CAPTAIN AMERICA

The trail ended in the one room Steve Rogers never expected to fight his way into. Closing out the Secret Empire storyline in 1974, Rogers followed the conspiracy's leader into the White House and watched the man — a senior government official the story strongly implies was the President himself — take his own life rather than be captured. The discovery that corruption had reached the very top of the country he personified broke something in him that no battle ever had.

Rogers set the shield down and walked away from the identity altogether. When a travelling showman calling himself the Golden Archer prodded him back toward hero work, he returned under a new name and a new costume in Captain America #180 (1974): Nomad, billed as the Man Without a Country — a dark blue and yellow suit with a sweeping cape, and pointedly no flag anywhere on it.

The experiment lasted barely four issues, and the lesson arrived in blood. Other men kept trying to fill the vacancy he had left, and one young would-be replacement was murdered by his oldest enemy while wearing a homemade version of the uniform. Rogers accepted that the symbol protected people even when its bearer was disillusioned, took the shield back in Captain America #184 (1975), and kept the Nomad years' conclusion for the rest of his life: he serves the country's ideals, not whichever administration happens to hold office.