I read a lot of comic books as a kid. This series of posts is about the comics I read, and, occasionally, the comics that I should have read.

Captain America was dealing with some especially weird challenges when he met Sam Wilson. His arch-nemesis, the horrid Nazi called the Red Skull, had used the vast powers of the Cosmic Cube to produce a Freaky Friday body swap with the star-spangled Avenger. While the Red Skull strutted about New York City in the guise of Captain America, sullying his previous stalwart reputation with all sorts of egotistical and caddish behavior, our hero in the Red Skull’s form was cast out to the remote island of Exile Island, where a roving crew of oddball villains assaulted with weapons such as an especially lethal scarf.

This is simply how the House of Ideas churned them out as the nineteen-seventies were about to dawn. Across Captain America issues #117 to #119, writer Stan Lee and artist Gene Colan usher Sam Wilson and his faithful feathered friend, Redwing, into the Marvel Universe. He is introduced with swashbuckling flair.

After Sam and Redwing help the out-of-place Captain America fight off the malicious Exiles, the patriotic shield-slinger decides that he’s found a fine new recruit for the superhero biz. Handily enough, Cap had already hidden the fact that he was stuck strolling around in the Red Skull’s body by using old battlefield skills to fashion a few handfuls of mud into an astonishingly convincing human mask. These are effects makeup skills that deserve to win a dozen Oscars.

Captain America might be stuck in another physical form, but he remains a first-rate trainer. He takes his new pal Sam through the paces, teaching him hand-to-hand combat. He also convinces him of the importance of having a top-notch costume when off adventuring. Sam gets some appropriate duds and dubs himself the Falcon just in time for the Red Skull to grow weary of waiting for his minions to complete their assigned task of offing Captain America. Because the Red Skull is still wielding the reality-warping Cosmic Cube, things get a little wild when he decides to strike against the freshly forged partners in justice.

To face his longtime foe properly, the Red Skull undoes the body swap and teleports himself to Exile Island. With the nearly limitless powers of the Cosmic Cube literally in hand, the Red Skull seems almost impossible to beat. When penning the pulse-pounding saga, Lee must have realized the same thing. Luckily for Captain America and the Falcon, the worker drones at shady tech organization Advanced Idea Mechanics orchestrate a long-distance destruction of the Cosmic Cube for their own nefarious purposes. With some added assistance from Redwing, the Red Skull is duly dispatched.

And that’s prime comics, true believer!

Previous entries in this series (and there are a LOT of them) can be found by clicking on the “My Misspent Youth” tag.