With this 175th issue of Captain America, the “Secret Empire” saga that had dominated the series’ pages for over half a year finally reached its climax. And as our storytellers picked up their narrative right where the previous month’s episode had left us readers hanging, you could hardly accuse writer Steve Englehart of underselling the occasion in his opening, credits-prefacing caption…
As we’ve mentioned in the past, the Secret Empire had first appeared some eight years prior to the current storyline, in Tales to Astonish #81-85. But while Gabe Jones’ recap here hits the high points, it can’t really convey the sheer nuttiness — or, if you’d rather, cleverness — of the almost-kinda-crossover between ToA‘s two lead features — Hulk and Sub-Mariner — that took place over the course of those five issues. Nor does it indicate how that sequence ultimately ended up tying into two other, presumably separate ongoing storylines in Marvel’s other double-feature books of that era, Tales of Suspense and Strange Tales.
Things had gotten going in the Hulk strip in Tales to Astonish #81, when (as shown in the flashback panels above) the Secret Empire dispatched the villainous Boomerang to steal the plans for the U.S. military’s new Orion missile. That effort had been well and truly wrecked by the Hulk by the end of his half of #83 — an episode which had also chronicled the all-but-final takeover of the Empire itself by one of its inner council’s hooded members, Number Nine. After having apparently gassed one of his peers (Number Five) to death in issue #82, in the next installment Nine made his play to take out the rest of the group (text by Stan Lee, art by Jack Kirby and Bill Everett):
This was the last readers saw of Number Nine — or, indeed, any member of the Secret Empire — in the Hulk strip. However, the Sub-Mariner story that followed the Hulk’s outing in this same issue introduced the group’s head honcho, Number One himself, as he observed a battle between Subby and the evil Warlord Krang (text by Lee, art by Kirby and Dick Ayers):
Number One managed to put Namor under mind control for a little while, sending him off to destroy the Hulk, but his plan didn’t work out; as Gabe Jones’ dialogue in CA #175 puts it, the two ToA stars “never set eyes on each other” (though they did make cameo appearances in each other’s strips) before the Sub-Mariner managed to free himself from No. One’s control in ToA #85. Number One then tried to blow the Hulk with a bomb — though, as Gabe tells us, that didn’t work out so well, either…
OK, so what’s this in the editorial footnote about the recap’s concluding panels giving us “Gabe Jones’ brilliant defeat of the Secret Empire” for the first time? Back in 1974, my younger self had not a clue, as I hadn’t read my first Marvel comic until 1967, and so, I shrugged and kept on reading. But that doesn’t mean we have to skip over the matter today, obviously.
Before trying to explain just what Steve Englehart was getting at here, however, we’ll first have to turn back to 1966, and to a comic that arrived on stands about a month after Tales to Astonish #83: Strange Tales #149 (Oct., 1966). This issue featured the wrap-up of a storyline that had Nick Fury and S.H.I.E.L.D. taking on a previously unknown group called Advanced Idea Mechanics, aka A.I.M.; at the mid-point of this episode, with A.I.M. on the back foot, the narrative turned to a couple of the beekeeper-suited operatives fleeing the scene of their botched mission (text by Denny O’Neil, art by Jack Kirby and Ogden Whitney):
“…our plot is a bit complex!” Yeah, you could say that, Stan (or Denny, or whoever actually wrote that editorial note). The shadowy group known as “Them” had recently been making trouble for Captain America over in Tales of Suspense, but this was the first inking readers had been given that it, Strange Tales‘ A.I.M., and Tales to Astonish‘s Secret Empire were all essentially the same organization. What was more, by the end of this episode, it would be revealed that said organization was in fact Hydra, who’d supposedly been done away with by S.H.I.E.L.D. back in Strange Tales #141.
But that revelation, big as it was, needn’t concern us here; rather, we’ll keep our focus on the role in this story played by Number Nine, who, having picked up these two hapless A.I.M. agents, yanked a lever on his car’s dashboard that first dropped a plexiglass barrier between the front and back seats, then pumped the latter area full of knockout gas…
Upon examining this sequence (up to and including the closing caption by “Breathless Stan”), it seems pretty clear that readers were intended to understand that the Number Nine who’d knocked out the other members of the Secret Empire’s ruling circle (excepting Number One, of course) over in ToA #83 had been none other than Gabe Jones all along. So why did Steve Englehart feel obliged to create a new scene for CA #175’s flashback establishing that Gabe had actually been Number Six, rather than Number Nine — a scene that’s then claimed to represent the actual Secret Empire takedown, “advertised but never shown in 1966.”
Your humble blogger doesn’t have a definitive answer to that question to that question, I’m afraid — though, naturally, I’m willing to speculate. My best guess is that the continuity-conscious Englehart — with or without the cooperation of Marvel editor-in-chief Roy Thomas, another continuity maven who I suppose could have written the CA #175 footnotes attributed to “Roy”, but most probably didn’t — was bothered by the 
implication that, in the guise of Number Nine, good guy Gabe Jones had intentionally and cold-bloodedly killed Number Five back in Tales to Astonish #82, and thus came up with an eight-years-after-the-fact retcon as a workaround. Personally, I think it would have been easier just to assume that the two guys who fingered Nine for taking out Five were mistaken all along, and it was someone else entirely who committed the deadly deed (see original panels at right; text by Lee, art by Kirby and Everett). But hey, what do I know?
Anyway, I hope you’ll all pardon me for this somewhat lengthy digression from the discussion of a very well-remembered fifty-year-old comic book to an examination of some scenes from a handful of rather less well-remembered fifty-eight-year-old-comic books. I do realize that this whole Number Nine/Six question is pretty frivolous stuff, at least when compared to the earnest political subtext that informed the Secret Empire storyline of 1973-74. But, on the other hand, I think it’s worth taking note of the fact that, however much Steve Englehart’s mind might have been taken up with Very Serious Current Events at the time he was writing CA #175, he still had room in his noggin for this kind of obsessive (and fannish) continuity wrangling.
