How Did Our Heroes Spend America’s Bicentennial?

I don’t know about you, but I’m not much in the mood to celebrate America this year, not even for a big occasion like the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Instead, I thought it would be neat to look back 50 years and see what our favorite superheroes were doing during the bicentennial in 1976, back when things might have seemed a little more cheerful as Americans clawed their way out of the muck of Vietnam, Watergate, and the energy crisis, among other things.

For those unaware, the cover date on older comics doesn’t reflect the date those comics were published. It reflects the date that retailers were supposed to take unsold copies off the shelves. According to Wikipedia, in 1976, the cover date was three months after the publication date. So, comics with a cover date of October 1976 are the ones that went on sale in July of that year and are the ones I’ll be looking at.

There doesn’t seem to have been a big effort to have our biggest heroes commemorate the occasion, except for the one hero you would naturally expect to do so. But there was still quite a lot going on!

Captain America #202

Jack Kirby was both writing and drawing Captain America at the time. In the summer of ’76, he gave us a typically offbeat story about the residents of a dimension-hopping mental hospital kidnapping the Falcon to fight off a monster threatening the safety of these so-called “Night People.”

I should note that while this was the issue released in July, the 200th issue, published two months earlier, doubled as a “special bicentennial issue.” It was the finale of a story in which Cap and Falcon stop the detonation of the Madbomb. This weapon would cause Americans to lose touch with reality and make it easier for anti-democratic elites to take over the country. No, the Madbomb was not social media.

Green Lantern #91

DC was still in the midst of the “Green Lantern/Green Arrow” era of the book, though with Mike Grell on art rather than Neal Adams. This issue is the first of a two-part story in which Sinestro uses silver mined from an asteroid to lure Green Arrow to an impoverished nation and tries to kill him.

Avengers #152

This momentous issue featured the return of Wonder Man, who’d been dead since Avengers #9. Long before becoming the subject of a Disney+ series, Wonder Man was a disgraced inventor-turned-supervillain who ultimately sacrificed himself to save the Avengers. After a brief appearance at the end of Issue 151, Wonder Man is revealed to have been turned into a “zuvembie,” because this is the mid-1970s and the Comics Code Authority wouldn’t let them say “zombie.” He recovered a couple of issues later.

Justice League of America #135

Pinky the Whiz Kid has to be a top contender for worst sidekick name ever.

The JLA embarked on another of their annual crossovers with the Justice Society, heroes of Earth-2. But this time, the crossover also included certain heroes from Earth-S, home to characters who originally belonged to Fawcett Comics, which DC acquired in 1976. The Marvel Family doesn’t appear until a later issue in this storyline (and even then, it’s only for three pages), so it’s up to lesser-known heroes like Ibis the Invincible and Bulletman to get the ball rolling on saving multiple worlds.

X-Men #101

After sacrificing herself to save the team, Jean Grey, formerly Marvel Girl, unexpectedly came back to life with a new costume and a new set of powers. This marks her first, albeit brief, appearance as the Phoenix, which in turn set the stage for “The Dark Phoenix Saga,” the most iconic of all X-Men storylines, a few years later.

Oh, and the X-Men go to Ireland on vacation. It doesn’t end well.

Want more superhero comic talk? We’ve gotcha. Dive into this look at how superheroes use the library, where and how copaganda has changed in superhero comics, and Latin America through the eyes of superhero comics.