Captain America Returns

Strike up the band and shoot off the fireworks.

It's the Fourth of July.
 
And Captain America is back!
 
Yes, Captain America, aka Steve Rogers, has again cheated death and this week -- in time for the Fourth, his birthday -- he began his return from comicdom's great beyond in "Captain America Reborn."

He was cut down on the steps of the U.S. District Court in New York two years ago, after he was arrested for leading one group of Marvel Comics superheroes against another in opposition to a law requiring them to reveal their identities and register with the federal government. The series was called "Civil War."
 
His death was a stunner, given his iconic status and the fact he was known to generations of readers going back to World War II. And not only to Americans.
 
"Great news about the return of Captain America," Colm Dowling, general manager of Captain America's Cookhouse and Bar on Grafton Street in Dublin, Ireland, wrote in an email to Military.com. "We didn't know he was planning a return and are delighted to hear."
 
Two years ago, when Captain America was shot, cookhouse staff were queried by media and customers about the hero's death, according to Dowling, who oversees one of three Captain Americas in Ireland. The walls of the Grafton Street restaurant include giant murals depicting Captain America in combat against the Nazis.
 
"We will certainly be celebrating the resurrection here in the restaurant," he said.
 
An expected surprise
 
Captain America's resurrection, though great news, was hardly surprising to those who know comics, where the only killed off character who seems to have stayed dead over all the years has been Ben Parker, Spider-Man's uncle. Even Superman was killed once. He got better, too.
 
"I'm not surprised" he is back, Stan Lee, himself a comics icon who was there at the start of Captain America in 1941, told Military.com. "I assumed they would bring him back sooner or later ... If you're a comic book writer, or any kind of writer, you're a little bit like God -- you can kill somebody, you can bring him back to life. You can do anything with the characters if you're the one writing them."
 
But comic book practices -- and business -- aside, Captain America's return may represent more than a periodic demise/rebirth of a superhero. The product of a U.S. War Department secret program that turned him from a patriotic but weakly art student into a "Super Soldier," Captain America took his first comic-book cracks at Hitler and the Nazis even before the United States was in World War II.

Late in the war, he and his young sidekick, James "Bucky" Barnes, were thrown into the north Atlantic after trying -- unsuccessfully -- to defuse a bomb-laden plane. Captain America survived in suspended animation, frozen in ice, until thawed out in 1964, where he found a world that was not so black and white as the one he left in in 1945.

"He's probably been the most patriotic comic book superhero of all," Lee said. "I guess what he's been is a great symbol of somebody who always does the right thing, who cares for his country. He is the ultimate patriot."

More than any other superhero, Captain America -- given his history and role -- represents the nation's conscience, resilience and ideals, says Arnold Blumberg, who teaches a course in comic book literature at the University of Maryland Baltimore County. Which is why other characters in the comic book world -- even those with greater powers -- defer to him.
 
"Basically, one of the things that make Captain America so indelible as a character, what makes him so iconic -- and it's hard not to become an icon when your name is 'America' and you're wearing the flag ... [he] is the focal point, he is the leader, the one the other characters all look up to," Blumberg told Military.com.
 
He represents "the best ideals of the country," Blumberg said. "What he is, ultimately, at heart, in his origins, is a Soldier. So he is serving his country."