In any event, for the rest of this post, we’ll be talking only about fifty-year-old comics, so put your mind at ease, OK?
See the figures attached to the big shiny disc up there? They’re pretty sketchily rendered here by penciller Sal Buscema and inker Vince Colletta, but I think it’s safe to assume that they’re the same nine mutants we saw in a similar predicament in the middle of issue #174, despite the fact that they were freed by Cap, Falc, and their X-Men allies a little later in that episode. As you may recall, they were still visibly groggy and recovering when Cap and co. got zapped by the Atomic Annihilator™, so it stands to reason that they were recaptured with relative ease by the Secret Empire immediately afterwards (even though we didn’t see that 
on panel, either in that issue or this one). Unfortunately, that means that the “continuity implant” story Marvel published around 19 months ago in X-Men Legends (2022) #2 (Nov., 2022) was off the mark when it had the Beast and Mesmero escaping prior to the disc’s installation in the saucer, then heading off to Long Island to have an encounter with Wolverine. That sort of lapse is disappointing, considering that the new story was written by none other than Roy Thomas, the editor of record for both Captain America #174 and #175; on the other hand, those two comics did come out half a century ago, so maybe we should cut him a break.
(OK, so I lied a couple of paragraphs back when I said we would be discussing only fifty year old comics for the rest of the post. But I’m going to do better starting now, OK? Only 1974 vintage material from now on, I promise.)
As we noted in last month’s post about CA #174, despite Steve Englehart’s having been inspired by the Watergate scandal in his development of the “Secret Empire” storyline, he’d made no direct references to it in his scripts prior to that issue — by which time he’d already made a point of acknowledging the subject in the letters page of issue #173. Now, as the storyline neared its climax, the writer evidently felt he could be more overt (though he’d yet to play his final hand, of course).
Within minutes of the “flying saucer” touching down on the South Lawn at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, the military — and the media — are on the scene…
“Where the devil’s the President?” Ah, if they only knew…
For what it’s worth, this “Number Two” — previously unseen — is about as close an analogue as can be found within our story to the helmeted and caped figure shown in the foreground of the cover (which, per the Grand Comics Database, was drawn by Sal Buscema over a layout by John Romita). Unless (as also claimed by the aforementioned GCD) it’s supposed to be Number One, himself.
“…I think the rest of the show is yours.” Marvel Girl’s words here are right on the money. Despite the fact that this storyline serves as the wrap-up of a mutant-centric mystery initiated by Englehart way back in Avengers #111 (May, 1973) — as well as of a plotline that had run through most of the issues he’d scripted of the Beast feature in Amazing Adventures, even earlier than that — the X-Men’s role in the current saga doesn’t really extend beyond the mechanics of the plot. Thematically, this isn’t their story (or even, really, the Falcon’s) — it’s Captain America’s. And for its remaining pages, the plot stuff belongs to Cap, as well.
Moonstone may be seen as having the advantage over Cap, as far as power-levels go — as we’ve seen in previous issues, he can fire laser beams from his hands and de-materialize at will, in addition to being super-strong, super-fast, and able to fly. But, as Englehart’s narrative captions inform us, “Captain America has a fighting heart — and a fierce pride in the land he’s named for — and a cold determination that now, before the television-fed eyes of every American, will vindicate all that he is —”
And that, of course, allows him to ultimately overcome his more powerful foe, as we see satisfyingly rendered here by Buscema and Colletta…
Yeah, as all of the good guys stand around smiling and congratulating one other, it’s hard to disagree with our narrator. Who, indeed, could “ask for a neater wrap-up”? But there’s 1 1/3 pages of story yet to tell…
Some three and a half decades after the publication of Captain America #175, in an interview for Alter Ego #103 (Jul., 2011), Steve Englehart offered these recollections concerning the “Secret Empire” saga and its conclusion:
I created an analogue to Watergate… Captain America had to react to what was going on. That fact that the story never names or shows Richard Nixon was my own self-censorship. With great freedom comes great responsibility, or something like that, and I could do whatever I wanted to, but I wasn’t in the business of screwing things up for Marvel. Nobody at Marvel nor I myself thought that going there and doing that sort of story was going to create a problem. I just thought, I’m not going to say this villain at the bottom of all the lies and secret deals was actually Richard Nixon. I’ve never met anybody who didn’t get it, who didn’t realize that’s who it was. It was totally clear who it was, but it was my decision, not Marvel’s, not to use his name. The editorial people, whoever that was at the time, just said, “Great comic. Keep going.”
A sidebar to Englehart’s interview offers the perspective of one very key individual among those “editorial people”, namely, Roy Thomas (despite being written in the third person, the sidebar is almost certainly the work of Alter Ego‘s editor — i.e., of Thomas himself):
Captain America #174 (June 1974) ends with the violent suicide of the unmasked head of The Secret Empire — who was clearly intended to be then-President Richard M. Nixon, who would not actually resign until August 9th of that year. As editor, Roy T. gritted his teeth and took a chance that publisher Stan Lee wouldn’t see red when he learned about the sequence. RT hoped that he and Steve could both hide behind the “ambiguity” of the ending (since, after all, Nixon would still be alive and President when #175 went on sale) — though, in truth, everybody in the office understood what was meant. Today, Roy isn’t 100% certain he would make the same decision a second time… but he’s got to admit, it was one helluva climax!
I’m not sure what to make of the long-after-the-fact ambivalence expressed by Thomas here, except to feel grateful that it was his 1974 self who was calling the shots at Marvel half a century ago, and not his 2011 iteration. I do want to note, however, that despite being less conscious of (and less concerned with) current events than I should have been at that time, when my younger self read this story back in the day, I understood that the face Captain America saw when he yanked off Number One’s hood was that of Richard Milhous Nixon. At the same time, it never occurred to me, then or later, that actually showing Nixon’s face, or even using his name, could ever have been an option — if for no other reason that (as Roy Thomas points out), in the “real world”, Richard Nixon was not only still very much alive at the time of the story’s publication, but was also still very much the President of the United States.
