What Happened To Everyone Who Became Captain America?
5. William Burnside
And this is where the Captain America replacements start to go wrong.
Horribly, horribly wrong.
So, as was mentioned previously, before Cap made his big return in The Avengers in 1964, courtesy of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, he and Bucky originally survived the events of the war and proceeded to embark on what I'd like to call "the crazy years".
As the US shifted its attention from opposing the threat of fascism to getting really anxious about the USSR and the spread of communism, so too did Captain America. The character was reintroduced in the early fifties as "Captain America: Commie Smasher!", the quintessential Red Scare-era Marvel comic that was about as bad as it sounds.
The issue of "Commie Smasher" Cap was addressed initially during Steve Englehart and Sal Buscema's seminal Captain America run from the 1970s. The comic reveals how a man called William Burnside idolised Cap during the Second World War, and eventually discovered his true fate. From there, he approached the government to become the new incarnation of the hero, even legally changing his name to Steve Rogers and undergoing facial surgery to match his appearance.
The government chickens out midway through, but Burnside is able to recruit James Monroe to be his Bucky. They take the super soldier serum without the important vital rays, and proceed to go a bit loopy, taking only surface level lessons from Rogers' example and embodying all the jingoism and nationalistic dogma the original Cap opposed.
Burnside and Monroe are placed in suspended animation, but are set free years later to attack Rogers and Sam Wilson. Burnside is then brainwashed into assuming the supervillain alter-ego of the Grand Director, openly adopting white supremacist ideology, before eventually almost losing his life in a battle with Rogers, where he is then given a new identity by the government after his death is faked.