly interesting villain. (Ironically, for a Nazi, he comes across as less vile than guys like Lex Luthor these days.)

I imagine it's got to be pretty hard to write the Red Skull in general. If you write him as a standard villainous megalomaniac with some sadism thrown in, he really doesn't seem "evil enough" in comparison to other, arguably worse villains.

But if you write him as someone who does what Nazis do -- as Peter B. Gillis did inb Super-Villain Team-Up's last arc and Mark Waid tried to do in the bowdlerized Captain America v.3 #14 -- it seems too grotesque and lurid even for superhero comics. That is to say, writing the Skull as a genocidal racist comes off as crude and exploitative to a lot of people, and I can't imagine a plotline set in the 'eternal present" of the MU with that take on the character that wouldn't provoke some sort of public backlash.

So what we get instead are stories in which the Skull is just a viler version of Doctor Doom or the Mandarin and their sort, or stories in which he's an afterschool special sort of villain who hangs out with a Hitler-clone in a purple Klan costume and reminds us not to be prejudiced or somesuch.

Would a story in which the Skull is actively mass-murdering or attempting mass-murder the Jewish people or trying to mobilize Germany into war really be palatable to most comics readers? Does anyone really want to read a story about his efforts to nuke Tel Aviv? Such stuff would come across as thoroughly offensive to a lot of people and do some damage to Marvel's public profile, I imagine.

The closest you can get, really, is something like "Red Zone," the story in which he tries to create a race-specific bioweapon but just ends up indiscriminately killing a lot of people and getting beaten up by the Black Panther. It was hamfisted and dumb, and again rather afterschoolish. ("Race isn't biologically real, which is why your evil scheme couldn't work, Skull!" Pow!)

This is, again, one of the problems in just literally porting over real-world monsters into superhero stories -- they really don't work all that well if you make them as scary as the real thing, and if you don't, you may as well be writing about Chairface Chippendale's latest scheme to write his name on the moon.

But I'd rather not restart that mega-discussion again, he said disingenuously and after-the-fact.

Don't forget the Look Magazine had Superman enter the war and end it within hours by bring both Hitler and Stalin before the League of Nations.

The thing about the Red Skull is he has a very natural enemy that's rarely been explored. Only during Acts of Vengeance have we ever seen Magneto go after this guy. As a concentration camp survivor, Magneto shouldn't rest until the Skull is dead and every one of Arnim Zola's machines is destroyed so he can never come back.