New comic book series is a knockout

David Morrell has done something new: the best-selling author of action thrillers has written a comic book series.

It all happened because a Marvel Comics editor suggested that Morrell, who created the famous character Rambo in his novel First Blood, would make a good pairing with another military icon, Captain America.

Captain America or "Cap" is a superhero created by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby in response to the Nazi menace in World War II. Some 210 million copies of Captain America books have been sold in 75 countries since then, according to Marvel estimates.

Morrell hasn't had much to do with comic books since his boyhood, but he eagerly rose to the challenge. As he says in the book's afterword, he thought it would be interesting to "dramatise the burden of being a superhero in today's troubled world, especially a superhero named after the United States."

The result, Captain America: The Chosen, is a standalone comic book that tells a poignant, uplifting story with psychological dimensions; transcending the genre.

Born Steve Rogers, he was first orphaned, his loss was compounded when two father figures died. A participant in a US government Frankenstein-style experiment to create physically perfect soldiers, he was transformed from a frail youth into a muscled specimen, but since he accidentally destroyed the machine that would have created others like him, he ended up fighting bad guys alone.

He is not immortal, so had to overcome the fear of death to remain courageous. He got to punch Adolf Hitler in the face; but while trying to defuse a bomb, was blown into the Atlantic and spent years embedded in a block of ice.

Morrell has imagined what a man with such a background would do after reigning 70 years as a superhero. In his ingeniously plotted story, Cap comes through as a man of vision at his heroic best.

-- Captain America: The Chosen. From Amazon.com, $16.49 (Dh61)