Captain America #182: Review

Feb 1975

Steve Englehart, Frank Robbins

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Story Name:

Inferno!

Review & Comments

Rating:

Captain America #182 Review by Peter Silvestro (March 15, 2010)

Part six of the ten-part Nomad arc. The events of this story were inspired by the gun battle between the LAPD and members of the urban terrorist group the Symbionese Liberation Army on May 16th 1974. The Serpent Crown will reappear in MARVEL TWO-IN-ONE #66.

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Synopsis / Summary / Plot

Captain America #182 Synopsis by Peter Silvestro

Nomad, the former Captain America, arrives in Seattle, where police are besieging the hideout of Viper and Cobra. Attempting to intervene, he is seized by the cops and knocked unconscious as they have no idea who he is. Meanwhile inside the house, the two villains are shooting back at the police, with Cobra—a career criminal—regretting getting mixed up with a fanatical terrorist like Viper and starting to panic. Viper dons the Serpent Crown and receives instructions to make their failure a grand production…. Nomad recovers and finds himself cuffed to a police car as the SWAT team prepares to assault the house. In Virginia, Sharon Carter watches on television, and distraught she goes for a walk and encounters her neighbor Dave Cox (last seen in issue #163). Shocked by the loss of life, Nomad tears himself free from the car and uses a nearby pole to flip himself through an upper window of the besieged hideout, just as a tear gas grenade explodes next to a broken gas line, starting a fire. The flames send Cobra into a full panic, hallucinating that his ex-partner Mr. Hyde is laughing at him. Nomad bursts into the room and engages Cobra but Viper covers them both with a machine gun as she announces that they are all going to die as martyrs to the cause, inspiring future terrorists. When Cobra tries to flee she shoots him in the back but that gives Nomad the change to overcome her—until the blast from a fire hose knocks him across the room, just as the burning ceiling collapses on Viper. Nomad grabs the wounded Cobra and escapes from the house, which falls to rubble moments later, and the water from the fire hoses washes the Serpent Crown down into a sewer. Back in New York Roscoe, the new Captain America, links up with the Falcon who agrees to be his partner and show him the ropes. On patrol they spot Peggy Carter with Gabe Jones, which confuses Falcon (clod). Roscoe sees a gang of masked crooks cutting their way into a bank. The heroes swoop down and subdue the baddies and are surprised to discover that they were bringing money into the bank. As they puzzle this out, the robbers’ masked leader sneaks up behind the heroes and stuns them with a blast from his weapon. He then unmasks revealing…the Red Skull!

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