Captain America and the Falcon

Captain America and the Falcon
Cover to Captain America and the Falcon #10 Art by Steve Epting
Publication information
Publisher	Marvel Comics
Schedule	Monthly
Format	Ongoing series
Publication date	May 2004 - June 2005
Number of issues	Fourteen
Main character(s)	Captain America Falcon
Creative team
Writer(s)	Christopher Priest
Penciller(s)	Bart Sears Joe Bennett Andrea Di Vito Greg Tocchini Dan Jurgens
Inker(s)	Rob Hunter Jack Jadson Scott Koblish Oclair Albert Tom Palmer
Colorist(s)	Mike Atiyeh

Captain America and the Falcon was a comic book series published for fourteen issues in 2004 and 2005 by Marvel Comics. The series' title is a reuse of the cover title of Captain America's solo series during a period in which the Falcon was given second billing on the front cover. Although never the official title, Captain America was cover titled Captain America and the Falcon from issue #134 (dated February 1971) to issue #222 (dated June 1978).

The 2004 Captain America and the Falcon series' fourteen issues were all written by Christopher Priest, with the artwork duties passing to a number of different groupings. The artists with the two most prominent runs were Bart Sears and Joe Bennett.

The idea to begin publishing Captain America and the Falcon began with Marvel editor Tom Brevoort. Captain America's solo title had been restarted in 2002 as a part of the Marvel Knights imprint. This resulted in a situation in which the character's then current solo stories were no longer taking place within Marvel's main shared universe, the Marvel Universe. Captain America and the Falcon was meant to fill the gap created by this situation.

Problems began almost immediately, problems Priest would later admit were created by both himself and Bart Sears:

Complicating things even more was, initially, artist Bart Sears’ storytelling approach. Now, Bart is A Name, and his agreeing to work on CAF was greeted with elation, first and foremost by me. We have Bart to thank for CAF’s strong launch, as the book was (likely) entirely sold on Bart’s Name.

But many fans took an instant dislike to Bart’s style—everybody was hulking the anatomical proportions were comically extreme—and most everyone was completely lost by the first issue’s story, which was my fault. I’d designed a first issue where Cap seems to be acting out of character, intercut with apparent flashbacks to events leading up to this behavior. At the end of the issue, however, it is revealed that “Cap” is not the real Captain America, and that the flashbacks weren’t flashbacks at all but were cutaway sequences occurring within the same time frame.