Blue Ribbon Comics #5 was a comic published by Archie Comics in 1984, as part of the "Archie Adventure Series".
So I got another box of miscellaneous comics online. Still less than halfway through my box from a few weeks ago. Its just a fun little thing I do to keep myself entertained and I can stop anytime I want to. Anyway. So, as I was sorting through this box, this issue jumped out at me because it had a red, white and blue costumed Super-Hero who was obviously supposed to be a take-off on Captain America, and I composed a mental tagline for the review I was already planning to write. "Archie Comics Pretends That Marvel Never Happened". I knew that Archie had some properties derived from the Golden Age of Comics, and I was assuming this was them trying to milk them for a non-discerning audience.
Unfortunately, this glib view disappeared as soon as I opened the comic and saw that it was credited to Joe Simon and Jack Kirby. So the cover, depicting what I thought was a Captain America rip-off was drawn by...Jack Kirby. The man who created Captain America. And this comic featured a character called The Shield. Something was going on here. So, let me explain the story.
Malcolm Fleming is a scientist who believes that mankind has hidden potential, and to prove it, he is raising his own son in a glass cage to help him develop super-powers. Red agents are onto him, and they sabotage him while he is trying to move his son, leading to his toddler son being found by a wholesome, childless farm couple. (One of whom is even named Martha). They rename him Lancelot, and he grows up unaware of his parentage, until in the second chapter, an alien attacks and he suddenly becomes aware of his super-powers. In the third chapter, he fights more red saboteurs (Are you wondering why a comic book published in 1984 was so full of deep cold war terminology? So was I. I was guessing this was a reprint...but was a bit confused about when, exactly). During our final chapter, Lancelot Strong/The Shield has been drafted into the army and is going through basic training while hiding his secret identity. An experimental tank goes haywire, and when The Shield tries to find out, he finds it is full of tiny men who are, once again, under control of a Red saboteur, who has kidnapped the captain of the army base and his daughter who has also fallen in love with The Shield---but at the end of the issue, The Shield prevails and we are promised "further, spine-tingling adventures in his amazing career"
No one has ever accused Jack Kirby of lacking imagination. In our first look into The Shield's life, we have...a child raised by a mad scientist father, an adoption by simple country folk, an alien invasion, spy espionage, a romance with concealed identity, a high tech army base, submarines, shrinking rays, a villain named "Doctor Diablo"...there is a lot going on here, none of it makes sense, and I enjoyed every minute of it. Even though the story is cliched, and the art is cliched as well, it was also drawn by Jack Kirby, so every picture pops off the page and draws you in. Even as I realized this was silly, I was convinced from start to finish.
I had to go outside the story to find my answers to what this was, and somewhat ironically for a "simple" story, the story of The Shield is, externally, quite complicated. The Shield, in his original incarnation, actually predates Captain America by several months. But Archie Comics quickly became known for...well, Archie, rather than for super-hero comics, so the character fell out of favor until they attempted to reinvent him in 1959, and got Joe Simon and Jack Kirby to do it. The concept didn't take off, but Archie Comics decided to reprint some of these old issues in the early 1980s. The Archie super-hero comics were later sold to DC, which relaunched them in 1991, again briefly, in 2015, and then in 2021, back to Archie and written by... Rob Liefeld.
I find some irony in the fact that while I thought I was going to be getting the simplest of Super-hero adventures (and indeed, this issue was fun and creative), in attempting to understand it, I had to catch myself up on 80 years of comic book history and a character whose story goes between three major publishers.