Captain America #239: Review

Nov 1979

Peter Gillis, Fred Kida

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Story Name:

Mind-Stains on the Virgin Snow!

Review & Comments

Rating:

Captain America #239 Review by Peter Silvestro (March 8, 2014)

Review: Nice title! Has a bit of poetry one occasionally sees in Marvel comics of this era. And appropriately, the tale ends with the haunting vision of a little girl who sees the future—and knows that there is none for her. The tale is a bit anticlimactic as all the buildup was for Cap to find a decrepit old man who spouts a bunch of exposition before the obligatory big boom. Oh well, it was thrilling while it lasted.

Comments: Part two of two parts. Steven Tuval previously appeared in SUB-MARINER #40-43 where he was a powerful telepath exiled from Atlantis to the Black Sea. Cap’s shield does not appear in this issue; it is back next ish with no explanation.

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Synopsis / Summary / Plot

Captain America #239 Synopsis by Peter Silvestro

At the mountaintop entrance to the secretive Dovecote, Captain America has been overcome by the brutish fighter Widowmaker. Over an intercom, the baddie receives orders to stop what he is doing, distracting him so Cap can knock him out. Cap blasts a hole in the gates and fights his way through a cadre of guards with and enters the castle, evading traps and burning through barriers with SHIELD weaponry. Suddenly he finds himself entering the office of Nick Fury, about to be briefed on his mission. Was the whole adventure a hallucination? No, Cap still has some of the gear Fury equipped him with. The next door he goes through and he’s frozen in ice and the Sub-Mariner appears to hurl him into the ocean. A third door has a knob that turns into a ghastly tentacle. Finally Cap gets past the last illusion and finds the controller of Dovecote. Stephen Tuval, the Mind-Master, abducted Snowfall with an eye to developing and exploiting her mental powers—and forced her to kill SHIELD’s psychic agents as a punishment for disobedience. Tuval then announces that the castle is wired to explode—and vanishes as he was not there in the first place. Cap releases Snowfall from her imprisonment and discovers she is only a little girl who "lied" about her age. Cap rushes her outside before the place goes up in a holocaust. Outside Ginny Snow tells Cap there is no place for her in the outside world and apparently walks off a cliff to her death, leaving Cap cold and confused at her parting words, "Everything that should happen, will happen."

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