Per both the Grand Comics Database and Mike’s Amazing World of Comics, Captain America #175 arrived on newsstands on April 9, 1974. Curious as to what a more civically conscious Cap fan than my younger self might have read about the POTUS had they picked up a newspaper as well as the latest installment of the Sentinel of Liberty’s adventures on that day, I recently went online and tracked down the Washington Post for the date in question.
The biggest news of the day (at least as far as WaPo was concerned) was Hank Aaron’s breaking of Babe Ruth’s career home run record, but President Nixon did figure into three stories on the paper’s front page. Only one of these — a report that the White House would reply that day to a request for tapes from the House Judiciary Committee’s preliminary impeachment inquiry — was directly related to Watergate. Another article was about how Nixon was expected to owe more than $100,000 in income taxes for 1973. The third concerned his signing a bill the day before that would raise the minimum wage to $2.00 an hour; noting that he had just returned from an official trip to France, the article reported that the President “seemed unusually jaunty when he arrived at the White House yesterday morning. He skipped down the steps of his helicopter, smiling broadly and looking well.” Yes, Nixon was clearly in trouble as of April 9, 1974; even so, he still was the President, and there was no guarantee at this point that he wouldn’t remain so until the end of his second term arrived, in January, 1977.
Of course, exactly four months later, on August 9, Richard M. Nixon did indeed resign his office, becoming the first (and, so far, only) President of the United States ever to do so. By that time, Captain America had left the “Secret Empire” saga well behind, in terms of its plotlines; still, in another, deeper sense, the comic and its titular star had yet to move on at all from the last page of CA #175. But that, naturally, is another story… one we’ll begin to explore here next month.
Attack of the 50 Year Old Comic Books 
Since RMN was POTUS (and, undeniably, a public figure) Marvel (and Englehart and Thomas as individuals) probably could not be liable for defamation under the holding in N.Y. Times v. Sullivan.
However, 18 U.S. C. § 871 makes threating a US President a crime (a law on the books since 1948). It is at least arguale whether the situation depicted would implicate the statute. For example. the 2006 film, Death of a President, did not implicate the statute, despite dealing with the fictional assassination of sitting Predident George W. Bush.
On the other hand, comedian Kathy Griffin’s handling of a prop severed head of then-President Trump damaged her career at an inopurtune moment.
It could be that something like this only becomes distasteful based on other events. After the assassination of his friend John F. Kennedy, Frank Sinatra spent his own money buying up copies of two films he had made dealing with political assassinations: The Manchurian Candidate (1962) and Suddenly (1954).
Public taste. rather than law. might be the long pole in the tent. My sense as a grammar school kid reading this was that. if someone publishes something like this, it is NOT impossible the President could be removed. It was where te zeitgeist was going.
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The thing about Sinatra buying up the Manchurian Candidate because of the Kennedy assassination is a myth: it came out in the 1980s that he’d yanked it because he thought United Artists was using Hollywood accounting to cheat him of his share of the proceeds. I’d suspect the same is true with Suddenly.
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I’ve read that, too. It would not be impossible that both things were true (Sinatra thought it was in bad taste after what happemed AND he thought UA was “putting a thumb on the scales”).
That version of The Manchrian Candidate was televised for the first time about the time (April 19740 this comic came out.
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The Manchurian Candidate’s scheme is quite similar to President Fu Manchu — assassinate the president, then have the sleeper agent veep ride to power.
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I had not heatd of that before, but it is very similar , , , ,
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In “The Rocky Horror Picture Show”, as Brad and Janet are driving to visit Dr Scott, Nixon’s resignation speech can be heard on the car radio.
Thanks to iffy distribution, I missed this issue, and spent the next issue trying to figure out what had happened.
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Thanks for the wrap-up, Alan, and for going back and pulling in the threads Englehart was weaving from books that came out in the sixties as well. As much as I enjoyed this one back in ’74, my thoughts on this book today are that the story was fun and exciting, but the whole thing wrapped up way too neatly, especially considering the state of American politics in 1974 (or 2024, but we’re certainly not going to get into that). I suppose a modern comics writer would have had Cap defeat the Secret Empire and while reeling from the emotional blow of discovering the identity of Number One, spend an entire issue (an alternate universe version of Cap #176, so to speak) dealing with the loopholes and human frailty of the American justice system as various people tried to cover-up their involvement in the scheme, while some other villain rose from the ashes to take advantage of the confusion. Englehart, however, really seemed to be largely over the Secret Empire by the time we arrived at Cap #175 and anxious to move on to something else. No way of knowing what he was thinking, unless he discussed it in an interview somewhere, but I can imagine he was as disillusioned as the rest of the country by the Watergate scandal and how it tarnished the American Dream. Super-heroes are easy with big battles and simplistic solutions that can be solved in 16-24 pages. The real world, not so much. Damn, now I’m getting maudlin.
Anyway, thanks for wrapping things up for us, Alan. I remember my friend John forcing me to read this one back in ’74, touting it as the book that “changed everything” because Richard Nixon was the super-villain in this one. I was less than enthused, because in my house in 1974, Nixon was hardly considered a villain (and my father would not admit he was for another twenty years), but I do remember thinking it was cool that Englehart was trying to tie his books to what was happening in the real world. Sal and Vinnie were at the height of their respective artistic games at this point and the art was stunning for it’s time and really made the dynamic aspects of the story even moreso. Englehart, of course, was only getting started, and would go on to become one of the best writers the comics biz has ever known. Thanks, Alan!
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My own parents weren’t particularly political at the time, although by the 1990s, my mom had become a staunch Republican (my stepfather, 18 years older than mom, born in 1925 and, hence, unable to vote until 1946, hated President Franklin Roosevelt and his New Deal policies, even to the point of thinking he somehow orchestrated the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, which I informed him was absolute bunk, unsupported by evidence and as if he somehow had magic powers over the Japanese and the entire U.S. military. I loved my stepdad, who died in 2021, but we had many disagreements, over politics and religion!). My dad, however, born in 1940 and soon to turn 84, on May 11, is much more centrist, more supportive of the Democrats, but not overly partisan.
