Captain America #1 hit the newsstands December 20, 1940. It was an immediate smash hit, selling almost a million copies right away.
Although this was a full year before America entered WWII, Joe Simon and Jack Kirby’s bold cover art proves heroes don’t wait for government approval to start punching Nazis.
Joe Simon: “The opponents of the war were all quite well organized. We wanted to have our say too.”
Joe Simon: “The United States hadn’t yet entered the war when Jack and I created Captain America, so maybe he was our way of lashing out against the Nazi menace.”
The Nazi menace was thriving openly at home in the form of the German American Bund, a Nazi fan club based in New York. Jack Kirby and Joe Simon received a flood of hate mail and threatening phone calls in response to their comic book.
Jack Kirby: “I once got a letter from a Nazi who told me to pick out any lamppost I wanted on Times Square, because when Hitler arrived, they’d hang me from it.”
Joe Simon: “Some people really opposed what Cap stood for.”
When the Bund’s threats moved off the phone lines and into the streets, Mayor La Guardia intervened and sent cops to protect the publisher’s offices. The mayor told Joe Simon: “You boys over there are doing a good job.”
Jack Kirby and Joe Simon were both in their 20s, both born in New York, both Jewish and both children of immigrants from Europe. They continued to write and draw Captain America up to issue #10.
December 1918: Larisa Reisner becomes Commissar of the Soviet Red Navy.
The woman, born in a German family in Polish Liublin, became a writer and editor of the Russian anti-imperialist satirical magazine ‘Rudin’. In 1917 she was involved in agitation campaign in the Baltic sea fleet, convincing many sailors to join revolutionary forces.
In 1918 she joined the Bolsheviks and became a leader of a saboteurs’ group of sailors, raiding over the Whites’ rear front. She led the Red fleet in a battle with White fleet on Volga-river in 1918. And in December 1918 Trotsky appointed her as a Commissar of the Red Navy. She died in 1926 of typhus.
