Captain America Comics #46
☆ Be the first to review + Add to your collection — Join freeCaptain America Comics #46 is one of the most historically charged single issues of the entire Golden Age, distinguished above all by its cover: Alex Schomburg rendered one of the earliest — and most unflinching — depictions of the Nazi death camps ever to appear on a mainstream American comic book, showing concentration-camp prisoners bearing witness as an elderly man is pushed toward a cremation oven. Published in early 1945 as Allied forces were liberating those very camps, the image placed the Holocaust directly in front of a mass popular audience at a moment when most media still shied away from the subject's full horror. The issue also carries early professional work by a then-teenaged Carmine Infantino, who would go on to co-create the Silver Age Flash and reshape the look of DC Comics — making this a quiet origin point for one of the medium's most consequential careers. Together, the cover's moral gravity and the interior's roster of future talent give the issue an outsized place in comics history relative to its otherwise standard anthology format.
In "Invitation to Murder," Captain America and Bucky uncover a deadly conspiracy within a wealthy family’s inheritance, where greed and deception threaten to derail justice. With art by Vince Alascia and a striking cover by Alex Schomburg, this 1945 issue delivers a tightly wound mystery where loyalty is tested and the truth is buried beneath lies—only for Cap to restore order with a rare act of selfless integrity.
In "Invitation to Murder," Captain America and Bucky uncover a deadly scheme where a cunning lawyer manipulates a family's inheritance to cover his own crimes, turning the wealthy estate into a trap for its heirs. With the stakes high and trust shattered, the heroes must untangle a web of deceit before the killer strikes again.
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The issue was published by Timely Comics in April 1945 (cover-dated April 1945, with a recorded release date of February 14, 1945 per the Catalog of Copyright Entries) under editor Stan Lee, who was still a young man running the editorial department that Martin Goodman had built. Alex Schomburg — Timely's most celebrated cover artist, whom Lee later compared to Norman Rockwell in his mastery of a highly personal and instantly recognizable style — produced both pencils and inks for the cover, working with the urgency that the closing months of World War II demanded. Interior story art was split among Vince Alascia, Allen Bellman, Paul Reinman, and the young Carmine Infantino, who at the time was freelancing spot work at Timely while still completing his formal art education, his inks appearing over Reinman's pencils on the Human Torch feature.
Trivia · 8 facts
- Published April 1945 by Timely Comics (the company that would become Marvel), with Stan Lee as editor; cover-dated April 1945 and recorded on-sale date of February 14, 1945.
- The cover, pencilled and inked entirely by Alex Schomburg, depicts a Nazi concentration-camp scene — prisoners watching as an elderly man is forced toward a cremation oven — recognized across the collector community as 'the Holocaust cover,' one of the earliest such images in mainstream American comics.
- Interior stories include 'Invitation to Murder' (Cap and Bucky investigate a millionaire's estate murder), 'The Five Traitors From Berlin' (a Human Torch and Toro adventure fighting Nazi spies), 'The Shadow of the Monster' (crime boss Butch Cantwell dons a bullet-proof Captain America replica costume to frame the hero), and 'The Mystery of the Puff-Adder Skulls,' plus a short text story and a one-page detective feature.
- Interior art credits: pencils by Vince Alascia and Paul Reinman; inks by Alascia, Allen Bellman, and a young Carmine Infantino — Infantino's ink work appears on the Human Torch story 'The Five Traitors From Berlin' over Reinman's pencils.
- Carmine Infantino (1925–2013), who inked this issue early in his career while freelancing for Timely, would later co-create the Silver Age Flash at DC Comics with writer Robert Kanigher, help launch the Silver Age of comics, and eventually rise to Publisher of DC — making this one of his earliest documented published credits.
- The 52-page issue carried a cover price of ten cents, standard for Timely Comics anthologies of the period.
- The 'Shadow of the Monster' story is an early example of the 'impostor Captain America' narrative device — a criminal framing Cap by wearing an armored replica of his costume — a storytelling pattern that would recur throughout the character's history.
- The issue has been reprinted in the Marvel Masterworks: Golden Age Captain America Vol. 2 trade paperback collection, making its contents accessible to modern readers without requiring an original copy.
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Reprinted in Take That, Adolf!: The Fighting Comic Books of the Second World War #[nn] (2017)
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