Anyhow, in 1974, as an introverted loner, living in West Jordan, Utah, at the time, I didn’t have any friends or acquaintances who were also comics enthusiasts to hang out with and discuss what we were reading, but here we all are on this site, among others, doing just that 50 years later!
Strikes me as very true that Englehart wanted to move on from the Secret Empire and the greater implications of the President being revealed as a supervillain and head of a covert organization intent on taking over the nation and committing suicide upon having his plans foiled. Also, both Publisher Lee and Editor Thomas had good reason to not want even an increasingly unpopular President, albeit one who had been re-elected in one of the biggest landslide victories in U.S. politics less than two years earlier, to be unambiguously portrayed as a villain in Marvel Comics. Oh, sure, it was fine in the undergrounds, but Marvel was trying to appeal to a wide audience, and even if decrying bigotry and supportive of equal civil rights for all, the comics shouldn’t get overly political or partisan. Even if “everyone” (I couldn’t have been the only who didn’t get it at the time) “knew” it had to be Nixon under that hood, they couldn’t make it explicit. At least not unless they were willing to risk alienating Cap fans who might have also still supported Nixon in the spring of 1974. Might have been funny if Number One was revealed to have been the then most recent number two in U.S. Politics, namely Spiro Agnew, who had resigned in disgrace from the Vice-Presidency the year before.
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That’s part of the appeal of comics though, that they can deliver the justice we’re often short-changed on in the real world.
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I got the grand conclusion to Cap’s most epic adventure thus far and, almost amazingly, hadn’t missed a single issue of it. I must admit, however, that I for one had no idea that Number One was meant to be Nixon, although typing that out I recall the campaign slogan, “Nixon’s the One!” which by amusing sheer coincidence provides a sort of clue. It wasn’t until reading an interview with Englehart many years later, maybe in The Comics Journal in the ’80s, wherein he mentioned that Number One “was” Nixon that I became aware of the intent. Of course, in 1975, I was very curious and figured he had to be someone very high up in the chain. Maybe at the time, I just couldn’t conceive it would be the man at the very top, the very end of the chain! I was naive as Cap had been!
As to other aspects of the story, I had some of those earlier Secret Empire/Them/AIM stories from then recent reprints in Marvel Superheroes and Marvel Double Feature (as of yet, I hadn’t read any Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD, stories). Maybe one reason Englehart or Thomas, as editor, felt that Gabe’s role in that tale had to be an unseen #6 rather than #9 was that the panel showing #9 knocking out the others was rather ambiguous about his intent, not making it clear that he was acting as an undercover agent to take down the Secret Empire rather than ridding himself of competition to become the top dog, although a re-reading of his monologue in that panel it could as easily be the former as the latter. I wonder if Lee meant it to be Gabe at the time, or just how much he had thought out the whole intricate, multi-series plot lines. In retrospect, it is rather amazing how Lee, Kirby, et al, interweaved the goings on of Hydra and their splinter groups within 5 different series – SHIELD, Captain America, Hulk, Sub-Mariner and Iron Man. Another thing that stuck out comparing the coloring of the black characters in 1974 and in 1967 (and also having recently read a collection of FF 52-67) — for whatever odd reason, blacks were colored a bizarre shade of gray that doesn’t match the skin tone of any actual living, healthy human being (any more than pale yellow does) despite the fact that brown hues were certainly available among the colors available in the process at the time — Reed Richards and Peter Parker didn’t have to make do with gray hair because no one could figure out how to make brown! Fortunately, by 1974, they had gotten around to using a more realistic brown color for “black” people (of course, pure chalk white people and genuinely black people – as opposed to very dark brown – are rare if not non-existent; even albinos appear to me to be really more of a very pale pink than truly white). Not sure when they stopped using that horrid gray color – it just looked ghastly to me!).
Then there was Cap’s final fight with Moonstone. That full page panel of Cap smashing into Moony, exclaiming “the last lie!” was sooooo satisfying! As was Cap maintaining his advantage, wiping the floor with him, before Moony had a chance to use his powers. Perhaps it was a bit too pat for Harderman to make a final attempt to con the public once again and for Moony to interrupt him, refusing the obvious effort to make him the fall guy and giving a full public confession. Cap has been fully exonerated and for the first time in over 7 months, he’s actually smiling and full of good cheer! But then comes that final run by Number One, the final chase, and that suicide. Eek! Suddenly, the cheer is gone and Cap doesn’t even want to talk to anyone about what just happened.
Subsequently, readers were informed there was some sort of “cover-up” of the suicide, although given who it was that committed suicide leaves the question of what exactly was the “story” told to the public afterwards? After all, although there were no cameras watching the scene in the White House, there were plenty of tapes running as Cap chased the hooded Number One into the Presidential mansion and as a brooding Cap came out a few minutes later. If Number One was never revealed to the public as having been none other than President Richard M. Nixon himself, was the cover-up that Cap had somehow failed to prevent N.O. from assassinating Nixon? The press would have demanded to know who Number One was and if he had been captured alive, why wasn’t he put on trial. Nixon would have become a martyr figure in the M.U. I don’t know if there was any much later story that dealt with any of this, but at the time it was all just more or less entirely ignored in the Marvel Universe. It doesn’t wash with me that Nixon being Number One and having could have been successfully hushed up and Captain America somehow convinced to keep it secret and that he would not have been subpoenaed to appear before the U.S. Congress to explain what had happened – what he did and what he saw. Yeah, I’m overthinking all this a bit, and I can understand why it was decided (by Englehart and/or Thomas) to just ignore all that and pretend the world just went on without the truth coming out and that Cap just went along with the cover up doesn’t sit well with me. But, well, this is just comics, after all!
Not that I thought about any of that back in 1975, but I was eaged r to see what would happen next in the life of our favorite Living Legend of World War II!
And thanks for another fun and thought-provoking overview of this milestone issue, Alan!
