10 Embarrassing Comic Book Moments Writers Had To Explain
9. Captain America In The 1950s
By now the story of Steve Rogers before and after the second world war is legendary and seared into the minds of kids across the world. He becomes a super soldier, punches Hitler in the face, he has a buddy named Bucky, they survive the war, Cap becomes a schoolteacher, romances a woman named Betsy Ross because subtlety is for the weak, he fights communists...
Oh I'm sorry, is that not how you remember it going? Well there's a simple explanation for that. Stan Lee took over writing Captain America after Joe Simon left Timely comics, and was the one who had to figure out what Cap was supposed to do after the war ended. So he rebranded him as Captain America: Commie Smasher!
Yeah it didn't last long. So years pass with not a peep heard out of our buddy Cap until Avengers comes along to completely flip the script on what happened to Steve. Turns out the Cap readers saw smashing the aforementioned commies was someone else entirely and the REAL Captain America was frozen in a block of ice.
The 1950s Captain America would return in Cap's Bronze Age comics as a fascist terrorist, before being fleshed out further in Ed Brubaker and Steve Epting's seminal Captain America run in the late 2000s.