The tale opens in the Lower East Side of New York City in 1926. As a young Steve Rogers cowers under the kitchen table, his drunken father slaps his mother around for nagging him to quit drinking and stay sober at work. When she refuses to back down after the beating, Rogers storms out ashamed. Steve learns his first lesson: "You always stand up."
Decades later, as Captain America, he is clinging to the outside of a plane in a crash dive to the heart of New York. It is flown by an eco-terrorist, the fanatical Green Skull, who plans to save the environment by bombing the city with Omega Fertilizer to turn the area into a jungle, wiping out the human race. Cap crashes through the windshield, overpowers the henchmen, aims the plane toward the river, seizes the villain, and leaps from the craft. As a young woman on her way to a date complains to a police officer that strong sexy men don’t just fall from the sky, Cap lands by parachute, turns the Green Skull over to the cop and tells him to contact SHIELD about the bioweapon aboard the plane. He then heads to meet Sharon Carter; they change into civilian clothes and she gives him a present as today is his 90th birthday. On their way to their new mission, Sharon asks if Steve has considered her marriage proposal. No time for him to answer as they arrive at a subway station to investigate a mysterious subway car which has recently appeared on a long-disused track. Steve enters suddenly shackles trap his hands and the train vanishes into another dimension, where armed monsters appear and Steve is drugged by a hypo…
He awakens to find himself held fast to a lab table, his blood—and the Super-Soldier Serum within—being drained into a baby in a nearby tank. He is in Dimension Z, new stronghold of the bio-fanatic Arnim Zola. Cap musters his strength to stand up as his mother taught him all those years ago. He breaks free, snatches up his uniform and shield and slings the shield to wreck the lab, holding up the mutant henchmen; he shatters the baby’s tank and leaps from the window to hijack an aircraft. Zola oversees the wreckage, mourning the death of his bioengineered son who would match his young daughter Jet, and vowing vengeance against Captain America. The hero meanwhile, flies the craft onto a desolate rocky area where he crash-lands—and reveals that he has the baby, safe and unharmed. Now for the problem of what to do next….