Okay, now that you're warmed up a bit, a slightly more complex question, or perhaps just one with a more complex answer.
So, when Captain America joined the Avengers, it was explained in the papers that he'd vanished on a mission shortly before V-E Day in World War Two. Only now that he'd revived was it learned that he and Bucky had "died" preventing a revenge rocket from Baron Zemo from striking its target, only for Cap to be frozen in ice for over a decade until the Avengers found him. (Bucky is a question for another time.)
Except that no, according to the clippings in my scrapbooks, Captain America didn't vanish before V-E Day. He was still active through V-J Day, and served with a short-lived team called the All-Winners Squad after the war ended.
There's even scattered reports of him being active until some time in the 1950s.
But now suddenly, Captain America is back, he skipped all those intervening years, and there's dead silence in the papers about all those later appearances. Quite a few readers must have thought they were suffering the Mandela Effect or something.
So, what gives with those anomalous Captain America sightings? Were those impostors of some sort? Time travel shenanigans? Something even weirder?
So the short answer is that they weren't imposters, but they weren't the original Captain America either. In fact, there were no fewer than three other men who operated as Captain America in the time between 1945 and the end of the 1950s.
From the 1940s until relatively recent times, the Captain America identity and iconography has been the intellectual property of the United States government - first through the Department of War, which was later combined with the Department of the Navy to become the Department of Defense, and later transferred to the Department of Homeland Security and administered by the Commission on Superhuman Activities.
Because of this, and because of Captain America's importance as a war asset and propaganda symbol during World War II and the early Cold War, the United States government made significant efforts to continue the myth of Captain America as a seemingly immortal, invincible super-soldier, even after the heroic sacrifices of the original Captain America and Bucky in April 1945.
(Marvel Comics dramatization of Steve Rogers and James Buchanan "Bucky" Barnes' heroic sacrifices over the English Channel in April 1945.)
The culprit behind Rogers and Barnes's demise, Nazi operative Baron Heinrich Zemo, made sure to broadcast that information far and wide, and the story soon was picked up by American media outlets. However, President Harry S Truman soon appointed replacements, passing them off as the originals, having miraculously survived.
(file photo of William Nasland, the Spirit of '76 and Steve Rogers' successor as Captain America)
The first of these men was William Nasland, previously known as another patriotic hero active during the war, the Spirit of '76. He was joined by New York Yankees batboy Fred Davis Jr. as his Bucky.
Nasland's tenure as Captain America was tragic and all-too-brief. Though he finished out the war as Captain America, leading the Invaders' charge into Berlin that led to the Nazis' unconditional surrender and Hitler's death at the hands of the Human Torch, he'd end up dying in action less than a year later.
Nasland discovered a plot created by the evil android Adam II to replace Massachusetts congressional candidate and future President John F. Kennedy with a robot double. Nasland successfully foiled the plot, but at the cost of his life.
Just before his death, Nasland was found by the next man who would become Captain America.
(file photo of Jeffrey Mace as the Patriot)
Jeffrey Mace, yet another star-spangled Golden Age mystery man as the Patriot, discovered Nasland just before his death. Inspired by his sacrifice, Mace became the next Captain America, with Davis continuing to work alongside him as Bucky.
Mace continued to operate as Captain America until the start of the 1950s, working alongside the Invaders, now rebranded as the peacetime All-Winners Squad, and falling in love with one of their members, Betsy Ross, alias Golden Girl.
However, as the 1950s dawned and the United States geared up for war in Korea, Mace came under scrutiny from anti-Communist officials due to his Russian-Jewish heritage. After unveiling a plan by his former government handler to blackmail him into going to Korea and fighting, Mace retired. He and Ross retired to a quiet neighborhood in Queens, where they raised a family in peace.
Mace lived a long life, ultimately succumbing to cancer several years ago at the age of 85. He's survived by his wife and several children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, and had the privilege of having Steve Rogers at his bedside as he passed away.
Mace and Nasland were both true American heroes, but the same cannot be said of the third man to become Captain America following the war.
(Atlas Comics "Captain America: Commie Smasher" comic cover, featuring William Burnside as Captain America and Jack Monroe as Bucky)
William Burnside was what we, in modern parlance, would call a Captain America "stan". He was a child during World War II, and grew up idolizing Steve Rogers as Captain America, obsessively tracking his appearances and disbelieving the government narrative that both Nasland and Mace were the same individual as Rogers.
After graduating university in 1952, Burnside found a formula for the Super-Soldier Serum in West Berlin while studying the Nazi writings about Captain America there. He presented this formula to the US government, and they eagerly took his offer, wanting a new Captain America to aid in Korea.
Burnside had one condition, though: that he became the new Captain America. The government agreed, and here's where things get disturbing: Burnside legally changed his name to Steve Rogers and had plastic surgery done to resemble him in preparation for taking the role. This was only a harbinger of things to come.
Before he could suit up as Captain America, the Korean War ended and Burnside was cast aside. He became a schoolteacher in upstate New York, finding a new Bucky there in his student, Jack Monroe. He injected both himself and Monroe with the Super-Soldier Serum and donned the Captain America costume, using it to oppose communist sympathizers in the US without government sanction.
However, the version of the formula that Burnside and Monroe had put in their systems was unstable, and led to severe paranoid schizophrenia in both men. In the midst of the Red Scare, this severe mental illness led Burnside to see imagined communists where none existed, particularly within African-American communities.
In 1955, after one such racially motivated attack, the US government intervened, and Burnside and Monroe were placed on ice. Burnside later resurfaced, decades later, as the Grand Director, leader of a neo-Nazi hate group called the National Force, while Monroe became the vigilante called Nomad.
It wasn't until decades later that any of this became public knowledge, after Steve Rogers successfully gained the rights to the Captain America name and likeness from the Commission on Superhuman Activities, and with it, documents regarding his successors were declassified.
It's a real testament to the power of narrative and propaganda that even since then, the existence of Nasland, Mace, and Burnside hasn't become common knowledge. Most people aren't aware there was more than one Captain America (maybe they know about Isaiah Bradley, but even that's doubtful), but Mace and Nasland's stories, at least, deserve to be told.
