Last week, we featured Steve Englehart’s attempt to make Cap relevant and interesting to a 1970′s audience more interested in the Watergate scandal than WWII patriotic propaganda. As a parting gift before he left the series, Englehart decided to retcon (i.e. fuck with) the Falcon’s origin, revealing that he had not been a social worker with a heart of gold before shipping off to Exile Island, but had been a drug-dealing pimp in L.A. named “Snap” Wilson.

This little revelation was left as a parting gift to the new creative team, almost as classy a move as removing all the W’s from the computer keyboards in the White House. So in issue #191, cover dated November 1975, plotter Tony Isabella, scripter Bill Mantlo (who wrote short runs or fill-ins for virtually every book Marvel published in the 70′s–he was to writing at Marvel in the 70′s what Sal Buscema was to pencilling), and artists Frank Robbins and D. Bruce Berry had to deal with the fallout from Englehart’s revelation in “The Trial of the Falcon.”

Last week,we looked at Captain America #117, in which we saw the introduction of a new superhero, The Falcon. Lest you think this was merely a minor blip in the history of Cap, let’s jump forward five years, to 1974. Here’s the cover to Captain America #178, the first new issue of Captain America I ever purchased.

The title of the book is now Captain America and the Falcon, and if you notice the billboard, Captain America is missing. So this issue is likely to be all Falcon. Also, that robot really hates light bulbs for some reason; see how he’s shooting that one with pinpoint accuracy.

The next few weeks from the Vault are going to be a little different. I have a very few Captain America comics from the 60′s and 70′s, and for the next month or so, I’ll be visiting them one by one. Why?

Well, for one, Captain America: The First Avenger is still on my mind (or maybe it’s all the stuff leaking from the set of The Avengers, now filming in Cleveland). For another, the comics show in a very visual way the things that went wrong with Marvel generally in the 70′s, as well as illustrating the many ways writers floundered with making the character interesting.

Plus I need to get worked ahead for some very special plans that I’ll be announcing soon (maybe tomorrow), and this is the easy way out.