Stan Lee’s first Marvel Captain America story still holds up 85 years later

Stan Lee’s first Captain America story for Timely Comics, the publisher that later became Marvel, appeared in May 1941 in Captain America Comics #3. It wasn’t a comics story in panels, but a two-page prose piece called “Captain America Foils the Traitor’s Revenge.”

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This was long before readers knew Stan Lee, born Stanley Lieber, as Marvel’s public face. He was 18, working as a Timely office assistant and handling odd jobs for Joe Simon and Jack Kirby. He didn’t create Captain America; Simon and Kirby did. He got this assignment partly because prose pages helped publishers qualify for cheaper second-class postal rates, and that small break gave Stan Lee both a byline and a foothold at Timely Comics.

In the wartime story, Steve Rogers and Bucky Barnes expose Captain Curtis, a treasonous officer trying to kill his commander. What makes it interesting now is how much of Captain America already feels fully there: duty, courage, loyalty, moral clarity. It also features what’s widely credited as an early, and possibly the earliest, ricocheting shield throw.

If you follow Marvel history, this one’s well worth tracking down in reprint. Some period language and wartime tropes come with it, naturally, but it still plays like a World War II adventure. Marvel later adapted “Captain America Foils the Traitor’s Revenge” into sequential art in 2014 for the company’s 75th anniversary.

You can find the original in Captain America Comics #3, and the later adaptation through Marvel’s back catalog.

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