Grand Director - Publication History

Publication History

A character with a complicated history, the Grand Director's origin lies in discrepancies that crept up in the history of Captain America.

As a character, Captain America had been continuously published until 1949. He was then unsuccessfully revived in 1953 in Young Men #24–28 (Dec. 1953 – May 1954) by Stan Lee with Mort Lawrence and John Romita, Sr. These stories starred the original Captain America and were clearly set in the 1950s, with the character prominently battling communism and a communist Red Skull.

However when Lee revived the Captain America concept a second time in 1964 he chose to ignore his own previous stories (in some interviews Lee claims to have simply forgotten the brief 1950s revival). When he has the character return in Avengers #4 (March, 1964) Lee reveals that the original Captain America has been in a state of suspended animation since a battle he fought near the close of World War II.

The 1950s stories were thus considered outside of official canon until Englehart's 1972 Captain America storyline which attempted to resolve the discrepancy by revealing how an unnamed man and his teenaged student had assumed both the public and private identities of the original Captain America and Bucky as part of a government-sponsored program which planned to replace the lost heroes to combat the "red threat". The government eventually places them in suspended animation in the mid-1950s only for them to be revived decades later in contemporary times to battle the original Captain America. This complicated origin is the reason that some sources list Young Men #24 as the Director's first appearance.

A 1977 story, What If Vol. 1 #4, (August, 1977), introduces two other Captain Americas (William Naslund, appointed by Truman in 1945 to succeed the original Captain America, and Jeff Mace, who succeeds Naslund as Cap in the spring of 1946 after Naslund is killed in action). Though depicted in an issue of the What If? series, this story was explicitly noted as taking place as part of the formal canon.

The '50s Captain America was known for a time as Captain America IV. In later years, yet earlier "Captain Americas" were introduced, obscuring the numbering of the various Captain Americas, though most of these other later-introduced Captains are not formally part of the recognized linage (such as the Revolutionary War-era ancestor of Steve Rogers). Many recognize this character today with the specific terms "1950s Captain America" or "Captain America of the 1950s" and "Grand Director" to distinguish him from the World War II Steve Rogers, as his birth name (William Burnside) was not revealed until Captain America #602. He legally changed his name to "Steve Rogers" in the 1950s, and only refers to himself by this name, never by his birth name.