The Savage World of 1984!

Tonight's ISB Selection: Badass Panels From Captain America #194


This was the first Marvel comic I ever read, and when I was four years old, it terrified me. I finally got around to re-reading it Saturday after nineteen years, and was only mildly frightened.


Here's what's going on: Attempting to track down The Madbomb!, a device that drives anyone within its range into a psychotic rage, Cap and the Falcon have been ambushed and captured by an underground militia bent on eradicating the US government and replacing them with an entrenched aristocracy, installing a series of hereditary leaders from rich families and therefore subverting the ideals our country stands for.

[Cough]


Uh, anyway, they bust out of the prison that holds the Elite's failed experiments--because it just wouldn't be a Kirby book without some Hairies, or Weirdies, or Un-Men, or whatever he wanted to call them this week--and meet up with insane aristocrat daddy's girl Cheer Chadwick, who takes a liking to our heroes and leads them to see the machinations of the Elite's Master Plan, including their "love machine."


That's the part that scared me as a kid. At four years old, I apparently had a severe phobia of fascist mob violence. And besides...


Try telling me this guy doesn't give you the jibblies.


If I'd been a little older, I probably would've stuck around to get terrified instead by Tinkerbelle, a large angry black woman who takes out Cap AND the Falcon in between rounds of the Elite's favorite competitor sport, which also gives me my absolute favorite "next issue" blurb of all time: