Captain America (Steve Rogers)

Steven Grant Rogers

• Super-Solder Serum grants Rogers near-superhuman levels of speed, agility, and reflexes.
• Rogers has specific training in standard U.S. Army hand-to-hand combat, karate, taekwondo, and judo, among many others. He is also adept with firearms and bladed weapons, though he prefers using his shield in most instances.
• Rogers is considered to be one of the most renowned hand-to-hand combatants alive and is considered to be the greatest soldier and tactician to have ever lived.

• Rogers' physical strength is only outmatched by superhumans, such as Spider-Man or Thor.

A kind, honest individual with a heart of gold, Steve Rogers is the poster child of poster children. He doesn't go out of his way to flaunt it, simply wanting to do the right thing. He deplores bigotry of any kind and constantly lobbies the government to improve living conditions for all Americans, especially minorities and the disenfranchised. His decision to join the war effort against the Axis was fueled by admiration for his late father's service in the First World War, as well as his own disgust at reports of atrocities committed by the Axis in Europe.

When Rogers became Captain America, he found a small part of himself caught up in the fervent patriotism and overconfidence typical of many American soldiers of the time. However, the discovery of the Nušvitimo Vieta concentration camp in Lithuania and the horrors of the Nazi regime caused him to feel a tremendous sense of guilt and regret over failing to stop the Holocaust sooner. That guilt shaped much of his personality upon being reawakened in the twenty-first century, and he became much more self-sacrificial and reluctant to allow his image to be used in media over fear of losing sight of his duty again.

Despite his enormous legacy and immense guilt over his wartime failures, Rogers is a very humble and approachable person. He dislikes the popular notion of himself being put on a pedestal above his peers. Although he is the nominal leader of the Avengers, he considers his teammates to be a group of equals as opposed to a hierarchy. Within the superhero community, he has very close friendships with the vigilante Spider-Man, the X-Men's Cyclops and Beast, the Fantastic Four's Thing, and sees his Avengers teammate Janet van Dyne like a little sister.

Born on July 4th, 1920, Steven Rogers is the son of James Rogers, an immigrant from Ireland who died from injuries he sustained while serving in the First World War. Growing up in Brooklyn, New York, Rogers lived with his mother, Sarah, and had a relatively mundane, average childhood typical of most middle-class Americans of the time. His best friend was James Buchanan Barnes, who was born in the same neighborhood as Steve.

When the Great Depression began, Sarah found herself without work, and Steve began working numerous jobs to help his mother get by. After Sarah died from a brief battle with pneumonia in 1936, Steve lived with the Barnes family full-time. He found steady work illustrating comic books for the publisher Timely Comics, but he became increasingly troubled by the rise of militarism and fascist governments across Europe and Asia. When World War II broke out in 1939, Rogers was horrified to learn about atrocities and mass murders being committed by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland, and soon the fall of France in 1940.

On the eve of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the United States' subsequent entry into the war, Barnes found himself drafted into the conflict. Rogers attempted to follow suit, but was rejected for his frail, gaunt form. His persistence caught the attention of Abraham Erskine, an Austrian-Jewish scientist who fled from Austria after Adolf Hitler's Anschluss in 1938. Erskine admired Rogers' stubborn determination to serve in the war and chose him to be the prime candidate for Project: Rebirth, the creation of the world's first super-soldier. Given an experimental drug, Rogers was transformed into the peak of human performance and physical prowess. Unfortunately, Erskine was murdered and his laboratory destroyed by Nazi sabateurs hours after the procedure to ensure that the Allies could not produce more super-soldiers.

Still making use of Rogers for his determination to serve, he was initially given just undercover assignments as to not risk the safety of the only super-soldier. However, when Rogers learned that Barnes was being held captive by the Nazis at a fortification in occupied Switzerland, he disobeyed orders and gathered a small team of soldiers to lead a siege on the fortress to rescue Barnes' platoon. It was here where Rogers would encounter the first of many strange and unusual adversaries he would face throughout the war; the enigmatic and mysterious Kleiser, an S.S. officer with a bizarre reputation of being incapable of dying. In their first fight, Rogers bought his men enough time to escape, but wound up being defeated and left for dead by Kleiser. However, he was rescued by Barnes at the last minute.

Rogers was initially set to be court-martialed for insubordination, but his superiors were unable to look past his heroics, and instead was promoted to the rank of captain for his leadership and courage. Given a vibrant uniform, Rogers became known as Captain America, the Allies' most powerful weapon and the bane of the Axis. Rogers would see combat in every major theatre of the war, including the Western and Eastern Fronts, the Pacific, and the tail end of the North African campaign. It was in North Africa where Rogers first encountered the Black Panther, Azzari, then-King of Wakanda. Initially at odds, the two men would work together in order to drive away a detachment of Wehrmacht personnel who attempted a siege of Wakanda. They came to greatly respect each other after this point.

In mid-1943, Rogers met an amnesiac woman named Zarda, who possessed strength surpassing his own, flight, and the ability to create energy constructs to use as weapons. In reality, Zarda was a member of an other-dimensional race of beings called the Utopians who was displaced to Earth during a battle. Rogers and Zarda would fall deeply in love with each other and, along with Bucky and other assorted costumed heroes who were active during the war, became the founders and co-leaders of the first modern superhero team, the Invaders; Zarda took the codename "Power Princess."

With the Invaders, Captain America clashed with a myriad of bizarre and unusual villains during the Second World War, including the sadistic bioalchemist Baron Heinrich Zemo, the propagandistic prototype super-soldier Master Man, the religiously fanatical Teutonic Knight, and Hitler's personal agent the Red Skull, who would become Captain America's archenemy. Captain America would also have several more encounters with Kleiser, who would be revealed to be a member of the alien Chitauri many years after the war. The Invaders also led the charge in storming the beaches of Normandy during D-Day in 1944. As Nazi Germany began to collapse, the Invaders would soon make a chilling discovery early in 1945 when they arrived Nušvitimo Vieta, a concentration camp located in central Lithuania, whilst pursuing Baron Zemo. The Invaders were shocked and appalled at discovering the true scope of the Nazis' crimes against humanity; several of the malnourished, emaciated inmates had been used in many of Zemo's most horrifying and unspeakable experiments in his unsuccessful efforts to duplicate Erskine's Super-Soldier Serum.

Enraged at Zemo's crimes, Captain America relentlessly pursued him all over Western Europe in order to bring him to justice. In March, the Invaders finally got their break when they learned that Zemo was attempting to procure an experimental plane commissioned by Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring before the war broke out: he intended to flee Germany to South America, like many other Nazis, when it became clear the war was lost. When the Invaders attacked the airbase he took refuge in, Rogers pursued Zemo onto the aircraft while his allies were held at bay by remaining Wehrmacht soldiers. Zemo eluded capture again by ejecting himself out of the plane using a jet placed under the seat, with the Captain trapped inside as it crashed into the Arctic Circle. He would remain frozen in suspended animation for nearly sixty years until the beginning of the twenty-first century.

Rogers was finally located and resurrected by the recently formed Avengers superhero team, who discovered him by happenstance during a three-way fight between them, their former ally the Hulk, and the criminal syndicate Zodiac. Rogers was brought back to New York and, after initial hesitation, was inducted into the superteam as its first permanent field leader.