WHAT IF #4

"WHAT IF THE INVADERS HAD STAYED TOGETHER AFTER WORLD WAR TWO?"
Co-Conjurers of Cosmic Cacophany: Roy Thomas & Frank Robbins
Embellisher: Frank Springer | Colorist: George Bell
Letterers: Joe Rosen & John Costanza

The Plot: In April of 1945, the Invaders have gone their separate ways. Captain America and Bucky are presumed killed in action as they thwart Baron Zemo's attempted theft of a new Allied radio drone. Meanwhile, the Human Torch and Toro have taken the fight to Berlin, where the Torch kills Hitler in his bunker. Elsewhere, Namor battles the Japanese in the Pacific while Spitfire and Union Jack defend Winston Churchill from Nazi assassins. The group is summoned back together by their liaison officers, who reveal the deaths of Cap and Bucky. Namor and the Torches then fly to the United States for a meeting with recently inaugurated President Harry Truman, who explains that he had the press quash all coverage of Cap's death. Truman introduces Namor and the Torches to a new Captain America and Bucky -- the former Crusader called the Spirit of '76, and New York Yankees batboy Fred Davis -- and asks that they be allowed to join the Invaders.

Truman also adds the Whizzer and Miss America to the group, revealing that the Liberty Legion recently disbanded. Thus the new Invaders battle together and separately against the final remaining Axis power, Japan -- until the war finally ends. At that point, again at Truman's suggestion, the team re-christens themselves the All-Winners Squad and continues to fight crime in the United States. But eventually, the All-Winners decide to take a break. The Human Torch and Toro fly to Boston to visit the Torch's creator, Professor Horton -- but find that he has been imprisoned by his new android creation, Adam-II. Adam traps the Torch and Toro in a deathtrap with Horton, then departs on a mission. But former Liberty Legionnaire the Patriot comes to the aid of the Torches and Horton. As soon as he has freed them, Horton reveals that Adam-II is on his way to replace a congressional candidate with another android.

The All-Winners (plus the Patriot) reunite and head for a political rally -- where not knowing which candidate Adam-II is after -- they split up. Captain America and Bucky stumble onto the target, John F. Kennedy, but Bucky is knocked out. Cap races off to signal the other All-Winners, but is followed and attacked by one of Adam-II's androids. Cap signals the team just as he succumbs to his injuries. The rest of the group appears and saves Kennedy from Adam-II, with Captain America himself arriving to send Adam-II into retreat. But the evil android is killed when he attempts escape in Kennedy's limo and crashes into a wall.

In the battle's aftermath, "Captain America" reveals that he is actually the Patriot, wearing a spare Cap costume he found in Namor's ship -- and that the "real" Cap (the Spirit of '76) was killed by Adam-II's android. The All-Winners stand by for a moment to mourn their teammate, then welcome the Patriot into their ranks as the third Captain America.

Continuity Notes: As with most issues of WHAT IF, this tale is narrated by the Watcher (the robustly muscled, relatively normal-head-sized version popular in the seventies). But unlike your typical WHAT IF story, it turns out this is not a parallel universe; these events actually happened. Per Roy Thomas in a column to end the issue: he did not foresee INVADERS ever reaching the year 1945 and the end of the war, but he wanted to tell the story of what happened after. So in a sense, at least from the perspective of the Invaders themselves, Thomas considered this a "What if?" story, even though it's firmly a "This Happened" tale to the larger Marvel Universe.

A footnote on page 1 tells us that Cap and Bucky met their "ends" in a flashback in AVENGERS #56, which expanded upon a prior flashback in AVENGERS #4. Roy Thomas does some of his typical Roy Thomas continuity cop stuff as he has Cap and Bucky, in costume, knocked out by Zemo's android, and then changes them into their U.S. army uniforms, since those are what they were wearing in the issue 4 flashback. There's also a narrative reference in the scene to "time-paradoxes" which ultimately resulted in "another version" of Cap's shield freeing him and Bucky before Zemo could send them back to Germany. Thus freed, they jump onto a motorcycle to stop the drone plane as per the original flashback in AVENGERS #4.

I must admit that I've read precious little Silver or Bronze age AVENGERS or CAPTAIN AMERICA comics. I have no dea why Thomas jumps through so many weird hoops, when the original flashback to what happened to Cap and Bucky in AVENGERS #4 was very straightforward: they stumbled onto Zemo, while in their army uniforms, and met their "ends" wearing same. That was it. Clearly, this all became muddled in intervening years (to the point that a temporal paradox required another version of Cap to get involved?!?), resulting in Thomas's need to fix all of it at some point.

