POVonline

Captain America #100
April, 1968

ROLL YOUR MOUSE OVER THE IMAGE
TO VIEW THE UNPUBLISHED VERSION

Syd Shores was a Golden Age artist who worked with Joe Simon and Jack Kirby on the first issues of Captain America.  He even inked the cover of #1, published in 1940 and then took over drawing the feature when Joe and Jack left their creation and went elsewhere.  Shores remained at Marvel and became one of their top artists...but that was back in the forties.

In the late sixties, his art career floundered and he even ended up driving a cab for a living.  He reconnected with comics and Marvel, and began inking Kirby on Captain America.  It was the hope of Stan Lee that in so doing, Shores would pick up on the new "Marvel method" of drawing a comic from a plot instead of a script, and also that he would make his super-hero art more dynamic, a la Kirby.  Neither happened and he was destined to remain primarily an inker of other artists.

There were several times while inking Kirby that he seems to have gotten confused as to whether the end product was supposed to look like a Jack Kirby comic or a Syd Shores comic.  Stan was encouraging him to be himself but also to learn from Jack...but sometimes when Shores tried to be himself, Jack had the art retouched back in Jack's direction.  This cover was such an example.  It is not known who was responsible for the distracting background shadow in the unpublished version.  It doesn't look like the kind of thing Kirby would ever do but it's unlikely Shores would have added it on his own.  In any case, Stan (or whoever was making such decisions by then) had it removed and also had a lot of the Shores detailing stripped from the Captain America figure.

But the big change was the head of Captain America which was judged as looking too much like Shores.  A Kirby/Sinnott Captain America head from an earlier issue was pasted into this version.  And another artist — probably John Romita — added in the figure of The Wasp to balance the shadow-less design.  It was all probably a lot of work but since this was Cap's "premiere" issue in his own comic (despite the numbering), it was probably worth it.

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