The other Awesome comics: Fighting American

Welcome to the ongoing feature where I read the other comics published by Awesome that ran alongside Supreme. I read them so you don't have to! (You're welcome.) You can read part 1 here.

We've talked about archetypal superheroes, with Moore doing riffs on the Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman types of heroes. One he never worked with much was the Captain America type. Occasionally he wrote Diehard as a fill in for a war hero type, but it wasn't overt.

But Moore need not have worried; Rob Liefeld had his back. Enter Fighting American.

So Joe Simon created Captain America, the patriotic, secret-serum war hero in the 1940s. He was one of the first Avengers, as detailed in that movie subtitled "The First Avenger." He became a guy named Nomad for a while and fought some dude dressed up like a pirate. In other words, he was a well-established Marvel character. And because he created Captain America under work-for-hire rules, Simon never owned the rights to Captain America, allowing Marvel to get rich off the character.

He did try to rectify that in the 1950s, when he teamed up with Jack Kirby (look, if you don't know who Kirby is by this point, you might be beyond my help) to create Fighting American, another patriotic character. Initially the team thought they could just adapt the "serious" patriotic-minded Captain America stories for fighting communists, but the series quickly loosened up.

Simon said in 1989 that he felt the anti-Communist fervor of the era would provide antagonists who, like the Nazis who fought Captain America during World War II, would be "colorful, outrageous and perfect foils for our hero." He went on to say:

"The first stories were deadly serious. Fighting American was the first commie-basher in comics. We were all caught up in Senator McCarthy's vendetta against the 'red menace.' But soon it became evident that McCarthy ... had gone too far, damaging innocent Americans.... Then, the turnaround, [as] his side became talked of as the lunatic fringe.... Jack and I quickly became uncomfortable with Fighting American's cold war. Instead, we relaxed and had fun with the characters."

Published by Prize Comics, it was, contrary to standard industry practices of the time, creator-owned. It lasted only to issue 7, but made enough of an impact to be remembered decades later.

Fast forward to 1996. Rob Liefeld was hired to work for Marvel Comics on Captain America for the Heroes Reborn storyline. He lasted only six issues (Marvel said he left early because of low sales, Liefeld said because in 1997, the company, which had filed for bankruptcy, asked Liefeld to accept lower payment for his studio's work. He refused and was removed from the series).

Because he had almost two issues worth of drawings and no publisher, Liefeld reworked it into a two-issue miniseries (August–October 1997) for Awesome, written by himself (story) and Jeph Loeb (script), and penciled by himself and Stephen Platt.

Liefeld called Fighting American co-creator Joe Simon and Roz Kirby, widow of co-creator Jack, who agreed to license the character to him, but at a price Liefeld would not accept. Liefeld created the similar character Agent America, drawing "maybe three pinups and one poster image," but withdrew the character, he said, when Simon threatened to sue.

In fact, Agent America was referenced in Judgment Day and made it onto several of the miniseries' covers (all drawn by Liefeld).

Ultimately, Liefeld negotiated a new deal for Fighting American, but was then sued by Marvel. During the course of the trial, he said, his version of Fighting American acquired a shield. As one of the terms of the settlement, however, Fighting American was forbidden from throwing his shield like a weapon, to distinguish him from Captain America.

Thank god they got all that worked out and no lawyers starved during the process.


Liefeld recruited Platt (with his quite dissimilar art style) to do pages that intercut with Liefeld's main storyline. Liefeld's pages deal with a retired super soldier in the present who had become a farmer and doesn't want to go back to fighting. But the return of some of his old villains forced him to come back and team up with a new android sidekick in a teenage girl's form: SPICE.

Platt's pages, in jarring contrast, show Fighting American in pitched battle with forces explicitly stated to be communists in the 1950s. Except they don't look like Russians and we never engaged in full-on war with the Russians in the 1950s and as pictured, the Russians in this comic wore uniforms like Nazis and fly the Nazi flag. Um...moving on...

In the modern story, Fighting American is transported to a flying island, fights a communist version of the Red Skull (but made of metal called the Iron Cross) and the purple-colored Smash, and then leaves.

It's kind of fun seeing Fighting American interact with some of Moore's WWII-era heroes even though they're not really Moore's heroes.

Awesome followed it up with two miniseries. The first, Rules of the Game, picks up where the previous story left off, and surprisingly, it's wonderful. Loeb wrote it with art by Ed McGuinness. McGuinness's cartoony art style lets Loeb be silly with it. That breaks most of the similarity to Captain America and let's the series breathe on its own.

Loeb brought back ridiculous Russian villains from the Kirby and Simpson days (such as Hotsky Trotski - see that's how you do it), who are all trying to kill Fighting American for $10 million (now that they're all mafia goons and not communists anymore). Loeb realized that Fighting American wasn't meant to be taken seriously, and the series is richer for that. It's such a refreshingly fun jolt of energy that I'm almost tempted to recommend it even beyond just Moore's Awesome universe.

Awesome moved away from that template and followed it up with the miniseries Dogs of War, written by Jim Starlin and penciled by Platt. Gone is the android sidekick. Gone is the subplot about Fighting American having a long lost daughter. Gone is the bouncy, silly fun.

Now we get Fighting American as an idealist trying to survive in a world of modern espionage and mass murder.

I love Jim Starlin, but silly is not a word you'd use to describe his writing. While the story is well written and interestingly plotted, it was just such a stark tonal contrast. Page after page after page of killing, brutality and pitch-black morality is not what I was hoping for from an Awesome comic. And Platt's Jim Lee art style just adds to the heavy effect.

Written several years before Captain America's the Winter Soldier arc, Starlin wrote a similar story of a villain (No Name) who might be trying to kill Fighting American, who turns out to be his long presumed dead sidekick (Speed Boy). The pair are trying to track down a Russian arms dealer who is looking to sell a Soviet-era weapon of mass destruction that can kill based upon the pigment of skin. As I said, it's well written, the ideas are dark and clever, and Platt is a good match for the writing. It would have been a great Captain America graphic novel. Unfortunately, Dogs of War would go unfinished, so we never got a number of answers or resolution.

All this is to say, if you ever come across Rules of the Game in the cheap bin at your comic book shop, you could do much worse than picking it up.