This issue was published prior to Brian Falsworth's debut as Union Jack, prompting Thomas to apologize on the issue's text page for spoiling it for anybody (though it should be noted that all readers would know from this story is that there is a new Union Jack, but not who is under the mask). Also appearing here ahead of their debut in the series proper are the Invaders' British and American liaisons, Major Rawlings and Colonel Farrow. (The two, along with the Invaders' Big Ben rendezvous point, were introduce with much fanfare in INVADERS ANNUAL #1, and then quickly disappeared pretty much entirely for the remainder of the series.)

The Torch kills Hitler when the dictator reaches for a button that would have blown up his bunker. As he dies, Hitler orders S.S. chief Otto Gunsche to tell the world he committed suicide, and the Torch decides that it's probably better that the world believe he took his own life as a coward.

Footnotes direct readers to INVADERS #14 and 15 for the previous appearance of the Spirit of '76, to MARVEL PREMIERE #30 for Fred Davis's debut, and to MARVEL PREMIERE #30 to see when the Patriot crossed paths with the Invaders. Speaking of young Fred Davis -- when the new Bucky appears, his hair is blond, but later it's brown. Miss America states that he's dying it (as well as wearing makeup to cover his freckles), which begs the question of why the president didn't simply find someone with more a physical resemblance to Bucky (and maybe with some actual combat training, too) to play the part! For reasons only he understands, Thomas just really wanted to use that batboy again, I guess -- story logic be darned.

There's also a reference to HUMAN TORCH #1 as the Torch describes Professor Horton to Toro. In his story, the Torch states that Horton was greedy and selfish, which is why the Torch left him. This seems to contradict part of the Torch's flashbacks in INVADERS 22, where he appeared to be on good terms with the professor after his creation. But Thomas wrote that issue after this one, so perhaps he was planning to ret-con himself eventually!

We're told that the All-Winners Squad's first mission was a battle against a villain called Isbisa -- a story which was originally published in 1946's ALL-WINNERS #19, and reprinted by Marvel in 1967's FANTASY MASTERPIECES #10.

By the final scenes of the story, Miss America is wearing recently prescribed glasses.

My Thoughts: When I was a kid, as I've mentioned many times, I played the MARVEL SUPER HEROES ROLEPLAYING GAME often. And in the game's character handbook, under the entry for Captain America, you had Captain America I (Steve Rogers), Captain America II (the Spirit of '76), Captain America III (the Patriot), Captain America IV (Grand Director), and Captain America V (John Walker). I found this all incredibly confusing, and never paid it much mind. Even to this day, I remained ignorant of those two Caps that existed between Steve Rogers and the character who would become the "Grand Director" (who I am mainly familiar with via learning Nomad's backstory during Mark Gruenwald's CAP run, and then subsequently when he featured in Ed Brubaker's mid-00s run). But now, at last, I know the truth. And somehow it's not surprising that both interim Caps were created by Roy Thomas simply because he felt a little tiny, mostly unnoticeable hole had to be plugged in the character's publishing history!

I suppose the more surprising part is that there even were two Caps in that interim period. It wasn't necessary, as far as I can tell. One would've sufficed. But I appreciate that Thomas found a way to throw a little curveball to the audience. Killing off one Captain America, so soon after the original had died, is an unexpected and interesting idea! Plus, it allowed Thomas to utilize and write out his own creation, the Spirit of '76, before turning the Captain America role over to the pre-existing Patriot. And as I understand it, the Patriot would remain Cap for the rest of the forties and into the early fifties, to be eventually replaced by the "Commie Smashing" Cap who would someday become the Grand Director.

Beyond all the Cap stuff, I appreciate Thomas putting a bow on the saga of the Invaders here. Of course he had no way to know the series would end a mere two years later, but regardless of how long it could've gone, it would always be a historical footnote in the modern Marvel Universe. So wrapping the series up early, just to tie everything off, was a wise move. And doing so with a genuinely (mostly) engrossing story makes it even better!

And that's it for the Invaders. Normally I'd throw in a little coda here, my thoughts on the series as a whole. But I think I covered that pretty well with Roy Thomas's final issue. He was the mastermind and heart behind INVADERS, and anything I might have had to say about the series was said when he left it. The remaining installments, while certainly enjoyable from the mind of Don Glut, were really just the book slowly ambling toward its demise.

That said, maybe I'm not quite finished yet. Next week, I'm going to "reprint" a couple of posts from the early days of the blog, jumping ahead about thirty-five years for the Invaders (or two years in publication time from their final issue; take your pick) so we can get the final word on the first two Union Jacks and their diabolical relative, Baron Blood...