In the latest Comic Book Legends Revealed, learn whether Isaiah Bradley was originally intended to receive the Super Soldier Serum BEFORE Steve Rogers.
Welcome to Comic Book Legends Revealed! This is the eight hundred and third installment where we examine three comic book legends and determine whether they are true or false. As usual, there will be three posts, one for each of the three legends.
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COMIC LEGEND:
Isaiah Bradley was always intended to have received the Super Soldier Serum AFTER Steve Rogers.
STATUS:
False
Despite featuring the story heavily on the recent hit Disney+ series, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, Marvel only recently announced that it will actually reprint Truth: Red, White & Black (by Robert Morales and Kyle Baker), the story of Isaiah Bradley, the first Black Captain America, in a collected edition (I don’t know why they haven’t done so yet, so I assume that there’s some logistical issue that kept it out of print until now. That’s almost always the case when a comic book hasn’t been reprinted in a long time when there is a clear demand for it).
Truth was inspired by the terrible Tuskegee Syphilis Study, where hundreds of Black sharecroppers in 1932 were told that they were receiving free medical treatment while in reality, they were part of a 40-year study (a study that ended only when it became public in 1972) to see what would happen with syphilis when left untreated. It was one of the most horrific medial ethics abuses in American history, which is saying a lot. So Truth is about a group of Black soldiers who are treated as lab rats for the Super Soldier Serum, with only one man, Isaiah Bradley, surviving the whole experience.
Truth has to be one of the most confusing comic book stories, in terms of continuity, that you can imagine, as even today, almost twenty years after the book was released, you can’t find a consistent description of the events of the book because the book was almost inherently confusing, since it seems pretty obvious that it was written one way initially and then altered along the way.
The biggest issue, of course, is that of the various Black men that we follow throughout the story (not knowing which one will become the first Black Captain America) almost all of them do not actually enlist in the Army until after Pearl Harbor, which is where the story kicks in.
Steve Rogers, of course, became Captain America BEFORE Pearl Harbor. Halfway through the series, in a confusing bit, the book appears to acknowledge that Captain America and Steve Rogers HAD existed since 1940…
Kyle Baker spoke about the apparent continuity conflict to Newsarama back in 2003, “With Captain America, people get on my case for ‘changing’ Captain America. We got a lot of grief from the Captain America fans on that series until the fifth and sixth issues came out; when it turned out that we hadn’t tinkered with the continuity. Before that, everybody was very upset, because our story started with Pearl Harbor, and everybody knows that the first issue of Captain America took place before Pearl. Somewhere in the middle of the series, its revealed that Cap already existed, and we hadn’t tinkered with the timeline, and suddenly, the book is okay.”
The late Robert Morales, for his part, noted that the story was originally meant to take place outside of Marvel continuity, noting in the original trade paperback collection, “Truth was originally planned to be outside of the Marvel Universe’s official continuity. The editorial decision to place it into continuity meant explaining Timely Comics’ first publication of Joe Simon and Jack Kirby’s Captain America in 1940—a full year before Pearl Harbor and the true start of our story.”
However, even as Truth was being released, its editor, future Marvel Editor-in-Chief Axel Alonso, stuck with the idea that this WAS the story of how the Super Soldier Serum was developed, PRE-Steve Rogers, as he told EW at the time:
The story’s premise has obvious historical roots in the infamous Tuskegee syphilis study, in which, from 1932 to 1972, the United States Public Health Service studied the effects of untreated syphilis on poor rural blacks. ”The high-concept question was, Would it stand to reason that the super-soldier program would have made its prime guinea pigs guys of Steve Rogers’ demographic?” asks Truth editor Axel Alonso. ”If the word Tuskegee rings a bell, you might know the answer.”
Alonso also went on NPR to tell that same story.
Therefore, it appears clear that initially, Truth was intended to tell the story of Isaiah Bradley as the man who received the Super-Soldier Serum FIRST (likely originally in an out-of-continuity, sort of Elseworlds-style story) and at some point in time, as Baker notes above, the continuity was altered so that the story would fit into the established Steve Rogers origin story, but then people noted that that would mean that Isaiah Bradley would have received his Super-Soldier Serum as part of an attempt to REPLICATE the original Super-Soldier Serum that Steve Rogers received in 1940.
Of course, this being comic books, that story could change tomorrow and the events of Truth could now be said to have occurred in, say, 1938 or whatever. Just noting that at first it was clear that Isaiah Bradley was going to be the FIRST Captain America originally…until he wasn’t, which is certainly why it is hard for people to get this story straight now when people write about it, as the story was unclear itself!
SOME OTHER ENTERTAINMENT LEGENDS!
Check out some other entertainment legends from Legends Revealed:
2. Was South Park Originally Going to be a Big Parody of The X-Files?
4. How Did the Tonight Show Save Twister From Oblivion?
PART TWO SOON!
Check back later for part 2 of this installment’s legends!
Feel free to send suggestions for future comic legends to me at either cronb01@aol.com or brianc@cbr.com
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