8 Captain America Questions That Always Confused You

3. If Cap Went Missing In WW2, Why Did He Appear In The 1950s?

Everyone knows the story by now - Captain America and Bucky went missing at the end of World War II trying to disarm a Nazi super weapon, only to reemerge decades later as an Avenger and Cold War assassin respectively. However, when Stan Lee and Jack Kirby resurrected the Captain in 1963 with that story in mind they also encountered a problem - Marvel had been publishing Captain America comics after World War II for years.

The 1950s Captain America books are a fever-dream of contradictions and McCarthyist posturing, but that allowed Marvel to have fun years later. In the lauded Steve Englehart and Sam Buscema run on the comic, the creative duo introduced the character of William Burnside to explain how Cap existed in the 1950s.

Burnside, much like the fifties-era Cap comics, was an aberration. The story goes that the government wished to cover up the deaths of Steve and Bucky and so injected Burnside and another soldier with an ersatz version of Doctor Erskine's Super Soldier Serum. Burnside himself walked, talked and looked like a fascist, while the botched super soldier treatment left both him and his Bucky with psychotic tendencies.

Stored in suspended animation after the government realised that they'd perhaps made a huge mistake, Burnside later returned as the villain known as the Grand Director, battling Bucky-Cap until finally conceding defeat in 2012.