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Regarding the “cover-up,” I’ve always figured that, within the Marvel Universe, following Number One’s suicide, SHIELD provided the government with a Live Model Decoy duplicate of Richard Nixon who stood in for the President before conveniently resigning a few months later.
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That would be an excellent in-world save, Ben. Nice work.
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Of course, that plays well into Alan Moore’s point in Watchmen that both the existence of super-powered people as well as the fantastic technology that is ubiquitous in super-hero yarns, would have a significant impact on human culture and politics, which Marvel & DC mostly ignored prior to the 1990s or so within their mainstream universes (hence, not counting those set even in the relatively near as well as very distant future or in alternative worlds, etc. As it is, in the real world, Artificial Intelligence as well as ever more life-like CGI art and voice-duplicators, among other high-tech, have already been impacting global politics for the worse. Simply imagining that a Life Model Decoy could pose as the U.S. President for even 4 months, brings up the question as to what would prevent, say, A.I.M. replacing the President and other powerful figures with adaptoids? If a lot of the high tech that Kirby imagined in 60 to 50 years ago actually existed at the time, the world as we know it would be quite different and not in a good way!
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But as Kurt Busiek says, dealing with the real-world effects of comic-book tech and powers and magic would kill the illusion this is happening in a world just like ours. I think it’s worth the tradeoff. I’m more annoyed when non-Big Two superhero novels go the same route as they should have the freedom to get wilder.
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If I recall CA%F #176, Steve Rogers refuses to talk about what he saw in the Oval.
Abouut two years later, when Steve Englehart was wrtting Supervillian Team-Up, He has SecState Kissinger working towards detante with Dr. Doom and Latveria.
Many people on the Left (and the Right) had issues with Dr. Kissinger in 1976, which may be why he never served again in a government position. Steve Englehart appeared to be one of them . . . .
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By contrast I thought the Secret Empire/AIM stuff became a complete mess. Why even bother with two groups? And having AIM agents know they’re the same organization makes it even more pointless. It felt like Lee and his co-creators got bored and decided, “Okay, let’s wrap it up and get back to Hydra!”
Blogged about the Silver Age Secret Empire a while back (https://atomicjunkshop.com/in-hindsight-tales-to-astonish-81-becomes-more-interesting/ and https://atomicjunkshop.com/even-in-defeat-the-secret-empire-remains-an-enigma/)
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Hey, Fraser. Interesting looks at these old comic books. I imagine Kirby was the one who did the primary plotting on all these stories, so maybe he intended for it to all be leading somewhere, or maybe he was just making it up as he went along. And whatever broad intentions he might have had for AIM and the Secret Empire and Them and Hydra could have gotten confused by Lee and the other scripters not knowing exactly what was going on and where this was supposed to all be headed.
All these decades later, with everyone who was involved passed on (and all of them having had notoriously bad memories when they were still alive, anyway) we’ll never know.
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True. A lot of stuff that has me scratching my head is unanswerable now. Even when people are alive they may not remember. I asked Gerry Conway once why the Hyena switched from “someone in a hyena costume” to “were-Hyena” and what his original concept had been and he responded he had no clue now.
Rereading, it’s obvious there were several times Lee and Kirby either started without an endgame (as much as Conway ever did) or switched gears mid-plot. But they still usually made it entertaining.
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Odd (and off yopic) thought: sometimes real off-shoots of other real organizations form (competing, sometimes hostile) branches.
For example, both Hamas and Palistinian Islamic Jihad are offshoots of the Muslem Brotherhood, but they are seperate and competing (and at times, mutually hostile) organizations.
For a more familiar exanple, the Catholic, Anglican and Lutheran Churches were all one church at one point and have similar beliefs, but are now seperate and competitive organizations (who are looking for, at least a modus vivendi, if not a merger).
Although it is never spelled out, the idea I got from the 1966 comics was that AIM/Them was Tech heavy while the Secret Empire (which had Hydra legacy-tech) was more oriented towards social science things like politics and manipulating public opinion.
Finally, Thrush/UNCLE and SPECTRE/Bond’s MI5 are excellent analogies, I suspect Wood’s THUNDER transitioning between The Warlords and SPYDER probably drove the idea of “What replaces Hydra as the “Big Bad?”
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Having read it recently, while AIM went heavier on tech it did do some manipulation too, like trying to get Fury out as head of SHIELD. Secret Empire … didn’t do much of anything. It would have made more sense to use AIM/Them everywhere. I think of the Secret Empire as one of those third tier characters Englehart revived and made interesting, much like the Space Phantom, Immortus, Hugo Strange and Patsy Walker (who had been a A-lister once but she’d faded by the time she and Buzz turned up in the Beast’s strip).
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I had thought Them was later renamed AIM or maybe AIM broke off from Them, and that they were originally meant to be Hydra’s hi-tech division, but more likely neither Kirby nor Lee had it all worked out as they were creating them and maybe it was Lee who decided they were all divisions of the same group but for whatever reason the Secret Empire and AIM had developed an animosity towards Them. As far as I know, Them only appeared in the Captain America series in ToS, in the story in which Nick & Cap finally meet in the modern era and Them sics the Super Adaptoid on Cap and they awaken the Red Skull from his 22 year nap and he steals the Cosmic Cube from them.
Seems an oddity that within less than a year Kirby would come up with both a high tech gang of rogue scientists called Them as well as the god-like creation of other mad scientists called Him. Maybe Him’s creators were connected with Them, all trying to play god in creating superior humanoid life-forms.
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AIM was originally a front for Them, a tech-oriented R&D group. It took them less than a year after their defeat to revive as an independent operation, only to promptly fall under the control of their own creation, Modok.
A 1990s Captain America plotline in which AIM announces “we’re good at tech, lousy at crime so we’re just going to sell people weapons” made a lot of sense.
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Although selling certain people weapons (or anyone certain kinds of weapons) can be a crime itself . . . .
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Alan, Thanks for another fascinating trip down memory lane. At this time, Captain America was one of my favorite books thanks to the excellent work of Steve and Sal so I was following this storyline avidly and remember this issue well. You reminded me of some things that I had completely forgotten about, such as Steve’s note two months earlier that he was going to cut the story short (it still seems like it went on for quite awhile) and that it was going to be less political (hmmm…really?), and that Linda Donaldson did not appear at all in CA&F 175. That last point is really interesting since as you pointed out in a panel of 175 today, it is noted that everyone involved in the Secret Empire scheme, including the Viper will be dealt with..but Linda Donaldson is not even mentioned (and yes, I did read the Beast’s series and would have liked to have seen some resolution there). In fact we don’t even really see the Beast much at all in 175. In fact we don’t see the Beast (other than a cameo in CA&F 183) until the following year in April 1975’s Avengers 137. And as I recall, the Beast doesn’t even mention Linda Donaldson or the Secret Empire when he meets the Avengers.
Thanks also for addressing the cover of 175…I always wondered who that guy snarling at Cap on the cover was supposed to be….I guess he could be the guy who pretended to fight Moonstone with his mask off (as good an explanation as any).
Regarding the famous unmasking at the end of 175…it was really cleverly done on Steve’s part because it had “plausible deniability” and it was clear but not clear who it really was… Of course Nixon was shown to be the President of “Marvel Earth” in several places including FF 103 and on the cover of FF !23 and I believe had made a brief cameo in an issue of CA&F, possibly 144 or 145. As much as Roy Thomas had been known as more of a “hands off” editor, I don’t believe there’s any way he would have allowed Number one to be revealed in print as Nixon and I certainly don’t think Stan would have accepted that, especially in April 1974 when Nixon was still President and others should understand that In April 1974 it was by no means clear what Nixon’s ultimate fate would be (including impeachment). Actually, I have read numerous interviews with Steve where he has discussed issue 175, including an interview in late 1980 in a short lived interview magazine called the Monster Times. His comments are fairly consistent with the comments you provided but he also said that there were certain people that came to him at the time of the story and asked if Number One was supposed to be Nixon and he swore up and down that it wasn’t. But later he admitted that it was. I remember being a bit confused by the end of 175 since there was some ambiguity there, but rereading the story after reading that interview with Steve, finding that it seemed pretty clear all along who Number One was. Of course I look forward to your comments on CA&F 176.
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Thank you for the nod to *FF* #103, which also name-checks Nixon’s daughter Tricia (not yet the wife of Edward Cox, whom Mike Doonesbury damned, if not as harshly as Taylor at the end of “Planet of the Apes”)…and for reminding me of references to Vice-President Agnew in *Avengers* #79 and *The Hulk* #139.
Have we ever seen the Viper (Jordan Dixon, ne Stryke) without his mask? Not only is he masked here, he’s also masked when Madame Hydra slew him and took his name in *Cap* #180. I know that Marvel super-villains can sometimes keep their uniforms in jail — see the Melter and the Black Knight in *Avengers* #15 — but the Viper’s powers are in the venoms he created, not in his clothes.
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Yep, that’s one of the absurdist aspects of many of those old comics – bad guys often got to wear their masks & costumes in jail — likely mainly so that regular readers could instantly know who they were supposed to be and so that the artists wouldn’t have to bother with having to figure out or remember what the baddie looked like under the mask.
In my early years (in the ’70s) of becoming more familiar with Marvel’s past, I initially was confused then amused by the way different artists portrayed the Puppet Master, who typically did not wear any costume or mask. As originated by Kirby, P.M. looked a bit like a sort of Howdy Doody puppet himself, with a rather short, spindly body but big head and lines on the bottom portion of his face that looked like that of a puppet. But then when Gene Colan drew him a few years later in a Sub-Mariner story, he gives P.M. a costume, without a mask, and gives him a rather stout, average-height body and a head and face that look nothing like Kirby’s version. In the first version of the Puppet Master I read, in an early issue of Marvel Team-Up, Gil Kane served up yet another version, who looked somewhat more like Kirby’s than Colan’s but also looking much more like a real person than a sort of puppet.
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Some characters have logical reasons for this (the Rhino’s uniform is grafted to his body and a Skrull or other non-human alien who ends up in a human prison looks that way anyway).
I would guess some bad guys could go to court and get allowed to wear their mask and costume as it provides emotional or psychological support. (Possibly as a reasonable accomodation under the ADA so long as the costume did not provide powers?)
DC usually depicted the Flash villians in jail garb, since most had tech-based powers. Lex Luther, until the early 1970s, was usually depicted in his jail garb since he was usually an escapee.
In view of this story, The Atom’s bad guy, Chronos, is interesting— he was drawn (when he first appeared in 1962 as a petty crook who became obsessed by time and schedules serving a bid in prison) to look like then-Former VP Richard Nixon. (Gil Kane, who drew that story, was known to use public figures as model’s for characters and in 1962 it looked like we “wouldn’t have Nixon to kick around an more” as he was losing to Pat Brown in CA.)
As an aside: Kane based Hal Jordan on his former NYC neighbor, Paul Newman, and Ray palmer on a younger Robert Tailor. He admitted to using Edward G. Robinson, James Cagney and Jason Robards, Jr. as models for bystanders and incidental characters.
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The Scorpion got to keep his costume between his first and second appearance by claiming he freaked out without out. The fools bought it.
See also, letting Sam Scudder have a shaving mirror (https://atomicjunkshop.com/and-the-inaugural-sam-scudder-award-for-penology-goes-to/)
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As one of your Mirror Master commentators notes, there is the replacement warden who is unaware of Lex Luthor’s career and lets him work in the machine shop. I suppose he has a statue on Lexor, something akin to the tributes to “Righteous Gentiles” at Yad Vashem in Israel
When the Mole Man escapes the Fantastic Four in *FF* #90, Mister Fantastic says that there’s no law against trying to take over the world, and the Thing thinks of J. Edgar Hoover.
In his second appearance in *Amazing Spider-Man* #21, the Beetle gets out of jail and says that there’s no law against owning his criminal equipment. (There should be, of course, if you’re likely to fight Spider-Man and the Human Torch.)
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The Comic Buyer’s Guide used to have a regular column, “The Law is an Ass,” discussing legal absurdities in comics. For example the scene (which I’ve seen more than a few times) where the villain announces everything they’ve done is legal and the hero just skulks off without checking this with the DA (“Oh, so he did commit a crime? I’ll drag him down to the jail.”).
Or a couple of Silver Age Marvel stories that assume you can’t prove a murder without a corpse, not even if the villain has confessed.
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Or letting him shine his shoes . . . .
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He used shiny shoes in one story, yes!
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Credit to Marvel for knowing that there was a comparison to be made with “Howdy Doody” with the Puppet Master, as you’ll see in *Not Brand Echh’s* satire of *Tales to Astonish* #100’s clash of the Sub-Mariner and the Hulk, where the villain vows that “me and Buffalo Bob will make a comeback!”
(When Marvel reprinted the “Gallery” pictures of *Fantastic Four* foes in the 1970s, they provided a checklist of their appearances and a little commentary. Puppet Master’s various looks got a nod.
With *Spider-Man,* there was some reflection on the Sandman’s shifts in intelligence, an admission that the Terrible Tinkerer wasn’t one of Lee & Ditko’s finest moments and an assertion that anything they could say about the Burglar would be “unprintable.” After all, the man went around shooting Uncle Bens in cold blood…)
I suppose that if Marvel ever did get rid of Puppet Master once and for all he’d say to Alicia and the Thing what Clarabelle the Clown did when “Howdy Doody” left the air in 1960:
“Goodbye, kids.”
Maybe the Marvel villains get to wear their costumes in jail because there’s no Paul Gambi (or J.M. Leach, his assistant) to keep them outfitted on the outside. Admittedly, there was Melvin Potter, but his activities as the Gladiator probably didn’t allow for any other sartorial super-villain stylings.
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I do wonder how this would have played out if Englehart’s Beast had been a hit. Would we have had a crossover with both heroes battling the Secret Empire? Presumably the X-Men would have appeared primarily in the Beast’s series.
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I loved the Englehart/Buscema Cap and there are riffs from these comics that are (rightfully) burned indelibly into my cerebral cortex.
That last page is still epic.
But the actual narrative (as opposed to the perfect comics mind fever) bugged me even when I was a fanatical teenage Marvelite.
I appreciate your deep continuity dive—all of that was lost on me at the time. (I was fanatical but perhaps not fastidious 🙂)
The last page of this issue and the real peak of this story is Cap 176, where Cap just asks all of his friends what to do next!
Thanks again for this blog.
PS: I still wish these had been inked by almost anyone other than Colletta. The undetailed background you mentioned is probably not Our Pal Sal’s failing, but Colletta erasing details so he could go to lunch early.
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As I’ve mentioned before, I really wish Frank McLaughlin could have inked the entire “Secret Empire” storyline instead of just the first chapter.
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any of the available inkers would have been better. I like Verpooten’s unvarnished inks (somewhere in Cap 153-155).
the switch to Robbins midstory later in the run is still painful. (I can appreciate his work in other contexts but Trimpe would have been better if Sal couldn’t do em)
these adolescent scars run deep! Nick Hornby wrote very eloquently about this in Fever Pitch.
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I may have to pick up that Hornby book.
I loved Robbins art in THE INVADERS because it was a retro book. But him on CAP – no. (I always wondered why Marvel didn’t give him SOMETHING to write during his time there. He could have done a nice job on a mystery/crime series.
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Me too Bill, enjoyed the Invaders till no end and then one unfortunate day I bought a copy of Daredevil #155 with a decent Gene Colan cover only to open it up and find Robbins pencil work, my eyes, my poor eyes!!! No wonder Miller was a hit after that!
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Robbins is one of the wilder “Sons of Caniff”… His work does have some common DNA with Romita’s.
But his Marvel work was somehow really off. I think his Shadow (at DC) played to his offbeat strengths.
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Respectfully disagree. Robbins was a terrible artist. His figure work didn’t make sense and the end result was usually muddy and visually uninspired. He made Don Heck look like Neal Adams. I really can’t say enough how disappointing it was for me to buy and book and then realize it had Robbins’ artwork in it.
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I feel much the same. Robbins replacing Kaluta was ultra-disappointing.
His best strength, apparently, was that for stuff in the 1940s he had plenty of templates he’d used in his Johnny Hazzard strip so the visuals were accurate.
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There’s a lot to unpack with this one.
Alan, first off, thanks for providing the detailed background on the Secret Empire’s confusing history from Tales to Astonish and Strange Tales. When I read the “Secret Empire” storyline as back issues in the mid-1990s, I found Steve Englehart’s allusions to those events a tad confusing, so all these years later I appreciate the clarification of the villains’ backstory.
Sal Buscema did great work on this entire storyline. I love “Our Pal Sal” and this is one of the highlights of his early career. My only regret is that, as I’ve mentioned more than once, unfortunately Frank McLaughlin only inked the first chapter, and we got Vince Colletta on the other six issues. Without getting into any character assassination, I simply feel McLaughlin was a much better inker over Buscema than Colletta ever was.
So… Richard Nixon was the leader of the Secret Empire. I’m actually glad that Englehart kept Number one’s unmasked face out of panel. With Marvel’s sliding timeline, nowadays Cap was in suspended animation when Nixon was President. The way Englehart & Buscema stage the scene, Number One could be *any* President of the United States, real or fictional. And that is the more important idea, that Cap, who believes so deeply in the American Dream and in democracy, discovers that the Chief Executive (whoever he happens to be) is actually corrupt to the core.
I’m sorry, but I’m going to have to touch on 2024 here. It’s a genuine tragedy that in the present day a former President has been revealed to be a criminal and a traitor, but a significant portion of the American public either refuse to believe the evidence of their own eyes, or they simply do not care, and in fact *want* a President who is committed to dismantling democracy. In the Marvel Universe of 2024, I can see Number One being unmasked as the President, and a large number of people responding that they’re going to vote for him again anyway because he hates the same people that they hate and he’s going to let them have all the guns they want to have, or they believe all of the propaganda being spewed about Democrats & liberals on right-wing media and by the Russians, or simply out of spite to “own the Libs.”
