The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has acquired a prized copy of Captain America Comics No. 1, famous for its cover depicting the titular hero punching Adolf Hitler in the face, the museum announced Tuesday.
The issue was published in December 1940, nearly a year before the United States entered World War II, and entered the museum’s holdings courtesy of Riot Games cofounder Brandon Beck. Jack Kirby—who, with Joe Simon, created a host of iconic Marvel superheroes—was the son of Austrian Jewish immigrants and later served in the US Army during the war.
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According to the museum, Kirby conceived the now-famous Captain America cover as a not-so-veiled rebuke of the nation’s isolationist stance amid the mounting Nazi threat. The effort proved influential: the widely circulated comic has been credited with helping raise public awareness in the United States of the escalating conflict in Europe.
“This comic book holds enormous cultural and historical importance,” Zachary Levine, director of the museum’s Curatorial Affairs Division, said in a statement.
Beck also donated an original copy of Captain America Comics No. 46, another landmark issue whose cover depicts the hero liberating a concentration camp—among the earliest portrayals of such a site in American popular culture. Both comics are now undergoing assessment by the museum’s conservation and research center and will be digitized for public access.