As Quentin Harderman and Moonstone put it, “Lies are neat, truth is messy.” That feels ever more relevant today.
Anyway, on a more upbeat note, this issue is one of my favorites, and I’m glad I had the opportunity to get my copy autographed by both Englehart and Buscema.
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The scary reality is that if #45 had been Number One, he wouldn’t have worn a hood. He’d have just stepped onto the steps of the saucer, proclaimed his dictatorship, and his adoring fans would have cheered him on and slaughtered his perceived enemies, including members of the U.S. Congress, the U.S. Supreme Court and honest reporters. And that would be Day One.
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I fear you’re correct, Fred.
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Ben, it’s not “character assassination” to prefer one artist over another. In this case, at least, I agree with you. Colletta was never one for detailed inking, and when you’re dealing with an artist like Sal Buscema whose strength was layouts and pacing, rather than facial expressions and detail. In fact, I would argue that a lot of old-school inkers (Giacoia, Esposito, Abel, Giella, besides Colletta) were not the best fit for Sal’s pencils or breakdowns.
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I only collected the Englehart run and read them straight through a few years ago during the Covid pandemic (surprisingly enough the boom did not heavily effect the prices of this run!) and whilst I found them interesting and entertaining – the ‘shocking’ idea that the President is corrupt and trying to dismantle democracy as the power of the presidency isn’t enough was, well, rather quaint.
Watergate was a shocking abuse of power, but at the time of reading we were just being barraged with daily and weekly discoveries; the constant cycle of being outraged was exhausting, each one seeming to overlap the previous one for attention. It made the reading experience rather strange and I found myself longer for older days when Agnew & Nixon was as bad as it got!
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As various political pundits have pointed out, it was an era when most Republican leaders dropped Nixon as toxic. A big contrast from today.
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Thank you for yet another insightful commentary on one of the most memorable stories of the Englehart era of CAPTAIN AMERICA & THE FALCON (and that’s saying something).
Weaving the various strands of the previous Secret Empire stories, as well as his own “missing X-Men” tales, is more evidence (as if any were needed) that Englehart was adept on building from the past while still finding ways to push the title into new territory. I think I read somewhere that, before taking over a series, Englehart would try to do a deep dive into its history to find nuggets that might lead to new stories. Of course, that was a lot easier to do when you’re talking about a Marvel Universe that was only 13 years old! Nowadays, with all the reboots and retcons, I can’t imagine doing something like that. Which, you could argue, is one case for doing what Julius Schwartz did in 1954: Throw out everything, create all-new characters with NO connection to the past, other than names, and start fresh, continuity be damned.
Anyway, about that ending. Back in 1974, fifteen-year-old me was following what was happening in DC, but not obsessively. I knew I had hated Nixon even before Watergate, but even given that, I was pretty stunned when I read between the panels of that last page. ”What could go wrong?” indeed. I could tell it was meant to be Tricky Dick under the hood. (And as I remember, the two-page spread in #176 showed that Number One had a rather Nixon-like haircut as seen from behind.)
I had the chance to interview Steve Englehart about 25 years ago, and I did ask him about this issue. He laughingly admitted that a few people at Marvel asked him about the ending, and he had no problem lying to say that it was Nixon when, naturally, it was. But his intent was less about slamming Nixon and more about causing Steve Rogers to question what it means to be Captain America in the 1970s. THAT, I think we can agree, was the real purpose, which would become evident over the next nine months. I know, Alan, you won’t be commenting on ALL those issues (you can’t spent all of 2024 writing about Englehart stories), but you’ll probably be doing enough of them to be interesting.
Cheers!
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“you can’t spent all of 2024 writing about Englehart stories”.
Actually, Bill, I suspect that I could — but I probably shouldn’t! 😉
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HAH! You know that I, for one, wouldn’t holler. As I just wrote, I felt that 1974 was the year Englehart vaulted to the top tier of Marvel writers.
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Yeah. Alan’s posts remind me what a big deal Englehart was for me back then (and still is when I reread his stuff)
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Alan:
To slip into Agnew alliteration…
I must commend you for creating a cogent, coherent compendium of comic-book criticism, showing that you are and shall never be a nattering nabob of negativism.
Unlike Agnew, who was supposed to go quietly or else, I hope you will continue to keep up the good work for as long as you find it rewarding.
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Agnew? That was GL/GA # 83 . . . .
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Given Moonstone has been shown as a jumped-up punk, I have no trouble believing that when he got in a real fight, he’d crumple. He ain’t all that.
You’re quite right about the X-Men Legends — Mesmero’s hypnotic illusion would have to affect people who weren’t even there when he created. Plus it wouldn’t hide the loss of power from the mutant-draining dingus.
This was a great finish to the arc though as the Batman TV show used to say, the wildest is yet to come.
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As much as I dug what Englehart did in 1972 and 1973 with the Beast, Luke Cage, the Hulk and especially the Defenders, I’ve always felt that the series he carried forward into 1974 – CAPTAIN AMERICA & THE FALCON, AVENGERS, and DR. STRANGE – cemented his reputation in my mind as THE comic book writer of the era. As much as I loved Steve Gerber and Don McGregor and what they were doing with their respective books, it was Englehart who represented a step forward in literate scripts, offbeat characterizations, and some pretty wild plots.
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It was Englehart’s Defenders, Hero For Hire and the various issues of his Avengers run I’d picked up that got me interested in his Cap. I needed something to concentrate on that wasn’t heavily effected by the comic boom, something without a TV or movie tie in, with few 1st appearances…and CA&F fit the bill! The man certainly had the golden touch during this era though, seems like you could just grab anything he wrote and you’d be OK.
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The thing that threw me off as a kid was that the guy on the cover resembled Spiro Agnew (to me, anyway), Made me have a hard time processing that it was actually supposed to be Nixon.
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